The Best American Erotic Poems

From 1800 to the Present

David Lehman

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416564409
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Contributors were asked to name their favorite work of erotic writing—any genre, any language—and to comment briefly on the choice. Assisted by Jill Baron, David Lehman wrote the notes for the deceased contributors.

Kim Addonizio was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her most recent book of poems is What Is This Thing Called Love (W. W. Norton, 2004).

“I haven’t read much erotica, but I’d have to say that The Story of O made quite an impression. I think the reasons I like it had best remain private. Also, the writing is very vivid.”

Ai was born in Albany, Texas, in 1947. Her most recent book is Dread (W. W. Norton, 2003).

“I don’t really read erotic literature as such. However, I very much enjoyed Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm, which is described in a New York Times review as a ‘private eye crime novel and psychological suspense story.’ The eroticism came from the main character’s obsession with a woman he was watching and how he came actually to identify with her in the end. I found it appealing that someone could abandon all sense of self in the service of someone else. It seemed both mad and inspired and, I believe, reminded me of the artistic impulse.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). When the Savannah-born Aiken was eleven, he discovered the bodies of his parents: His physician father had killed the boy’s mother and then himself. At Harvard, Aiken made a lifelong friend in T. S. Eliot, whom he nicknamed “tse-tse,” and in 1924 he edited Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems, which did much to establish her reputation. Exemplifying Aiken’s strengths, “Sea Holly” takes its place in a tradition of landscape poems in which the natural world in its motions and gyrations seems to correspond to the human body. The “meeting of rock with rock,/The mating of rock and rock” is charged with erotic force not (or not just) because “rock” stands metaphorically for “breast” and the shape of a woman emerges from the side of the cliff, “virgin as rock,” but because the waves break on the sand and the wind sprays the air with a fury and in a rhythm suggestive of carnal love.

Sandra Alcosser was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944. Her most recent book is The Blue Vein, 2006 (livre d’artiste, Brighton Press).

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer, wrote Simone Weil. Eros is absolutely unmixed attention: Loren Eisley’s white wings moving inside a Manhattan evening; Colette’s mother’s house; Carl Philips’s Cortege; Henri Cole’s elephant in Middle Earth; Severo Sarduy’s Written on the Body; Michael Ondaatje’s dog paw. Jean Rhys: ‘The earth was like a magnet which pulled me and sometimes I came near it, this identification or annihilation that I longed for.’ Paul Shepherd: ‘hairlessness developed with the increased sensuousness of human body surface.’ George Seferis: ‘The sea, the mountains that dance motionless; I found them the same in these rippled chitons: water turned into marble around the chests and the sides of headless fragments. I know my whole life won’t be long enough to express what I have been trying to say for so many days now: this union of nature with a simple human body, this worthless thing.’”

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City in 1962. Her most recent book of poems is American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005).

“When I was the age of the speaker in the poem, the most important erotic writing to me was certainly Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada, with ‘Every Day You Play with the Light of the Universe’ being the anthem of a dreamed-of erotic life. I was also very taken with 1970s feminist novels starring sexually emancipated heroines: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, and a bit later, Audre Lorde’s ‘biomythography,’ Zami.”

A. R. Ammons (1926–2001). Born in North Carolina, Archie Randolph Ammons taught for many years at Cornell University. A maverick talent, grandly ambitious yet capable of whimsy, he understood modern science and brought it to bear in chronicling his encounters with the natural world. Though committed to the particular, Ammons in a philosophical mood can speak about abstractions as though they were living organisms observing rituals of unity and linkage. “The sexual basis of all things rare is really apparent” is the first line of his book-length poem Sphere. “Their Sex Life” is a model of elegance, symmetry, economy, and wit; the word failure can refer to a person or an event, and the placement of top invites us to interpret the two lines as corresponding to a pair of human bodies.

Nin Andrews was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1958. Her most recent book is Sleeping with Houdini (BOA Editions, 2007).

Andrews writes:

My favorite erotic poet is Vallejo

who isn’t exactly erotic but always makes me swoon

with his two most famous poems,

“Agape” and “Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca.”

It’s that quality of longing that poets have

way too much of,

and their terrible loneliness

that would like to say

as Vallejo does:

“I would come to my door,

I would shout to everyone,

if you are missing anything, here it is!”

And I’d love to.

Yes, I’d love to go to his door

and make love to him,

perhaps on a Thursday in Paris

on a day of heavy showers…

I’d keep everyone from beating him,

those whom he has done nothing to,

(Why does the world want to beat our famous poets?)

my Vallejo, yes, my own Vallejo

who lives deep inside me now

where he is safe at last,

though he of course knows nothing about this…

Sarah Arvio was born in Philadelphia in 1954. Her most recent book is Sono (Knopf, 2006).

“A few years after writing ‘Mirrors,’ I happened to reread some poems by John Donne—and there, in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’ I found an odd word that had slipped into my poem: sublunary. Donne’s argument: Only dull sublunary (earthbound) lovers care about ‘eyes, lips, hands.’ Refined lovers don’t care if the bodies of their lovers have died: They have their intertwined souls! In ‘Mirrors,’ the opposite occurs. The speakers—who are souls—look back with longing and regret at the embodied life. Note that my list of ‘breasts, balls, and lips’ mirrors Donne’s. I can’t help feeling that his three sexy words (‘eyes, lips, hands’) betray a touch of irony.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973). Born in “old” York (England), Auden wrote “The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral”—also known as “A Day for a Lay”—in New York in December 1948. By Platonic Auden meant ideal, not nonphysical. “Deciding that there ought to be one in the Auden Corpus, I am writing a purely pornographic poem,” he told his companion Chester Kallman. “You should do a complementary one on the other major act.” Auden later disavowed “The Platonic Blow,” never including it among his works or admitting his authorship. Typescript copies circulated among gay friends and admirers, and in 1965 Ed Sanders of the rock group the Fugs released a print version. A pamphlet consisting of “The Platonic Blow” and the three-line poem “My Epitaph” appeared from Orchises Press in 1985. (The editor’s note asserts that “The Platonic Blow,” which was “never acknowledged by Auden, can hardly be copyrighted by his estate; moreover, it has previously appeared in so many unreliable editions that any claim to copyright must by this point have been compromised.”) In the same year he wrote “The Platonic Blow,” Auden made the observation that “All American writing gives the impression that Americans don’t really care for girls at all. What the American man really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper, [and] he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he’s drunk.”

Ellen Bass was born in Philadelphia in 1947. Her most recent book of poems is The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

“Sharon Olds celebrates the power of the erotic: its intensity, wonder, intimacy, and joy so strong it borders on the frightening. It would be hard to choose one favorite, but some that come immediately to mind are ‘Greed and Aggression,’ ‘Ecstasy,’ ‘Still Life,’ ‘Sex Without Love,’ and ‘Celibacy at Twenty.’ The imagination and precision of these poems is stunning. In a time when we’re bombarded by sexual images that are detached and devoid of meaning, these poems show us sexual desire that is rooted in connection, passion, and amazement.”

Ted Berrigan (1934–1983). Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Berrigan went to Catholic schools, joined the electrical workers’ union before he joined the army, and came to New York City after studying literature at the University of Tulsa on the GI Bill. He had read Frank O’Hara and wanted to emulate the urban ways of his hero. In 1963 Berrigan wrote The Sonnets, his masterwork, in which he subjects the typical contents of a sonnet sequence to experimental methods; he would scramble lines, or repeat them, or lift them from other sources. Berrigan founded and edited C magazine, collaborated with painters and with other poets, and was a familiar presence at poetry events at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, which he helped make the semiofficial headquarters of a second generation of New York School poets. His work remains a vital influence on younger poets.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). Bishop was a poet of reticence and understatement who disliked the confessional mode and opposed the subordination of poetry to politics or feminism. She wrote little and published less, but her work is of the highest quality, and the poets of her own and succeeding generations have held her with a special affection. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop went to Vassar College and was the model for a character in Mary McCarthy’s Vassar-centric novel, The Group. On the week of her death, the last assignment Bishop gave to her MIT students was to read all of Theodore Roethke’s poems in The Norton Anthology and to attempt a ballad, at least eight stanzas long, rhyming either A-B-CB or A-B-A-B. “It is Marvellous…” first appeared in The American Poetry Review, was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, and has, as Helen Vendler notes, “been accepted informally into the Bishop canon.”

Star Black was born in Coronado, California, in 1946. Her recent books include Ghostwood and Balefire. A collection of her collages and Bill Knott’s poems appeared under the title Stigmata Errata Etcetera from Saturnalia Books in 2007.

“I have always thought that if I were in a state of erotic blissfulness the last thing that I would want to do would be to write a poem; but, when banished to the literary sidelines, the consolation zone of memory or longing for what could always be remembered, I turn to the beckoning doors in the beautiful Song of Solomon, or Penelope’s low-burning fire (‘She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone./She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace’) in Wallace Stevens’s ‘The World as Meditation,’ or these lines from an early Donald Justice poem, ‘Portraits of the Sixties’ (1973): ‘Pull down the shades./Your black boyfriend is coming./He’s not like you. He wants/To live in the suburbs./You want to paint.’”

Paul Blackburn (1926–1971). A Vermont native, Blackburn became a mentor to younger poets in New York City in the 1960s. In a memoir, Martha King likened Blackburn to a kind of divine eavesdropper, watching from the sidelines, whether “sitting on the subway, or looking out of a luncheonette window. Blackburn documenting the exact particulars of discarded newspapers and empty wine bottles around the base of a statue. Or of a woman’s clothing and precisely what it reveals of her body underneath, and who else on the street is also noticing.”

Robin Blaser was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1925. His most recent books are The Holy Forest: Collected Poems and The Fire: Collected Essays, both published by the University of California Press in 2006....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• ALSO BY DAVID LEHMAN
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
•  
• Introduction by David Lehman
• FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780–1843) “On a Young Lady’s Going into a Shower Bath”
• EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849) “Song” [“I saw thee on thy bridal day”]
• WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892) “I Sing the Body Electric”
• GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823–1890) from Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love
• EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)
• EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887) “Assurance”
• EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937) “Terminus”
• ROBERT FROST (1874–1963) “The Subverted Flower”
• AMY LOWELL (1874–1925) “Anticipation”
• GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946) from Lifting Belly
• WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955) “Peter Quince at the Clavier”
• WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963) “Young Sycamore”
• CONRAD AIKEN (1889–1973) “Sea Holly”
• EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950) Sonnet [“I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex”]
• E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962) “as /we lie side by side/my little breasts […]”
• H. PHELPS PUTNAM (1894–1948) “Sonnets to Some Sexual Organs”
• HART CRANE (1899–1932) “Episode of Hands”
• LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967) “Desire”
• KENNETH REXROTH (1905–1982) from The Love Poems of Marichiko
• W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973) “The Platonic Blow”
• ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979) “It Is Marvellous…”
• J. V. CUNNINGHAM (1911–1985) “It Was in Vegas”
• TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911–1983) “Life Story”
• MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980) “What I See”
• MAY SWENSON (1913–1989) “A New Pair”
• ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER (1915–1981) “The Milkman”
• RUTH STONE (born 1915) “Coffee and Sweet Rolls”
• THOMAS McGRATH (1916–1990) from Letter to an Imaginary Friend
• ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–1988) “The Torso” (Passage 18)
• CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–1994) “Hunk of Rock”
• HAYDEN CARRUTH (born 1921) “Assignment”
• RICHARD WILBUR (born 1921) “A Late Aubade”
• JAMES SCHUYLER (1923–1991) “A photograph”
• LOUIS SIMPSON (born 1923) “Summer Storm”
• ROBIN BLASER (born 1925) “2nd Tale: Return”
• KENNETH KOCH (1925–2002) “To Orgasms”
• A. R. AMMONS (1926–2001) “Their Sex Life”
• PAUL BLACKBURN (1926–1971) “The Once-Over”
• ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997) “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman”
• JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995) “Peeled Wands”
• FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966) “To the Harbormaster”
• DAVID WAGONER (born 1926) “Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love”
• GALWAY KINNELL (born 1927) “Last Gods”
• DONALD HALL (born 1928) “When I Was Young”
• ANNE SEXTON (1928–1974) “December 11th”
• RICHARD HOWARD (born 1929) “Move Still, Still So”
• ADRIENNE RICH (born 1929) “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)”
• SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963) “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”
• JOHN UPDIKE (born 1932) “Fellatio”
• MARK STRAND (born 1934) “The Couple”
• TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983) “Dinner at George Katie Schneeman’s”
• RUSSELL EDSON (born 1935) “Conjugal”
• LUCILLE CLIFTON (born 1936) “to a dark moses”
• FREDERICK SEIDEL (born 1936) “Heart Art”
• MARGE PIERCY (born 1936) “Salt in the Afternoon”
• C. K. WILLIAMS (born 1936) “Ethics”
• CHARLES SIMIC (born 1938) “Breasts”
• BILLY COLLINS (born 1941) “Pinup”
• STEPHEN DOBYNS (born 1941) “Desire”
• ROBERT HASS (born 1941) “Against Botticelli”
• LINDA GREGG (born 1942) “Kept Burning and Distant”
• SHARON OLDS (born 1942) “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure”
• LOUISE GLÜCK (born 1943) “The Encounter”
• SANDRA ALCOSSER (born 1944) “By the Nape”
• PAUL VIOLI (born 1944) “Resolution”
• ROBERT OLEN BUTLER (born 1945) “Walter Raleigh, courtier and explorer, beheaded by King James I, 1618”
• ALAN FELDMAN (born 1945) “A Man and a Woman”
• BERNADETTE MAYER (born 1945) “First turn to me…”
• HONOR MOORE (born 1945) “Disparu”
• STAR BLACK (born 1946) “The Evangelist”
• ELLEN BASS (born 1947) “Gate C22”
• AI (born 1947) “Twenty-Year Marriage”
• JANE KENYON (1947–1995) “The Shirt”
• YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (born 1947) “Lust”
• MOLLY PEACOCK (born 1947) “She Lays”
• JAMES CUMMINS (born 1948) “The Body Is the Flower”
• HEATHER McHUGH (born 1948) “Gig at Big Al’s”
• LYNN EMANUEL (born 1949) “Dreaming of Rio at Sixteen”
• DENIS JOHNSON (born 1949) “Poem”
• DANA GIOIA (born 1950) “Alley Cat Love Song”
• PAUL JONES (born 1950) “To His Penis”
• WILLIAM WADSWORTH (born 1950) “The Snake in the Garden Considers Daphne”
• MARC COHEN (born 1951) “It Never Happened”
• JUDITH HALL (born 1951) “In an Empty Garden”
• CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON (born 1951) from Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese)
• PAUL MULDOON (born 1951) “The Little Black Book”
• BOB FLANAGAN (1952–1996) from Slave Sonnets [“I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now”]
• DORIANNE LAUX (born 1952) “The Shipfitter’s Wife”
• PETER SERCHUK (born 1952) “The Naked Women”
• DENNIS COOPER (born 1953) “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade”
• MARK DOTY (born 1953) “Lilacs in NYC”
• TONY HOAGLAND (born 1953) “Visitation”
• RICHARD JONES (born 1953) “Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed”
• HARRYETTE MULLEN (date of birth unknown) “Pretty Piece of Tail”
• KIM ADDONIZIO (born 1954) “The Divorcée and Gin”
• SARAH ARVIO (born 1954) “Mirrors”
• DEAN YOUNG (born 1955) “Platypus”
• AMY GERSTLER (born 1956) “Ode to Semen”
• SARAH MACLAY (born 1956) “My Lavenderdom”
• CECILIA WOLOCH (born 1956) “Bareback Pantoum”
• CATHERINE BOWMAN (born 1957) “Demographics”
• ED SMITH (1957–2005) “Poem”
• NIN ANDREWS (born 1958) “How to Have an Orgasm: Examples”
• CARL PHILLIPS (born 1959) “I See a Man”
• DENISE DUHAMEL (born 1961) “House-Sitting”
• ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (born 1962) “At Seventeen”
• OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS (born 1963) “Francesca Says More”
• BETH GYLYS (born 1964) “Preference”
• LISA WILLIAMS (born 1966) “On Not Using the Word ‘Cunt’ in a Poem”
• DEBORAH LANDAU (born 1967) “August in West Hollywood”
• JEFFREY McDANIEL (born 1967) “When a man hasn’t been kissed”
• RICHARD SIKEN (born 1967) “Little Beast”
• JENNIFER L. KNOX (born 1968) “Another Motive for Metaphor”
• JANICE ERLBAUM (born 1969) “The Temp”
• JENNY FACTOR (born 1969) “Misapprehension”
• CATE MARVIN (born 1969) “Me and Men”
• CATHERINE WAGNER (born 1969) “Lover”
• C. DALE YOUNG (born 1969) “Maelstrom”
• BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY (born 1970) “Voluptuary”
• KEVIN YOUNG (born 1970) “Étude”
• JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM (born 1971) “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica”
• BETH ANN FENNELLY (born 1971) “Why We Shouldn’t Write Love Poems, or If We Must, Why We Shouldn’t Publish Them”
• TERRANCE HAYES (born 1971) “Preface”
• CATHERINE WING (born 1972) “Eye-Fucked”
• ROSS MARTIN (born 1973) “Body Cavity”
• SARAH MANGUSO (born 1974) “Reverence”
• RAVI SHANKAR (born 1975) “Lucia”
• LAURA CRONK (born 1977) “From the Other”
• DANIELLE PAFUNDA (born 1977) “Courtesy”
• MICHAEL QUATTRONE (born 1977) “February”
• MAGGIE WELLS (born 1977) “Sonnet from the Groin”
• NOAH MICHELSON (born 1978) “Valentine”
• HEATHER CHRISTLE (born 1980) “Letter to My Love”
• RACHEL SHUKERT (born 1980) “Subterranean Gnomesick Blues; or, the Gnome Who Whet My Fleshy Tent.”
• Contributors’ Notes
• Acknowledgments
• A NOTE ON THE TYPE