Talk Dirty to Me

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously wrote of pornography that, though it’s difficult to define, “I know it when I see it.” I’ve often thought the same is true of good poetry, and with Angelo Nikolopoulos’ debut collection Obscenely Yours (Alice James Books), the comparison has never felt more apt. Drawing inspiration and many of its poems’ titles from the vocabulary of porn films (“Servicing Seniors,” “Brothers Knows Best,” etc.), Obscenely Yours pays close attention to what Nikolopoulos tells me he admires most about pornography—“its pageantry.”

“The mechanics of sex don’t interest me as much as its accouterments: the props and tawdry narratives, all the orchestrated parts of a smutty mise-en-scène,” he says. “In this way pornography and writing are very similar given their emphasis on scene construction, on details.”

Indeed, in the poem “Obscenely Yours: Scenes Two and Three”—part of a series imagining a fictitious fetish film—the speaker instructs: “You need the particulars. They matter. / Daybreak enters. // My shoes, I didn’t leave them there. / I left them here.” Here, as elsewhere, Nikolopoulos’ reader must also assume the role of collaborator, whether lover, cameraman or devoted fan.

If Nikolopoulos’ obsessions are base, they certainly aren’t basic. For him, the pornographic form is a means to an end, a new way of penetrating the complexities of desire and loneliness. “The language of role play and fetish is so ripe with symbolism…I think there’s much we can learn from our fetishes,” he says. His poem “Self Suck,” for instance, contemplates autofellatio in order to consider the advantages of being alone (“Maybe more’s not merrier but messier”), while “Fisting: Treading the Walls” turns out to be a meditation on metaphor and faith.

Again and again throughout his book, Nikolopoulos proves he’s a true master at mashing up the ribald and the intellectual. In another poem from the “Obscenely Yours” sequence, he complains a lover’s safe word is “too red,” before concluding: “I like it when you talk structuralism. / Your big fat red mouth, dirty speech act.”

Don’t mistake his intelligence for high-mindedness, however. “It might seem that I’m looking for the sacred in the profane, but I’m not,” he assures me. “I don’t believe in either.”

Left wondering if there’s anything capable of offending the salacious poet, I ask Nikolopoulos what he considers obscene.

“To talk about obscenity you have to talk about shame. Someone who’s acting obscenely is someone who acts without shame. Which I champion…But obscenity also implies an offense to one’s standards of beauty or moral code. And in my moral hierarchy, I find people’s high threshold for boredom to be incredibly obscene.” And who can blame Nikolopoulos for fighting the good fight against obscentities like boredom, tradition and, of course, the missionary position?

Angelo Nikolopoulos recommends: Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet, Queer Street by James McCourt and Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson