THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 12, 1996 TAG: 9610120062
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 80 lines
THE MIND'S blue pencils cross out words even before they reach paper, but great artists learn to write past their cerebral censors.
Poet Denise Duhamel knows. She ignored the cautious little voices so well that her most recent volume of poetry - ``The Woman With Two Vaginas'' - scared off a printing company in Alaska and was banned in Canada.
``Take 10 minutes and write down things you've never told your mother, or anyone else,'' she instructed Old Dominion University students Thursday, urging them to loosen up in the service of becoming better writers.
Duhamel's master class in poetry was a component of ODU's 19th annual literary festival, ``Forbidden Passage,'' which continues through Sunday.
A dozen noted writers of poetry, fiction and plays are centering their lectures and readings around the festival's theme - banned books and censorship.
M. Evelina Galang, festival director and assistant professor in ODU's creative writing program, said she had no trouble finding American writers who'd been censored.
In choosing the festival theme, she forfeited political correctness in favor of bringing to the fore some of the many cases of censored materials in the United States.
``Censorship threatens to take away what might be the most important freedom of all, the freedom to think for ourselves,'' wrote Galang.
On the surface, the poems in this volume are moral lessons cloaked in Eskimo Inuit mythology. But completely undressed, they explore issues of gender and sexuality.
For example, in the title poem, a wife coddles her husband to divert his attention from the fact that her genitalia is not in the usual place but, rather, in her hands - both of them. When he discovers the glitch, he rids himself of his devoted mate and takes a young wife. But, alas, variation from the norm becomes less and less important to him, and, in sadness for his loss, he
makes his new wife slap his face,
to feel the warm tingle of her fingers,
. . . then cries out into her barren palms.
On a less explicit - but just as revealing - note, invisible men wail for a dead fellow with
voices even more invisible than usual
sobbing their disembodied grief.
Here, Duhamel says that the men's separation of body and spirit alienates them.
Duhamel's language, frank in regard to body parts of both men and women, apparently offends the book's critics.
Duhamel's book ran up against a brick wall when Alaska's Salmon Run Press sent it to a printer shortly after accepting it for publication late in 1993.
The printer came up with one excuse after another for not starting the press run. Failing to meet deadlines is a ``common tactic'' to avoid publication, Duhamel said.
After dragging its corporate feet for months, the company finally refused to print the book.
``They said they never intended to print it, that it was pornographic,'' the poet said.
Finally, in March 1995, an Ohio press printed the controversial book, but it was banned in Canada.
Canada's censorship law is a version of one sponsored by American feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin that failed to win congressional approval in the United States. The aim of the law in both the approved and proposed versions was to help protect women from abuses thought to stem from pornographic images, but it turned out to be ``a double-edged sword in Canada,'' said Duhamel, because women like her are now censored.
Even after the volume appeared on booksellers' shelves, unofficial censorship continued to haunt Duhamel.
In her Rhode Island hometown, people she had known all her life treated her differently after learning that her writing had been banned, she said. Even now, ``sometimes people won't even say the title of the book,'' she said.
Duhamel, 35, lives in New York City with her husband, poet Nick Carbo. She has published three other full-length books of verse and four chapbooks. Her latest volume, ``Kinky,'' will be published next year by Orchard Press. ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD L. DUNSTON
The Virginian-Pilot
Denise Duhamel leads a master class in poetry Thursday at Old
Dominion University's annual Literary Festival. by CNB