by David Lehman
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.
“At eighty-two I find everything erotic—that’s the stomping ground of all intelligence—the intellect picks it up from the ground and gives language as a kind of music to dance around.”
George Henry Boker (1823–1890). Boker was born in Philadephia, the son of a prominent banker. During the Civil War, he raised funds in support of the Union war effort. In 1871 President Grant appointed him U.S. minister to Turkey, and he later served with distinction as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Russia. Boker wrote plays, of which the most celebrated was Francesca da Rimini, a version of the Paolo and Francesca story familiar to readers of Dante’s Inferno. All but 76 of Boker’s 389 sonnets form a massive “sequence on profane love,” in whic
h he contemplates the tyranny of passion and recalls the “wicked hours” passed in youth with “wanton Circe and her bestial kin.” The sonnet here, like most in the sequence, went unpublished in Boker’s lifetime.
Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1957. Her most recent books are Notarikon (2006) and The Plath Cabinet (2008), both from Four Way Books.
“One of my favorite works of erotic writing is Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, because it’s beautiful, strange, and so dirty.”
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994). Born in Andernach, Germany, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother, Bukowski grew up in Los Angeles, attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. He gave up writing in favor of drinking in 1946. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked at a variety of blue-collar jobs to support his writing, including mail carrier and postal clerk, dishwasher, guard, elevator operator, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, and shipping clerk. But he never worked in academe, and he wrote with disdain of the Beats and others (“hucksters of the/despoiled word”) who issue rebellious proclamations from “sad university/lecterns.” Bukowski felt that, as the hero of his own life, he had the right to make up the details of his stories, which he told with such conviction and authenticity that readers took them as unvarnished truth. He identified his natural constituency as “the defeated, the demented, and the damned.”
Robert Olen Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, in 1945. Intercourse was published by Chronicle Books in 2008. Butler’s prose poem included in The Best American Erotic Poems is one of sixty-two that he collected in his book Severance (2006). Each entry contains exactly 240 words and records the last thoughts in the mind of a man or woman who has been beheaded. The working assumption is that after decapitation the brain continues to function for ninety seconds, and that in a heightened state of emotion people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.
“My favorite work of erotic writing—not in its ability to arouse sexual desire but as an expression of crazy wonderful erotic fervor—is the Song of Solomon (King James Version, of course). I love, in this case, to pretend that the biblical literalists of the world, who feel God’s own personal voice speaking through every word of the Bible, are right. Oh my. How God loves sex and how goofily over-the-top He is about it. For example, ‘Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins and there is not one barren among them.’ And ‘Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.’ The Man’s usually sublime, universe-building voice (‘in the beginning was the Word’) has gone wildly out of metaphorical tune and, in doing so, betrays a love of the body, of sex, of sensuality that is very endearing. And when He says, ‘the roof of thy mouth [is] like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly,’ I say unto you the Scripture-driven sodomy laws are dead wrong. The blow job has a clear sanction in the literal truth of the Holy Bible.”
Hayden Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1921. His books include Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991 and Collected Longer Poems (1994), both from Copper Canyon Press.
“My choice of a favorite erotic poem from recent American literature is Galway Kinnell’s ‘Last Gods.’”
Editor’s note: Kinnell’s poem is included in The Best American Erotic Poems.
Heather Christle was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1980.
“It is hard not to love Charles Simic’s ‘Breasts.’”
Editor’s note: Simic’s poem is included in The Best American Erotic Poems.
Lucille Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1936. Her Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000) won the National Book Award.
“Among my favorite erotic works are those of Richard Shelton, a contemporary poet in Arizona:
I touch you
like a blind man
touches the dice
and finds he has won.
Also E. E. Cummings: ‘somewhere i have never traveled gladly, beyond.’”
Marc Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. His latest book of poems is Opening the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005).
“My favorite piece of erotic literature, ‘The Deserts of Love,’ is also the first prose poem that Arthur Rimbaud wrote; he was seventeen years old at the time and had just read Baudelaire’s collection of prose poems, Paris Spleen. Louise Varèse, the original translator of the poem, called it ‘pure poetry,’ and I’ll take that judgment one step further and call it pure erotic poetry. I’ve always admired the poem because it captures the self-discovery and romance of the erotic as well as the despair that follows when the flowers of ecstasy wilt and die. The poem renders two dreams by a narrator who is in the grips of the psyche’s unconscious longing to engage in sexual love. The narrator is probably aware of what Baudelaire wrote in his Intimate Journals : ‘That which is created in the Mind is more living than Matter,’ and can at least take heart if not comfort from the maxim.”
Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. His books include The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Random House, 2005).
“So much erotica, so little time. But if I had to pick two, I would include the Victorian classic The Whippingham Papers (1888), which, as the title implies, is a collection of stories and poems featuring flagellation. Algernon Charles Swinburne contributes some verses. One consoling feature of such tales is the presentation of a society containing just the right balance of sadists and masochists, an answer to the common complaint that in real life the latter grossly outnumber the former. More backsides than whips.
“A close second would be Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, the story of an office temp named Arno Strine, who has actually figured out how to stop time and who exercises this amazing supernatural power by taking off women’s clothes while he has them on Pause.”
Dennis Cooper was born in Pasadena, California, in 1953, and grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia. His books include The Sluts, a novel (Carroll & Graf, 2005).
Hart Crane (1899–1932). Born in Garretsville, Ohio, the son of the candy manufacturer who invented LifeSavers, Crane resembles an American Keats: He wrote great letters, had the loftiest literary aspirations, and died too young. A factory accident at the Crane company in Cleveland provoked Crane to write “Episode of Hands” in 1920. He settled in New York in 1924 and lived for a time in Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, where he commenced work on his most ambitious poem. “Only later did Crane learn that the house where the vision of The Bridge first came to him, and where he finished it, had been the property of Washington Roebling, the paralyzed engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, and that the very room where Crane lived and wrote had been used by Roebling as an observation tower to watch the bridge’s construction” (Waldo Frank). In a letter, Crane described the epiphany he’d had when under the influence of “aether and amnesia” in the dentist’s chair: “Something like an objective voice kept saying to me—‘You have the higher consciousness—you have the higher consciousness. This is something that very few have. This is what is called genius.’” Crane would drink to excess, play a Spanish bolero on his Victrola, and compose. He had a liking for sailors and rough trade. Beaten up in the early-morning hours of April 27, 1932, he jumped to his death at noon that day off the deck of the Orizaba, returning to the United States from Mexico.
Laura Cronk was born in New Castle, Indiana, in 1977.
“Vladimir Mayakovsky sent the poem ‘Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love’ to his editor instead of the political poems he had been commissioned to write. This may have been maddening for Kostrov’s superiors, but it was a wonderfully subversive and sexy thing to do for poetry. It’s the kind of stunt that can secure a poet a place as a literary heartthrob. I love that Mayakovsky’s poems, this one included, embody toughness along with tenderness, coarseness along with delicacy. The
se lines are among my favorites:
To love
means this:
to run
into the depths of a yard
and, till the rook-black night,
chop wood
with a shining axe,
giving full play
to one’s
strength.”
E. E. Cummings (1894–1962). The Harvard-educated Cummings takes typographic liberties and eschews the uppercase in his poems, concealing a romantic soul beneath an experimental veneer. He rejoices in lust, spring, the “sweet spontaneous earth,” and the breasts of a woman in love (“two sharp delightful strutting towers”). In a “nonlecture” he gave at his alma mater, he called himself a “burlesk addict of long standing (who has many times worshipped at the shrine of progressive corporeal revelation).” Cummings’s deviations from conventional grammar and punctuation permit him to achieve at times a kind of abstract lyricism. In the spaces between the words and lines as much as in the content, he enacts the quickening of the heart—“my somewhereallover me heart my”—that accompanies arousal. Cummings died in 1962 in New Hampshire. He had just finished chopping wood.
James Cummins was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1948. His most recent book is Then and Now (Swallow Press, 2004).