Today’s Poem: The Wild Party

Joseph Moncure March and the poetry of speed

“Kiki, Noire et Blanche,” 1926 photograph by Man Ray (Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Moncure March (1899–1977) had his day and faded. Not that he shone all that brightly when he published The Wild Party in 1926. But the book-length poem was one of those racy productions that never quite died away after its first burst of scandalous success. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) or, say, Venus in Furs (1870, but translated into English in 1921), it could be read for the lubricious parts, the titillated readers applauding themselves for the daring of consuming high-tone smut. But like its fellow Banned-in-Boston 1920s texts, The Wild Party had something more to it — although what, exactly, needs some work to explicate.

What are we to make of something like this, the most-often quoted passage in the book (partly, I suspect, because it’s racy enough to make the quoter feel brave and transgressive without actually being explicit):

Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest lov…