The Rumpus Interview

From TheRumpus.net, an interview by Julie Greicius

Rumpus: Right! The book. Let’s talk about this book. You and this mortal HoopGirl have written a guidebook to sex.

Conrad: Actually, it’s a guide to hooping, the modern form of hula hooping.

Rumpus: Oh come now. Let’s take a look… “activate the muscles in your legs to power your pelvic thrusts,” it says here.

Conrad: Right, in order to keep the hoop in orbit around your waist.

Rumpus: I think we both know you’re talking about sex. How about this: “Don’t anticipate; respond to it. Push into it when you feel it touch you.”

musing on poem mentions my hoop…

In honor of National Poetry Month, my friend Stephen Elliott has been soliciting “poems I love” for his magazine The Rumpus, a yummy wonderland of writing, sexyness, and politics. I’ve been reading more poetry again recently, and so I was inspired to send him this reflection on a Poem I Love, which, yes, includes a reference to hooping, as part of my rhythm of Desire:

You’d think Stanley Kunitz, near 70 and hobbling through “Touch Me,” would have slid off my 19 year old self. But it was the only poem that stuck, from a night of literary luminaries.

15 years later, returning—not the first time since—and reassured again by the continuum: desire, desire. Tonight it’s the motor of the cat’s purring, drummers sounding from the arts center, and the thump of my hips against a circling hoop. Some tomorrow again there will be a beloved, a darling, do you remember—I’m sure of it. And in three decades’ time, desire still.

Stanley, still winsome