Midnight Sutra was inspired by my longtime devotion to classical Chinese poetry. It is an homage specifically to a group of anonymous female poets in China, 5th to 8th centuries, most likely ladies of the court, all of whom employed the sobriquet Lady Midnight to cover their erotic compositions. Written to be read in private or by a small circle, they are now part of literary history. My second inspiration for this book is the Sutras, holy Buddhist scrolls that touch on all aspects of life, including the sexual, as in the famous Kama Sutra. Like all wisdom texts, they teach one how to live—in this case, more by permission than by prohibition. I was struck in the original Lady Midnight poems by their playful intelligence; how they dealt with the subject of passionate, obsessive erotic and romantic love with a childlike insouciance coupled with the knowingness of an adult, employing irony and sincerity in equal measure. Comparatively little known, even today, they are high art indeed, but do not eschew the base and the low. Stylistically, I borrow from both their profound simplicity and the refinement that long before anticipates the modernism of which we are so proud. The speaker-character of my collection, a nameless woman (or women), is a modern young person in the gig economy, making ends meet, barely, but most of all living for obsessive and passionate love, enjoying the extremes and even the sweet suffering. Her love object is a man (or men) also nameless, who is real, or imagined, or both. He is the repository of desire, and at least in that sense, an artifice or fabrication, as perhaps all love objects ultimately are. I have tried to capture her exuberance, optimism, petulance, comic verve as well as, in more serious poems such as “Body Art”, the painful consequences of objectification on either side. Yet I wanted this book about eros to rise above, as much as anything an homage to the time in life when one gives oneself the luxury of doing all for love, whatever the cost. |
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| Johnny Payne |
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Johnny Payne's work has appeared in Neon Door, Fast Flesh, Decadent Review, Verdad Magazine, Gasher Journal, Sparks of Calliope, Society for Classical Poets, The Chained Muse, Collidescope, Peregrine Journal, The New Lyre, Pulsebeat, Wine Cellar Press, and Soundings East. His most recent published novels are THE HARD SIDE OF THE RIVER and CONFESSIONS OF A GENTLEMAN KILLER, which won the IBPA Gold Medal for Horror in 2021. His books of poetry VASSAL and HEAVEN OF ASHES were published by Mouthfeel Press. He has directed his plays TOUCHSTONE, DEATH BY ZEPHYR and CANNIBALS for Slingshot Players, Los Angeles.
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| Other Publication By Johnny Payne |
Johnny Payne
ISBN: 9788119228041
Johnny Payne
ISBN: 9788119654659
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