“Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”
At first glance, Kristie LeVangie’s poem collection Libidacoria: In a Plain Brown Wrapper seems to portray a self-satisfied, empowered woman content to successfully live out this attitude. However, through subtle, telling hints, LeVangie (or K- as she is often known) reveals her speaker’s growing desire for emotional connection and romantic love. And the author’s ability to subtly illustrate gradual emotional development through metaphorical interactions among various parts of the speaker’s psyche becomes the piece’s greatest strength.
*This review concerns a piece with graphic depictions of intimacy that is intended for mature readers. You may feel free to read further or skip to the next featured work as you wish. *
In Libidacoria’s preface, the speaker refers to sexuality as simultaneously her ‘greatest adventure’ and her ‘abhorrent curse’ and describes a process of embracing its ‘unrelenting’ nature. She expands upon this complex relationship to her physical and emotional drives by separating herself into multiple ‘selves’ throughout the work. We see a ‘beast’ who seems primarily concerned with physical gratification, who at times wields control over the rest of the speaker’s psyche. There is also a ‘little girl’ who hides, sobs, and must be sheltered, who fears relationships and appreciates reassurance that no particular man plans (or will be allowed to) stay very long. The poetry itself cycles through the voices and emotions of these varied characters. Some pieces show liberated female sexuality as a source of empowerment: ‘loyal to myself/I will remain,’ while others convey violation and pain: “gang bang style, vultures entering without permission/feasting on the innocence.”
And, there is the speaker herself, the sole user of the first person, who consciously attempts to mediate among the various surface and hidden desires. In the second poem she wishes to ‘find a way to sate’ her inner beast for ‘only a few hours’ so she can focus on other matters. Later on she strives occasionally to protect the ‘little girl’ while going back and forth concerning romance and commitment.
About a third of the way through Libidacoria, she criticizes a man for bringing feelings into their series of sexual encounters. If his ‘eyes, still cloudy/want more than that,/I am simply incapable to give.’ In the very next poem, she laments another man’s inability to remember her name with the lights on. She seeks human connection while still consciously denying a desire for anything but short term encounters on her own terms.
Will romantic love remove the control the speaker asserts over her own destiny, the empowerment she repeatedly celebrates? Perhaps…but living without love, denying her own increasingly real desire for connection, confining herself simply to casual encounters, seems limiting in its own way. She reflects how sex with one man ‘turned her back to whore/the only type she knew how to be’ and on how she ‘longs to be dominated/although she seems to dominate.’ Her nostalgia for some kind of idealized romance increases throughout the work, as she writes of a long-ago prostitute/milliner who whispers to her clients and blows them kisses as they leave, and remembers her own youthful wish to be whisked away by a man to faraway places. As time passed, she laments, it became too scary to dream and men and women ‘forgot how/as they grew old.’
This internal struggle/journey motif has a long history within Western literature, harking back to Sir Gawain’s legendary battle with the Green Knight. The color green represented unredeemed, uneducated, and uncivilized nature and wilderness, the difficult-to-control and not always socially presentable aspects of societal and individual nature. The very idea of conveying these themes through a cycle of rhymed poems also harkens back to medieval and Romantic tradition. Through expressing direct, physical action and un-prettified words and concepts (cum, pheromones, grinding, etc) in short rhyming couplets and verses, K- at once parodies traditional and commercial greeting-card love poetry while aligning herself with, reinventing, and perhaps expressing some subtle nostalgia for certain aspects of the past.
K-‘s speaker communicates with a definite rhythm, stressing the syllables at the end of her poetic lines. The writing becomes memorable and belies its complexity at first glance. The rhyme occasionally varies from an exact match of sounds (dead/instead, need/plead) to a slant rhyme with similar vowel sounds and intonations (object/deposit, release/please) to add interest and color to the work while suggesting the difficulty of conveying mixed sentiments in brief pop-style lyrics. In a sophisticated manner LeVangie appropriates and critiques the poetic forms we use to communicate love. Romantic poetry becomes at once timeless and meaningful, and limiting because of the difficulty of getting across so many conflicting thoughts in a few simple couplets.
The concept of maturing female sexuality (and the social constraints to which it has been subjected) also goes back many years in literature. Christina Rossetti’s long poem The Goblin Men is a tale of two sisters where one rescues another from the grip of sensual pleasures which excite but ultimately become an addiction and drain her energy for other aspects of life. Rossetti stresses the need for women to resist and protect themselves from the temptations represented by the demonic male fruit hawkers, in keeping with her era’s Victorian morality. Yet she acknowledges female physical desire to a much greater extent than other writers of the day – women lie awake yearning for ‘fruit’ – and allows the ‘fallen’ sister to get rescued and return to her hometown and family without apparent permanent damage to her reputation.
The Goblin Men also emphasizes the value of female friendship, which is noticeably absent from Libidacoria. While Rossetti’s sisters exist in a world of perpetual sexual innocence seemingly without normal, healthy physical relationships (Joyce Carol Oates has remarked upon the absence of any mention of the women’s husbands although both eventually have children) K-‘s speaker seems to exist in a world full of sexual opportunity and explicitly detailed desire but without any female friends, parents, or role models. What she learns from life, she observes from her own complex desires and experiences and from the men with whom she becomes involved. This could be due to the brevity of Libidacoria (100 pages of very short poems) or perhaps a reflection on the greater anonymity and isolation of our modern society. While K-‘s speaker finds empowerment through selecting and seducing a variety of men, she remains alone, without even a platonic friend.
My personal experiences watching myself and friends grow from teenagers to young women, several decades since the sexual revolution and with technology creating both a larger and a more anonymous dating pool, kept coming to mind while reading K-‘s poetry. Despite major changes in terms of gender roles and what is and is not considered acceptable dating behavior, we (both men and women) faced the same perennial issues of heartbreak, loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, searching for lasting love, wondering if we were ready for it or would recognize it, etc.
Libidacoria, and the four-book series of which it will soon become a part, explores and illustrates the emotional complexity of the feminine psyche and suggests that some aspects of human nature may not have changed. ‘Free love’ may have brought a degree of gratification in some ways, but it has not replaced or eliminated our need for meaningful human connection.
For the May Queen, another book recently reviewed in Synchronized Chaos, also chronicled a modern, independent woman’s emotional and sexual maturation. Its author, Kate Evans, presented a heroine working to reconcile various personal and socially suggested desires: personal independence/adventure and committed love, the idealized romanticism of wedding ceremonies and casual fun and freedom. Evans integrated Walt Whitman’s poetry throughout the novel, particularly his use of the word ‘and,’ to suggest the possibility of the heroine discovering happiness through accepting the different parts of herself and finding a healthy balance among the different ideals rather than viewing them necessarily as mutually contradictory.
Along the same lines, Libidacoria’s speaker contemplates both traditional romance and new models of female sexual freedom and works towards a balance. Near the end, she suggests the possibility of a relationship where she can find rest for and make peace with her physical drives (described as her ‘special gift/and curse) and where the romantic connection helps her understand herself better rather than disempowering her. The very last poems in Libidacoria celebrate the physical and emotional passion in this relationship, and the speaker finally openly, consciously trusts the readers enough to acknowledge her own vulnerability, past emotional pain, and desires as herself rather than relying on indirect alter egos. Her ‘sanity is saved/by the promise she gave/that one day she’d quit/when her match was made.’ And it is that journey towards wholeness, towards self-acceptance, healing, and meaningful connection with others that draws readers in and makes Libidacoria relevant to a wider set of readers.
Libidacoria is available for purchase on the book’s official website, www.libidacoria.com – and author Kristie LeVangie is accessible through her blog and MySpace page.