After hearing about the controversy on Samantha’s B’s Full Frontal, I decided to repost this blogpost featuring my poem, “The Cunt Sonnet.” I originally wrote it in about 1992 when I attended The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. It was so long ago that Allen Ginsberg, alive and well, was on the panel when the poem was read by the theatrical Bobbie Louise Hawkins.
I heard that the word cunt — as in that “feckless cunt” — is regularly used in Canada (where Samantha is from) and in Europe. “Cunt” has a long and regal history. (Obviously Samantha was upset by the news — and justifiable so.) Let’s give her another chance. And let’s take back the word in the United States!
The cunts are coming, the cunts are coming!”
I heard that recently, on Face Book that there were some derogatory references going around containing the word “cunt.” Someone remembered my poem from the old days, “The Cunt Sonnet,” which I posted below. I came of age in a woman-affirming lesbian feminist community. No doubt that entered my thinking when I wrote “The Cunt Sonnet”. Now, more than a quarter of a century ago, I was at Naropa Institute for the summer in Boulder Colorado (when Allen Ginsberg was still there) when I was inspired to write the poem. After one of the faculty members, the writer Bobbie Louise Hawkins, read it on the farewell panel, I took a bow as “the cunt who wrote it.” Indeed. It is always time to reclaim the word “cunt” — perhaps now more than ever.
The Cunt Sonnet
The cathedral of my cunt is a real cunt-nundrum:
what and who it wants often I do not.
since the days of the cunt-iforms,
ancient Persia and Babylon,
this had been engraved in stone.
Still the English midwives,
those working class cunt-esses,
call a cunt a cunt.
Hark their cries in the dark night:
The cunts are coming!
The cunts are coming!
Join the cunt-ilinguists.
Scream it on the tastebuds of our common cunts
as they rise in my cunty swagger
for I am a cunting woman by day and by night
when those invited and not enter my dreams:
Cunts all, I embrace them warmly.
With my woman, cunt-ilingus is our pleasure boat
Sometimes slippery canoe or runaway yacht.
Each morning I hasten to salute:
My cunt-ry tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty.
by Janet Mason
first published in When I Was Straight, poems by Janet Mason from Insight To Riot Press (1995)
thanks to CA Conrad for encouraging me to submit to EOAGH, A Journal of the Arts
(CA may have been the guest editor at the time)
https://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/mason.html
Janet Mason, author 