Day 6: Charles Rammelkamp on "The Porn-Phone Caper"

One of The Five-Two's first contributors, Charles Rammelkamp remains one of its most enthusiastic six years on. Here's his commentary for this year's tour. —Gerald So

Paula Willis writes about aging, memory loss, their impact on sexuality and eroticism in both poetry and fiction (see her story, "Red Rover," in The Potomac). She’s by turns comic, melancholy, stoic and wise.

"The Porn Phone Caper" begins with a sly reference to Andrew Marvell's poem about seduction, “To His Coy Mistress," which is also concerned with time and sexuality (the winged chariot). "The Porn Phone Caper" is written in the same meter and rhyme scheme, iambic tetrameter and rhymed couplets. In Marvell’s poem, the speaker chastises his mistress for wasting precious, finite time, when they could be making love. In Willis’ poem, it's more about preserving the evidence of love in the twilight of time. This amounts to the same thing, just a different perspective on the spectrum of time of that brief spasm of sexual pleasure. Here, the narrator knows with certainty that there is never world enough.

The crime? Potentially leaving a record behind for grandchildren to discover and probably be disturbed by? Not an issue; the lovers are being discreet, even though the “caper,” recording the sex act, is meant to preserve the episode, for a while at least, for private pleasure, as insurance against the loss of memory. The sex itself? More like a saintly act of compassion and generosity.

In both poems, the real crime is time—or, said another way, age. —Charles Rammelkamp