Jonathan Fletcher

             “I want to know how things will end. I’ve heard of the beginning, / how grains of pollen fell from the poplars. Then a little choral / music, cavalry, bright skirmish on the hillside, a thousand / years of this” (Cravens 2024, 3). And so begins Madeleine Cravens’ aptly titled debut collection of poetry. Part-travelogue, part-meditation, Pleasure Principle (2024) is not so much the examination of a burgeoning life but the sacred discovery and assertion of self. With such intriguing titles as “Voicemail from La Jolla,” “At the Ashokan Watershed,” and “Sonnet with Two Bridges,” Cravens not only invites the reader to various and numerous locations of significant philosophical and personal import (transporting them to geographically distinct places as Bodega Bay, the Catskills, and Jacob Riis Park), but also guides the reader to intimate spaces of the self, revealing the most vulnerable of interiorities.

            Throughout Cravens’ debut collection of poetry, flourishes of womanhood, feminism, and expressions of sapphic attachment abound. In the twentieth section of the longform poem, “Desire Lines,” for example, the speaker identifies with refreshing and unapologetic frankness what is presumably their first erotic encounter with a woman and the transformative and liberative consequences thereof:

“I fell in love for the first time. There was / an element of terror when she removed her rings. / I could be shaped, I could be changed, / I could see a future and be denied it—. / When I used to kiss men, I felt nothing. / Only their total inability to annihilate me.”

(emphases mine) (ibid. 2024, 40)

Such self-discovery and sexual empowerment are evident elsewhere in Pleasure Principle. In the aptly titled poem, “Sapphic Fragment,” for example, the speaker acknowledges early on, “I didn’t like sex in the beginning. / Somewhere in Greece, the sea eroded rocks. / There was no oracle.” By associating their initial negative attitude toward sex to the absence of an ancient oracular figure, the speaker necessarily (as well as conversely) links a positive understanding and experience of sex with the presence of an oracle and (by extension) a future (ibid. 2024, 9). When read in tandem with “I could see a future and be denied it,” one of the more arresting lines excerpted above from “Desire Lines,” such a positive association of the erotic with hope is only reinforced (ibid. 2024, 40).

Throughout Cravens’ debut collection of poetry, however, between such revelations of self or moments of reclamation, uncomfortable truths or sobering realities balance those welcome discoveries or gestures, blunting the joy and pride that otherwise attend them. Farther down in “Sapphic Fragments,” for example, the speaker admits, “I had been lied to. Women, too, were violent. . .My sister was in a psychiatric hospital. . .In the nightclub bathroom, I inhaled stranger / vapors, then smashed my head into a wall” (emphasis mine) (ibid. 2024, 9). Though hardly a celebration of physical violence, let alone the impulse toward self-destructive behavior, the speaker’s admission undercuts the traditional (and arguably sexist/misogynistic) image and expectation of a docile woman (such docility represented in the domestic labor of the speaker’s mother). At the same time, however, such lines (wisely) avoid the polar (yet no less sexist or misogynistic) assumption of women as inherently (biologically?) violent and, thus, unable to govern themselves. After all, as the speaker observes in the line immediately preceding the one in which their sister is admitted to the hospital, “The presidential candidate praised drones” (ibid.). Though a possible allusion to a former female presidential candidate, the fact that the gender of such a “character” is unspecified in an otherwise sapphic environment lends itself to a more patriarchal interpretation. When coupled with the image of drones, aircraft that are often phallic in look and penetrative in function, the argument for such a reading is only reinforced.

            Like “Sapphic Fragments” and “Desire Lines,” “Polyamory,” one of the later poems in Pleasure Principle, also explores the idea of womanhood, feminism, and expressions of sapphic attachment. As the speaker acknowledges at the beginning,

“Originally, I wanted the story / to have several female characters. / I thought it would be better / to be untethered to one perspective, that a chorus would strengthen / the plot. . .But I couldn’t accept the inverse. / At heart, I wanted to be possessed.

            (ibid. 2024, 47)

Notwithstanding the obvious allusion to a Greek chorus (an interesting inclusion, given the other allusions to ancient Greek literature, belief, and rituals within Cravens’ debut collection of poetry), “Polyamory” otherwise reads quite modern. Given the title of the poem (“polyamory” being a relatively new word, though not a new practice), as well as the reference to Hudson (presumably Hudson, New York), such an assumption is reasonable. Nonetheless, universal questions abound within the piece: who is the speaker? What does she want? Though the speaker answers these questions in the second verse paragraph, it is not until the final ones that she acts on such knowledge, fulfilling such a primal (and, theretofore, unfulfilled) need: “In the weak light I climbed / on top of her” (ibid. 2024, 47). As if to provide gendered contrast to the sapphic encounter between the speaker and the speaker’s lover (only identified as “L”), L’s father (but not her mother) is mentioned (an interesting choice, given the traditional expression of “mother tongue”): “Last night, in Hudson, / L spoke to me in her father’s language, the language of my favorite novel. / It seemed like she was naming parts / of my body, though I couldn’t be sure” (ibid.) Though hardly the only male “character” in Pleasure Principle (the speaker’s father, for example, appears and reappears throughout Cravens’ debut collection of poetry), L’s father still stands out in an otherwise erotic section between two women, prompting the question of how he might react if he knew of the tryst between his daughter and the speaker and, by extension, their presumable sexual identities.

            Both an interior exploration and an assertion of the self, Cravens’ Pleasure Principle is one not to miss. Visit Point Reyes. Visit Jacob Riis Park. Visit the Catskills. Most importantly, though, meet Cravens’ family, her friends, her lovers, her self. See who she starts as. See who she becomes. You will not be disappointed.