Grabbing Pussy by Karen Finley (OR Books)

Performance Artist and poet, Karen Finley, creates for an adult audience and speaks up for those that are silenced or victimised. Her latest book, Grabbing Pussy, based on a performance piece, Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, combines Language and Beat poetry in a bravura display employing the deeply limited and limiting sexual vocabulary of recent American political discourse.

She begins with Donald Trump’s riposte to Senator Rubio’s implied link between his small hands and his penis: ‘if they’re small something else must be small.’

Of pussy grabbing the lack of penis backpack
The ability to men u strate
Takes-over-the-consciousness-of-everything-else state.

Grabbing Pussy focusses upon the psychosexual obsessions during the 2016 US Presidential election and before the MeToo campaign. Her poems, full of feminist humour and outrage, elevate and insinuate by manipulating found material around the language of philandering politicians and celebrities, centring on the misogyny of Donald Trump and his deliberate use of demeaning language and alternative facts for political advantage. Finley’s poems explore the sickness of this denigrating language and squeezes a series of nuances around what was said in a searing dissection of its sexual politics. This is framed within the wider perspective of an ideology that powerful men can do anything without being brought to justice and of an inadequate masculinity that leads to the assumption that a woman’s body is not her own.

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women] – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wat. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything …”

Finley’s ‘Pussy Power’ poem is a rant at the white rich triumphant ego
turning the language back into itself with repeated phrases such as, ‘My time is spent grabbing pussy’, ‘Let me man up’, based upon the ‘I You We’
communication skills around ownership and leadership. She cleverly links this to sublimated desire and thus elevates the rant to art. ‘Let me grab some pussy / Bite off man’s naughty bits / and feel my small manhood, my small hands’.

Finley’s use of juxtaposition, repetition and disjunctive language is borne from writing more for performance than the page, and it is gloriously effective and literary, as in ‘She He’:

She He
She She She
Constantly referred to as the She
He said She She She
As if Hillary doesn’t have a name
The only She on the stage
The She Devil She Wolf
She did that
She didn’t do that
She needs to be stopped

Finley’s response to Trump’s verbal abuse of women in general as ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals’ deconstructs his words exposing his insouciance and belief that women should be punished for having an abortion, if made illegal, and is emphatic in its assertion of a woman’s right to own her own body. This is linked to his portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a cold, distant and crooked woman, his contradictory thoughts on migrants and support for statues commemorating idols of enslavement. She takes this a stage further by mixing the hate and misogynistic speeches and sexual politics into a montage of confused and contradictory direct speech with social and cultural asides implicating more discursive material. It is in the cut-ups, emphasising obsessions with hair and bodily functions, that the poetry moves beyond Beat rant to a more elevated and disjunctive place.

My kinky fetish
My kind of girl
That is why I have to be such a pig, for I really am a pussy
My head is my pussy
My sprayed wiglet, my merkin
I really want to be a Barbie
I want to be Ivana

There are memorable lines, such as ‘You pray at Trump Tower / Trump Tower is my Flower Power’, ‘Grab me some pussy / Let me woman up’, ‘I am Doris Day with Rock Hudson’, and so on that pepper the sequence with humour.

This is an impressive collection, with a trenchant reading of power that enables and legitimises attacks on women’s rights to their own bodies, becoming subtler and more nuanced with repeated reading.

David Caddy 15th June 2018

http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/grabbing-pussy-by-karen-finley/