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faulty incubations: an argument against the womb

by Dr. Lori Kördann, M.D.


part I: the argument

...so goaded the spiteful looking glass:
seers, behold thy dubious fruits!
and partake of those dropped from your own loins
withered vines strangling -- strangling
umbilical cords around the necks of saints
breech in your throes, engendering
hosts of fragrant blossoms
hindering passage --
adorning lanes of forgotten wonder
and now-stagnant release;
crops fermented and moldy
seeping from your wretched crevice
congenitally defective bastards
with their impotent seed
ejaculated into a silver chalice:
oily, vile semblances
purveyed as the white wine of truth
and beauty ravaged
whetting insatiable thirsts for filth
to drown in swollen reservoirs
amid the stench of petty deceit.

sink, then, into the bog
and emerge in hell's ether


part II: data & methods

ref:
1) the vestibrium study
2) the seward lecture


part III: conclusion

lost prophet of the underworld.

Noted haiku analyst Leslie Mösknvorr interprets "faulty incubations" as a metaphoric indictment of commercial verse. The following excerpts are from her original notes for a lecture she presented at Vestibriüm University (fall colloquium, 2001).

In lines 1 and 2, the "looking glass" dares pretentious writers to examine their own contrived work... Line 3 announces the satire, labeling this exaggerated ... attempt at poetry as a taste of their own medicine, so to speak -- another "dubious fruit." The vines of line 4 are withered from cliché, unable to bear anything fresh; and instead only choke creativity by drowning it in hackneyed expressions (ref: "fragrant blossoms ... purveyed as the white wine of truth and beauty ravaged," 7-18). So "the womb," it seems, is any environment that fosters such banality, with the "impotent seed ejaculated" in lines 14 and 15 suggesting its self-sufficient nature. Line 19 then contends [that such] literary atrocities only lower reader standards by conditioning them to accept the flooded market of ... commercial material (the "swollen reservoirs" of "petty deceit," lines 20 and 21; or the pornographic "filth" of line 19). The second stanza succinctly chronicles the inevitable death of the would-be poet, who -- in a Miltonesque, or perhaps Dantesque fashion -- is hailed to reign supreme, taking their place in "hell's ether."