Gypsy Girl
Gypsy GirlText Box: Jim Larwillpoems byText Box: The Poet’s Next Step I cannot help feel that everything on the internet is porn of some kind. Pornography was once writing that was about those who would sell themselves. Over time porn became a marginalized (yet popular) art form of both images and words. Today everything and everybody on the internet is about trying to “sell” something to everyone; information porn, news porn, political porn, profile porn, lol cat video porn, environmental porn, passing comment porn: let’s face it - we live in a Global Village of porn. So at their best I hope these poems stimulate a pornographic response of erotic proportions in my reader’s imagination. For any poem can only happen in the mind of a reader and poets are mere organs in the play of words. Although thousands of years old, the written word is still the most effective form of virtual reality known to human kind. Language is the program of the human soul, and poet’s are Shaman of this magical realm of symbols. The purpose of some poems has always been to romance. It is an old tradition. In this Gypsy Girl collection, while it contains a selection of different romance poems, many of these poems are love poems to the profiles of woman I will never meet. Dating websites are an amazing place to observe the human art form of romantic display and I have long been interested in the interplay between image and word. Profiles and poems are a natural fit. Pictures of woman in dating site profiles often seem to deconstruct the traditional male gaze with their; under the Christmas tree shot, exotic location shot, sitting on the stairs leading to the bed room shot, sitting on the edge of the bed shot, and endless bathroom mirror shots. Where once men took pictures of women objectifying them into standard formats for the benefit of other men to look at, women are taking their own pictures and many are re-appropriating this discourse as they playfully deconstruct the traditional male gaze. How could a poet not fall in love with them? How could he not write a few poems? Jim Larwill