Sex as poetry

Garth Greenwell (source photo)

The reason I like writing about sex is because it seems like a place where the physical and the metaphysical are really close to each other. My experience of sex, in literature and out of it, is this unique occasion where, hopefully, you are as intensely attentive to another human being as possible and also as intensely thrust into your own interiority as possible. It’s almost the experience of poetry to me—a lyric space. One of the things that fascinates me about poetry as speech is that it’s at once public and private, it’s at once outwardly directed and inwardly directed. In a certain way, my experience of sex, and especially of cruising, which also creates these places that are public and private at once, was a training in poetry.

Bodies in Space: An Interview with Garth Greenwell - The Paris Review 19/01/2016

Toutes les critiques, tous les entretiens lus sur le web ne font qu’attiser mon envie de lire What belongs to you. Le prochain, sans doute, quand je serai venu à bout de City on Fire.