The Poetry Project

On Laura’s Desires by Laura Henriksen

Sylvia Gorelick

In Laura’s Desires, Laura Henriksen writes in intimate glory how Bette Gordon was inspired the first time she went to Variety, the porn theater that is the setting of her 1983 film Variety: “When she first saw the shining / marquee of Variety Photoplays she wanted / to swallow it.” In this place where fantasy came alive, where just existing was disruptive, she felt something unknowable and important stir in her. The experience would be transformed as it was passed to others: as Henriksen tells us, first in a short film called Anybody’s Woman, and then in Variety, where the protagonist Christine, on her breaks from selling $2 movie tickets, explores the theater’s space, catching fragments of pornos onscreen, lingering in the lobby. She sits on the stairs in front of a poster for a film called Laura’s Desires, smoking.

Gordon made Variety in collaboration with other women—Nan Goldin, Kathy Acker, Sandy McLeod, Cookie Mueller, among others. The film represents the collective realization of the inner and intersubjective lives and dreams of women. Henriksen shows us the intimacies that produced this feminist mystery/desire/porn film. Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency includes photos of Cookie and Sandy from the shoot. Gordon and Acker, the film’s screenwriter, first met when Bette was dating Kathy’s ex, making them “already erotically entangled,” bonded by a “sexy shared knowledge.” This is how experimental feminist work, then and now, becomes possible—through the gorgeous messiness of life, women thinking and desiring in community.

The film was produced in contentious conditions, both socially and ideologically—the NEA was cutting arts funding and filming stopped at one point as Gordon sought more funds to complete the project. When Variety was released, anti-porn feminists objected to it while mainstream viewers thought it wasn’t sexual enough. These split social opinions around women’s sexual lives, which endure in different ways, form the backdrop of Variety and of Henriksen’s investigation of desire.

For Henriksen, desire is a way of thinking freedom, its meanings and instantiations in life. She thinks freedom in, outside, beyond, and against labor, against the demands of surviving capitalism. Survival and desire are not opposed—they run together. They course through dream, memory, fantasy—modes of living that permeate these poems and converge in ways that make any categorical distinction beautifully pointless.

This reflection connects the long poems which comprise Laura’s Desires: “Dream Dream Dream” and “Laura’s Desires.” The dream-freedom vision comes in part through an engagement with the work of Bernadette Mayer, Jackie Wang, Rainer Diana Hamilton, Robin D.G. Kelley, and others; dream writing shows us the very real possibility of bringing about a different world through dreaming. The abolitionist work of dream—creating, through first imagining, a world where no one is caged. Henriksen writes:

Freedom, I am convinced, is a presence,

as Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains,

it is a place. What makes something

a place? Relative proximity and distance

to other places, having a history, a population,

mostly belonging and fantasy, I think.

Belonging and fantasy describe how places come into being, both oppressive and liberatory. The prison holds fantasies as much as a dream about flying. It is the intentional work of transforming place through imagination and living that opens up an idea of place as freeing. Henriksen’s writing makes her poem a place among many others for envisioning freedom as experience. She writes about places in New York and elsewhere in the U.S.—places produced through colonialism and land theft that she nonetheless finds ways to live in, and where we meet her. Her opening of questions about freedom and desire bend the map, setting in motion poetic resistance work against the violent logics of geography. She directs us instead toward the ways we actually experience place—as mobile and unstable.

Gordon transferred Variety from its actual location in the East Village to Times Square, the then-center of smut and erotic possibility that Samuel L. Delany celebrates in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Henriksen writes in “Dream Dream Dream”: “I am interested in the way the movies are also dreams. Diamond-studded, insistent, hallucinogenic dreams.” Gordon mobilizes the powers of dream to make a geographic transposition of this porn theater from one place in the city to another. This is one of the things, says Henriksen, that dreaming can teach us to do in life—seeing and recognizing “a place or a friend” transformed, learning the transformability of everything.

Henriksen brings into focus the porno-poetic soliloquies into which Christine slips in several scenes of Variety, to an audience (her boyfriend) who “cannot hang.” In response to one of his jarring reactions—“what are you doing?”—Christine says, “I’m just trying to tell you about my life.” Henriksen writes:

She wants

to be a writer, she’s in her boyfriend’s

parked car writing her life.

Henriksen is writing her life too, to a you that is vast, queer, unruly, in revolt—in other words, to an audience that can hang.

Henriksen’s writing of Variety and her life, inextricable, gives her a fantasy-portal into Christine’s inner life—her desires. Writing her own life, she reads the embodied, unwritten parts of Acker’s script. She knows that when Christine spills her Coke in the theater lobby she is “feeling a little flustered, / feeling a lot of things.” This is the same fantasy-capacity that opens her poem to reflections on the past and future lives of Christine, to the many “possible Christines.”

Henriksen makes the point that this film is Christine’s writing of her own fantasy. Sandy McLeod, the actor who plays Christine, had wanted to be a cinematographer—in Henriksen’s reading, she is:

In this part of the fantasy that is

her life as she is writing it, it’s still

prologue. She knows the one thing

you don’t want to do with pleasure

is to rush it, unless that’s your thing.

The quick pace of this poem, led by desire, moves us vertiginously through image, reflection, philosophy like a dream. Henriksen reveals truths and disrupts power games including the dominant metaphysical demand for resolution. The end of “Laura’s Desires,” like the end of Variety, is wide open.

This non-resolution has to do with Henriksen’s relationship to faith, her thoughtful departure from the notion that “everything happens for a reason”—the teleologies of Christianity and cinema ruptured, with, on the other side, an undefined, pleasure-led anarchism—Henriksen is already there. Indeed, her crisis and reconfiguration of faith spills through an ethics of sex: “Let fucking be nonteleological.” Despite and beyond her “breakup with Jesus,” she will lyrically invoke God from time to time:

The seam

on God’s wallet, asleep

on the couch

and dreaming an apocalypse with

the volume of snow. It is not possible

to be at home in this world, and there’s

nowhere else to go.

These mentions of God, whom Henriksen will later describe as a fallacy, an untruth, limn another, desired spirituality. On the way out of faith as limited by the social-Christian idea of what is thought to be destined, she grapples with God’s presence that is here, when we are dazzled or in love or experiencing pleasure and say, my god. Such an amorphous god is there, in the world where we are not at home, freed from ends and endings, be they sexual, narrative, or divine.

Like cinema and poetry, spirituality is a practice—for Henriksen, a practice of freedom—an embodied politics.

I think sometimes

it’s best not to overthink things

that make you feel alive

[…]

If you can do so without causing

harm, or with the intention not to,

it’s hard. If in so doing you can be

more free. If you can take anyone

there with you.

More free means she can take her liberties in writing, radically. Halfway through “Laura’s Desires,” Henriksen gives us a reading of the film Laura’s Desires, bringing this other film, whose poster haunts Variety, into the center of our view. Gordon said the poster was a dedication to Laura Mulvey. Had she seen this film, which feels, through Henriksen’s reading, like an anti-Mulveyan feminist manifesto?

I’m not thinking

about Laura Mulvey when I see

the poster, I’m thinking about how

I’m going to write that poem,

and it’ll be about me and my desires

The book’s namesake is a German porno about—in Henriksen’s expansive vision—the sexual liberation of a woman who is either dreaming or remembering or fantasizing a series of erotic encounters while on a beach vacation. Through Henriksen’s luminescent words we meet the Laura of the screen, who has sex with a woman wearing “diamond-studded lingerie” both in a fantasy during a photoshoot and later on in the dressing room. We see two sides of sex and labor—one in front of the camera yet protected by fantasy, and one in a performed privacy, behind the scenes. I imagine both to be delicious.

Laura’s Desires has a lot to teach us about pleasure in public and in private. Poetry, in Henriksen’s hands, becomes a place where the reality of fantasy and dream run wild. Central to her vision is a freedom conditional on the freedom of all. And at the same time, a freedom that is a presence, a present, an instant of intimacy without permanence—as beautiful as a spell we cast together.

#277 – Summer 2024

Elsewhere