The poetics of consumption
On desire and ache
I. Appetite as Origin
In most myths, there is a certain hunger. It presents as a beautiful woman, a naked shoulder, a reddened yet unmarked fruit skin, a sigh inside a dark cave, or it snakes itself into the promise of uncertain glory.
Hunger is not just for food, but for desire and risk. “You came and I was crazy for you and you cooled my mind that burned with longing,” wrote Sappho, ever the patron saint and the poet of fevered hunger after millennia. Desire itself is the first narrator, which can express its heat through longing and touch as it saturates every myth, soaking to the edges of every sentence.
For example:
Eve tasted the apple.
Persephone swallowed the pomegranate seed.
Carmilla drank blood.
We’re taught that the first bite is sin, but what if it’s an initiation? What if consumption is the true beginning, the first moment of becoming? What if annihilation is a new way to embody?
Poetry begins in the mouth. The tongue pressed to sound or the breath caught between teeth. Reading is an act of devouring as our eyes feast on the page and our minds gorge on metaphor. Even Lacan reminds us: “Desire full stop is always the desire of the Other. Which basically means that we are always asking the Other what he desires.” Poetics tends to focus on what fuels the ravenous desire, whatever the Other may be. In turn, this desire forges into an arrow, hunting for its target as the means of pure fulfillment. This is not only a desire-fueled experience, no, it’s a primal one.
After all, most poems (and myths) don’t start with virtue, they begin with hunger. A woman opens a box. A god disguises himself as gold. A mouth meets a mouth. A door is unlocked. A boundary crossed. The original transgression is almost always desire.
Which means, to consume is to know as in, to be deeply in touch with the carnal points driving the psyche. It is relentless, perhaps even sycophantic, and urgent.
This is especially true when positioning poetry and language under the lens of taste. As I wrote earlier, all poetry begins in the mouth. And, the allure of desire’s skin encapsulates with a bite.
The poetics of consumption begins here: in that first trembling decision to taste what should not be tasted, to want what you are told to leave untouched. In this light, every bite is a rebellion. Every poem is a fruit, bruised and glistening.
As readers (and I’d argue too, as writers), we consume much in the same manner. Except this consumption feels safer, housed in the nature of its voyeurism. By all means, when we’re done consuming, we merely close the book. Therefore, poetry or prose is a vehicle for consumption. It is a time and place where the consumption meets its very nexus, and yet it is also immortal. The poem itself is a vessel that can be experienced again and again. The vessel does not end.
“won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton once asked, “that every day something has tried to kill me / and has failed?” Perhaps consumption is not just survival but a celebration of its devouring.
In the context of the poem as a vessel or the myth as a container for consumption, we must connect this back to eroticism. Our inherent desire to consume and to categorize things as worthy of consummation in turn comes from the cataclysmic connection to our sense of boundaries (or desire to suspend them). Anne Carson, in Eros the Bittersweet, wrote:
“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
And yet, isn’t that the ache? To want so badly to dissolve into the beloved, only to be reminded we are made of edges.
This is messy; dripping juice and meat onto the chin. But it is true: a primal dance between the desire and the boundary, in which the other is the north star. How can we pull our desire in further? How can we walk through the boundary? We consume.
And now, for even more delicious subtext via Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”
The teeth are sharp. The mouth salivates. Let the reader chew.
II. To Be Consumed
To be desired is to be devoured.
There is an elemental danger in that. What begins as eros often teeters toward obliteration is to be seen too deeply in the eyes of another and to dissolve beneath the chthonic weight of someone else’s wanting. Eroticism is not always soft in its prowess and may arrive on a knife’s kiss and red-lipped in our psyche.
Desire is double-edged: we hunger and we also long to be the feast.
So much of our desire is shaped by what we long to be inside of. Not just sex but story, a narrative thread which is beloved. Desire is also a dream in which our waking lives and subconscious fancies converge. We want to be consumed in the way fog eats a shoreline, or in the way lovers disappear into bedrooms with closed doors and no clocks. Being seen is merely the starting point and it ends with being swallowed whole by significance.
In mythology, the most dangerous women are never the ones who cry and they’re the ones who open their mouths. Think: Lilith, Circe, Medea. Think of Persephone again, but this time as the one who opened her jaw like a cobra and said: Yes, I am one with the underworld now. I am the one who bites. I liken this perspective to Sappho’s Fragment 47: “Love shook my senses like a wind rushing down upon the oaks of the mountain.”
Each woman the world tried to contain, only to make her myth eternal. This is to say in order to find agency in the feminine, one must straddle the poetics of consummation while also writing the self. “Write your self. Your body must be heard,” said Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa.
Women are long put on the pedestal where the body is desired. In this instance, it is the women below who use their body as an amphora that channels their body’s desire to be heard. Channeling is intrinsically linked to the subconscious and consumption.
Lilith did not bend to Adam. She was his equal, which was unforgivable. She left paradise with her name intact, becoming a creature of the night, a mother of monsters, a whisper of sex on the wind. What’s more erotic than refusing to submit? Her legend warns us of women who won’t lie down and those who make you want to.
Circe is the sorceress of thresholds and therefore her consumption eternally lingers at the crossroads. She is a goddess and a wielder of immortality, with the ability to provide dramatic transformations. She consumes with her seduction in such a liminal state. In her presence, men turn to pigs and wolves, nymphs turn into terrible sea creatures. Circe shows us that desire isn’t always about what’s done to us but merely what we uncover and transmute.
Medea is desire gone darkly nuclear under the driving force of revenge; it’s overexposed. She loved Jason so fully, so ferociously, she crossed oceans and killed family. And when he betrayed her? She burned it all. Medea embodies the erotics of surrender, yes, but also the erotics of complete destruction to the point of it evolving into complete horror. She is the mother who devours and her recklessness is the extreme act of sublimation.
Desire, in its most potent form, is shapeshifting. It flickers between tenderness and possession, pleasure and pain, prayer and peril. Vampires, femme fatales, and cursed saints (like Joan of Arc) devoured by devotion as they all orbit the same burning question: What are you willing to give up to be desired? What would you risk to be wanted that much?
L. Sheridan Fanu’s Carmilla teaches entranced women how to hunger. Her seductions are softened but spellbound with less about fangs, more about proximity and tapping into the shadow’s veil. Her bite is a metaphor for awakening, for knowing one’s own appetite. And Dracula’s unnamed brides, with their whispered laughs and bloodstained lips are a chorus of women too dangerous to be named yet too divine and too majestically horrific to be forgotten. They are the erotic excess the Stoker novel can’t contain.
This all converges back to literature as it’s a mouth wide open. Like the vampire, it speaks and devours at the realm that meets at the crossroads of desire and annihilation. It’s the art form that most mimics the vampire’s kiss: a little puncture, a little pleasure, and a little death.
We flirt with the abyss in search of that heat. We don’t want a clean love, we want a messy one. One that stains the hands. On the surface, the erotic is simply pleasure but as the journey deepens, it is undoing. It is the moment before the mouth meets the fruit and everything changes.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” To be consumed is to feel yourself unraveled by the breath of another. To want that? To lean into that kind of wildness? That’s poetry.
III. Consumption as Culture
“There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either.” —Robert Graves
The algorithm will see you now. More intimately, this section explores how literature got branded and sold back to us on a tote bag.
We’re living in an era where the poem is a commodified 9:16 graphic with an aesthetic font. Where the sacred has been filtered through word count and captioned for maximum emotional engagement. (FYI: I do not pretend that I am exempt from this game, after all, I use social media.)
The bite-sized line break becomes a carousel. The stanza, a swipeable soft launch of someone’s heartbreak or healing. A long ago romantic entanglement lives on as a TikTok trend. And before we know it, the algorithm has learned what we ache for better than our lovers ever did.
And the algorithm wants us to keep on aching and to keep on consuming. Isn’t that the nature of consumption? To never stop because consumption is sellable (even dare I say, scalable).
Even Instagram captions are poems now. We’ve seen it. We’ve bookmarked them under boards labeled “raw” or “divine feminine.” Maybe even “brb crying.” (Who isn’t guilty of this?) They haunt us mid-scroll in a line that hits too close to home. For a moment, it feels like the phone is whispering just to you: yes, feel this. Now, consume. Then, save. Don’t forget to share it. Print those missives on a bag and cart it around a used bookstore, browsing with a single use cup in hand, waiting in line for croissants, or wearing it and staring idly at a phone screen on the 9-to-5 commute. After all, people need to recognize that you are one who devours.
Consumption feels nearly endless in its dopamine discovery and its cyclical banality. We’re inundated with images constantly, which is expansive and maddening. Really, the images are an interplay on our desires, our need for eros, and finally, the need to consume. Food for thought via Guy Debored in The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness: But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.”
Even more so: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Wow. My goodness.
So what happens when we commodify what was once sacred? When the temple becomes a content calendar? When the hushed body of the poem becomes a flat feed, competing with travel porn, brunch, and skincare routines? The poem, once a howl in the dark, now moonlights as a brand identity.
I don’t know.
Poetry by nature has always resisted domestication, and yet here we are, drafting verse with marketability in mind. I am also a copywriter, so I think about this often with both wonder and malaise. Sometimes that manifests as designing our vulnerability for engagement. Or, watching tenderness become trendy. The irony, of course, is that the poem is a poem is a poem whether I feel a sense of awe or misanthropic. Even behind its stripped down meaning, its bare bones, the poem still pulses, still driven by some form of consumption.
This is the paradox of poetry in the digital age: it both resists and participates in consumer culture. It’s a feral thing in a gilded crown. A liturgy sold as merch. A flatlay of vintage crystal with orange wine positioned alongside a fragment of Sappho.
Consumption may be inescapable.
We do read to fill ourselves (yes!) but maybe also to remember our own emptiness. That we are, in fact, unfinished. That no amount of perfectly spaced lines can replace the raw ache of being a body that longs. Personally, I find beauty in this kind of frailty.
My answers here don’t necessarily feel a sense of finality or embody a robust outlook as we’re currently living through late-stage capitalism and art is surviving within its poison breath. Nor am I untouched by consumer culture: I generally consider myself a participant in the societal zeitgeist, I am an avid fan of the internet, I work, I pay rent and bills (and student loans), I try to live, I enjoy the frivolity of pretty and precious things.
Being profound and poetic is an art. It is also a point of consumption.
This was good. Thank you kindly. +1