Poet Puzzled By Reaction To Provocatively Titled Book

“What if I have written pornography?” the feminist poet Denise Duhamel recalls asking herself in a fit of shame.

She was describing how she felt upon learning that her latest poems were, in effect, “banned” by two Alaskan companies - a printer and a distributor - which considered them too sexually explicit and refused to handle them.

The provocatively titled book, “The Woman With Two Vaginas” (Salmon Run Press, $9.95), eventually did find a printer, and a few weeks ago - nine months later than scheduled - was distributed by another company.

Duhamel, 33, says her self-doubt quickly turned to rage, then disgust. She says she couldn’t believe that her poems, based on Eskimo myths, would prompt such a reaction, especially “when I had to watch things like people on MTV with no clothes on, and degrading women.

“The women in the book are really strong,” she says. “I think that’s the most threatening thing - not the sexuality, but that the women are really strong.”

Duhamel, whose work has won her numerous prizes and fellowships, teaches writing at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa.

Her publisher, Salmon Run Press, is based in Anchorage, Alaska.

“‘If we print this, our staff will walk out,”’ Duhamel says the printer told her editor.

“They said (it was) because of the sexual content. I think it’s because it has vagina in the title.”

After retrieving the poems and cover design from the printer, the publisher found a small press in Ohio that would take the book for a comparable price - “God bless their hearts,” says Duhamel.

Duhamel’s focus on Eskimo myths is new; previously, her work was inspired by fairy tales and Barbie. She discovered “these really great Inuit women” in library books.

“I loved them,” she says.

“To be desirable there is to have really fat hands and be able to kill a seal - totally the opposite of what the Barbie thing is.”