Editor’s Note: As you might have guessed, the following essay abounds with profane language that might not be suitable for all audiences. Read at your own risk.
At first, fuck is only phonemes. To the uninitiated, the word is no more than the sum of its linguistic parts: a fricative, a schwa, a velar stop. Fuck’s real power lies in its transgressiveness. It’s a dirty word, but a versatile one: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, a sui generis part of speech altogether. Fuck is profane. In some circles, it’s also sacrilege, almost on par with the smut that gets a person eternally damned. And so fuck becomes fun. A provocation, a taboo.
Punishments for profane language vary by culture and context, but in America a foul mouth is scolded, washed out with soap, censored, or even cited. In Massachusetts, anyone older than 16 is subject to fines for using “impure language” at sporting events, and an errant “Jesus Christ!” could theoretically land someone in jail. Obscene words are bleeped or minced on-air, asterisked or expurgated in print. In January, when President Trump reportedly referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries,” the New York Times’s headline discreetly described his language as “disparaging words,” while the Washington Post printed the insult in full. Most cable newscasters repeated the word on-air, and it scrolled across CNN and MSNBC’s chryons. Fox News, meanwhile, bowdlerized the word with dashes.
For poets, the stakes of using profanity are different. Each of a poet’s “fucks” is deliberate and premeditated, deployed for meaning and phonetic value rather than shock value. Weeks before Trump co-opted the word, I asked poet Maggie Smith about the power of “shithole” in her poem “Good Bones.”
… Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.Smith tells me the word has been in the poem since the first draft. “It feels right to me as a colloquialism,” she writes via e-mail. “It’s the first poem I ever used profanity in, but to me it feels like an integral part of the poem. I think it helps keep the poem from being too sentimental, and it gives the poem its ‘teeth.’”
But in some contexts off the page, the word has been sanitized. When the poem was featured on the CBS drama Madam Secretary, the network’s legal department asked Smith for possible replacement words. “I suggested either ‘dump’ or ‘hellhole,’ and both cleared, so I chose to go with ‘hellhole,’” Smith says, adding, “Some newspapers have opted to use asterisks when reprinting the poem (sh******), and when I read the poem for a video on The Ohio State University homepage, the word was silenced.”
Images by Mike Flemming
How does one become a butterfly?’ she asked pensively. ‘You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.’~ Trina Paulus
How my heart sings 