Tom Disch: Bard of Plump Love

It takes a brave poet these days to praise the beauties of obesity. Our poets tend to celebrate emaciated muses, often in verses as spindly as their beloveds. It wasn’t always so. Arab poets, in the days before Islam, sang of fat sweethearts with loving gusto. A woman with fingers “as thick as sand grubs” prompted erotic fantasies; another whose belly folds spilled over her waistband drove her serenading suitors wild, especially when she proved too well-padded to budge from her couch. In a desert environment this made sense; to be fat there was to be rich. But in 21st-century America, the very notion of plump love seems vaguely monstrous.