I’ve been slowly making my way through ten poems to change your life by Roger Housden, and I’m really, really enjoying it.

As I was reading last night, I did something I rarely do…I picked up a pen and underlined a passage.

The poem was “Last Gods” by Galway Kinnell, which is a beautiful, sensual poem that “elevates the instinctual play of lovemaking to an activity worthy of the gods and…shows how deeply resonant our loving is with all the currents and rhythms of nature itself.”

Housden spends a good deal of time explaining why he chose this poem for a collection purporting to be able to change your life, and he touched on something that resonates deeply with me, something that I’ve talked about here before:

Yet like erotic, the word pleasure has become divorced from its original savor. We still live in the aftermath of a religion (the Catholic variety) for whom the litmus test for a sin remains the question: Did you take pleasure in it?

Our culture, Housden continues, keeps us “in thrall to shame.”

It’s like I said when I was venting about taking the high schoolers to confession, where they were handed an “examination of conscience” flyer. This is an institution that teaches kids that not only is it sinful to have sex, it’s sinful to even *think* about it. It’s no wonder so many young people (and some not-so-young people) are so sorely misguided about sex and sexuality.

“Sex and the City” did a great job of pointing out some of the ways these deeply ingrained attitudes manifested themselves in adult dating behavior. Here are two examples I can think of off the top of my head.

In one case, Charlotte was dating a guy who seemed great except that during sex, he would scream out “You f***ing bitch. You f***ing whore!” When she asked him about it later, he had no memory of saying this, and couldn’t believe he would say any such thing. Needless to say, Charlotte found this disturbing.

The second one (and now that I think of it, I think this one was Miranda. I can’t remember…) was a man who was (of course) a not-quite-recovered Catholic who always, always HAD to get up and immediately shower afterwards. He just felt “dirty,” he explained.

Ach.

It would appear that I meandered a bit from my original point, which was to say that I loved both this poem and Mr. Housden’s analysis/explanation of it.