by David Lehman
H. Phelps Putnam (1894–1948). According to his friend Edmund Wilson, Howard Phelps Putnam “was—rather like E. E. Cummings—fatally attractive to women.” At Yale, Putnam won election to the Skull and Bones secret society on the basis of “his not voluminous poetry, his personal charm and his obvious superiority,” and in New York in the 1920s he could philander with the best of them. “I remember once visiting his rooms in New York when I was going to have dinner with him,” Wilson wrote. “As he was putting on his shirt, he displayed, with conscious pride, his bare back, which was streaked with what, rather shocked, I took for the results of some masochistic whipping, not knowing then that women, in their passion, sometimes thus ripped their lovers’ backs. But he wrote of his women in such a way as must sometimes have made them uneasy.” Around 1927 Putnam met the actress Katharine Hepburn, then a student at Bryn Mawr College. His relationship with her differed from his usual brand of female conquest and may have inspired him to write “The Daughters of the Sun”: “She was the living anarchy of love,/She was the unexplained, the end of love,/The one who occupies the dreamy self,/The one appearance in the finite world/Which is seen by us one time, and then despaired/Beyond romantic comfort afterwards.” Putnam’s health declined, and he wrote little after the second of his two collections ( The Five Seasons ) appeared in 1931.
Michael Quattrone was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1977.
“The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. I can never decide which is more exciting, the scenes Baker depicts or the language he uses to achieve them. The greatness of The Fermata is that its arousals are synchronous. The acuity of the author’s observation finds outlet in the compulsive voyeurism of his protagonist-narrator, just as Arno Strine’s adventures in a paused universe suggest the reader’s solitary delinquency as he or she indulges in another chapter. The metafictional unfolding of the novel, and the rapturous coinages and appropriations it contains, prove that the imagination is a fetishist.”
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982). When Rexroth published The Love Poems of Marichiko, he announced that they were the work of a “contemporary young woman who lives near the temple of Marishi-be in Kyoto” and that he was merely the work’s translator. But though he had translated entire volumes of Chinese and Japanese poetry written exclusively by women, Marichiko was his invention, and Rexroth, when pressed, did not deny his authorship of these “love poems.” There are several ironies at work here. In his own poems, Rexroth had celebrated, from the male perspective, the female body and “the sweet secret odor of sex,” yet as an old man he expressed his deepest erotic feelings through the persona of a young Japanese woman. The Marichiko poems demonstrate the attractions of the pseudo-translation (or hoax translation) as a method of verse composition as well as, perhaps, a means of self-discovery.
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1929. Her most recent book is Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006 (W. W. Norton, 2007).
“I don’t believe in favorites. All poetry worthy of the name is erotic.”
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980). Born in New York City, Rukeyser was passionately political, an advocate of left-wing causes from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s to feminism in the 1960s. “If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day,” she wrote. “For there would be an intolerable hunger.” Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich were among the poets inspired by Rukeyser’s example. “No more masks!” she declared. The line became a feminist rallying cry and the title of an anthology devoted to twentieth-century American women poets.
James Schuyler (1923–1991). Born in Chicago, Schuyler lived in New York City, where he associated with the artists and writers of the New York School. In the early 1950s, Kenneth Koch commented, “Jimmy was a regular part of our gang,” along with the poets John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and the painters Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. “If you invited one of us to a party, you were likely to get us all, plus one or two more,” Koch wrote. “We were each other’s main audience and so in time each other’s main inspiration.” Ashbery (in collaboration with whom Schuyler wrote the comic novel A Nest of Ninnies ) introduced the first public poetry reading the shy and nervous Schuyler ever gave. It took place in November 1988. “It’s nice to have a writer to whom one feels so close both personally and aesthetically that asking advice from him is only a step removed from consulting oneself,” Ashbery said that night. But he was “jealous” of Schuyler’s singularity, he added. “He makes sense, dammit, and he manages to do so without falsifying or simplifying the daunting complexity of life as we are living it today.”
Frederick Seidel was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936. His most recent book is Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
Peter Serchuk was born in Queens, New York, in 1952. His most recent book is Waiting for Poppa at the Smithtown Diner (University of Illinois Press, 1990).
“My apologies to Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, both of whom I’ve enjoyed immensely. However, I think my favorite is My Secret Life by Anonymous. I first read it as a teenager and was overwhelmed not only by its graphic sexual adventures (all under the radar in Victorian England) but perhaps even more so by its precise and graphic language. Hearing masturbation described as ‘frigging myself’ and withdrawal after intercourse as ‘uncunted’ was almost as titillating to my aspiring writer’s ear as it was to my thermal imagination.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974). Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath have more than a little in common. Both came under the direct influence of Robert Lowell, embraced the “confessional” style, disclosed intimate personal details, and took their own lives. Because comparisons are inevitable, Sexton has sometimes seemed like a lesser version of the iconic Plath, who predeceased her by a decade. In fact, Sexton has major strengths all her own, including an unabashed sexuality; the singular passion in such poems as “The Fury of Cocks” and “When Man Enters Woman” is in keeping with the first syllable of the poet’s last name. The poem in two stanzas given here begins with a barrier separating the lovers and ends in their union on “the identical river called Mine.”
Ravi Shankar was born in Washington, D.C., in 1975. His most recent book is Instrumentality (Cherry Grove, 2004).
“In the twelfth century, Jayadeva of Orissa wrote the Sanskrit lyric poem the Gita Govinda, which rhapsodized the romance of Krishna, butter thief and divine cowherd, and his beloved, Radha. Back from cavorting with the gopis, Krishna is met with the sensual fury of Radha, who is described as having heaving breasts, kohl-darkened eyes, jangling anklets, and a lotus mouth (what I wouldn’t do for a lotus mouth!). Begging for her forgiveness, Krishna entreats Radha to chain him and bite him, to pulverize him in her curves. That’s got to be my favorite work of erotic writing; it is simultaneously transgressive and ardent, secretive and arousing, fraught with the full import of sexuality as a creative, carnal, pulsing act, something as deeply spiritual as it is resolutely corporeal. Radha’s erotic, even illicit, feelings for Krishna are the very equivalent of religious passion.”
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970. Her most recent book is Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
“My favorite is Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly. This book-length poem is not only beautiful and incantatory, and more than a little shocking, but it is also utter nonsense, which strikes me as sort of super-erotic. When I’m lucky enough to happen upon language that is totally illogical, cagey, and secretive, and yet sensorily suffused and extraordinarily insistent, another part of my mind springs to life, a part that is neither all mental nor all physical, and yet not suspended in the strange limbo of the ‘spiritual,’ but fully immersed in the erotic, that is, the realm of imagination, floating images, private meanings and associations.”
Editor’s note: See Introduction for an excerpt from Stein’s Lifting Belly. Rachel Shukert was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1980. Her latest book, a collection of essays, is Have You No Shame? (Villard, 2008).
“Ch
ocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore is not an erotic work per se; it’s a product of an all-too-brief vogue for novels about sexually precocious poor little rich girls, written by sexually precocious poor little rich girls (see Sagan, Françoise). It is, in fact, sort of an American Bonjour Tristesse, this time set against the cocktail-party swirl of 1950s Manhattan and Hollywood, complete with alcoholic writers, suicidal debutantes, and fresh-faced Yale boys with One Thing On Their Minds. The sexual conquests of the fifteen-year-old protagonist include a closeted B-movie actor drowning in a sea of gin and torment; the louche, Byronic scion of minor European aristocracy; and a witty, cold-blooded WASP looking down his nose at the whole sad affair—coincidentally, precisely the types of men who have figured into every one of my meaningful sexual fantasies. As a result, the demurely written love scenes, even filled with torpid references to the sea and the sun, are some of the hottest things I have ever read. Honorable mention goes to The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander, for teaching me everything I know, and of course, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, which requires no explanation.”
Richard Siken was born in New York City in 1967. His book Crush won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and appeared from Yale University Press in 2005.
“For me, the erotic is uncomfortable: a friction produced when the life of the mind rubs up against the life of the body. I’d rather live the life of the mind. Exclusively. It can’t be done. The life of the body is base and gross. It’s pornography, really: mucky organics convulsing plotlessly in overlit rooms. The body is a tragedy. It is not the life of the mind that craves Super Nachos and wears hot pants. Dennis Cooper understands this. His poem ‘My Past’ is dirty and mean-spirited. It also attempts to reconcile mind and body. I could quote every line and yammer on about tonal texture, direct address, and sadness disguised as huff and bluster, but here’s my favorite part: ‘Take you, for example, who I found throwing up in the bathroom of some actor’s mansion and crowned my new boyfriend.’ The conflation of the body’s betrayal of itself (vomiting in the throne of the toilet) with the mind’s grandiose romantic coronation of the boyfriend is, for me, perfect. We want, and we hate that we want, and we embarrass ourselves with it and about it, and we want it all to be pretty but only part of it is pretty, a small part, if that, and we want it more than anything but thinking about it just makes our heads hurt. Thank you, Dennis Cooper. I could kiss you.”
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938. In August 2007 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. His recent books include My Noiseless Entourage (Harcourt, 2005) and The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (Harcourt, 2003).
“Ovid’s Amores are my ideal of love poetry. Lyrical, witty, psychologically acute, and erotic, the poems, in Peter Green’s gorgeous translation, are a work of great literature. Ovid knew that what happens between the sheets is most often the stuff of low comedy. As for tragedy, he pleaded:
Just be patient awhile. Your service
Demands a lifetime. Her needs are quickly met.”
Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica, West Indies, in 1923. His most recent book is The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940–2001 (BOA Editions, 2003).
“It has to be James Joyce’s Ulysses. Sorry to disappoint the heavy breathers. I would also name Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. ”
Ed Smith (1957–2005). Edward Young Smith was born in Queens, New York. As a teen, he had aspired to become a theoretical physicist specializing in graviton propagation, and he attended Pomona College for two years. In the 1980s he joined the group of writers and artists—such as Dennis Cooper, David Trinidad, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, and Benjamin Weissman—who congregated at the Beyond Baroque literary arts center in Venice, California. He and his wife, the artist Mio Shirai, moved to New York in 1997, where he worked as a computer animator for the children’s television program Blue’s Clues on MTV.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). No other American writer born in the nineteenth century was as unrelentingly innovative as Gertrude Stein; she has outdone her most ardent disciples in radical experimentation. Stein, who studied with William James at Radcliffe, settled in Paris in 1903 and met Alice B. Toklas four years later. Their studio at 27 rue de Fleurus became an international artistic salon, a mandatory destination for ambitious American writers. Lecturing at the University of Chicago, Stein was asked about her line “rose is a rose is a rose.” “I notice that you all know it,” Stein said. “You make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘…is a…is a…is a….’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think thatin that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens studied at Harvard, became a lawyer, and married a girl from his hometown, Elsie Kachel Moll, who modeled for the figures on the Mercury dime and the Liberty half-dollar. For most of his life the poet worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming a vice president in 1934. Never learning how to drive, Stevens walked the two miles between his Hartford home and office twice daily, composing poems in his head. “Peter Quince at the Clavier” retells the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, from the apocryphal book of Daniel. In the tale, the married heroine rebuffs the leering advances of two aging voyeurs. In revenge, the men accuse her of lewdness. They are stoned to death when it is determined that they are lying. The musical motifs throughout the poem suggest that music (or music as a metonymy of art) is the poem’s true subject, yet it remains Stevens’s most erotic work, culminating in a meditation on beauty and the human body. An inveterate aphorist, Stevens once observed that “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915. Her most recent book is In the Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). A new and selected poems entitled What Loves Comes To is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2008.
“My favorite erotic poem is ‘Compelled to Love’ by my husband, Walter Stone, published after his death in 1959, in Scribner’s Poets of Today series, volume VI. Sensual, romantic, and beautifully constructed, it captures both the rapture and the universality of the act of love. To demonstrate, the following is a condensed quote from the poem:
“‘Compelled to love, his body sings…He probes her jewel-box…With the same instrument that kings…Unlock their queens with…The classic key that fits their golden wives.’”
Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. His most recent book is New Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007).
“I have not read anything recently that qualifies as erotic. When I was a teenager, I read the scatological poems and, I suppose, considered them mildly erotic—but much ‘dirtier’ than erotic. Some poems of Robert Burns, also in the dirty-joke category. But nothing else. I never thought Lady Chatterley’s Lover particularly erotic; The Story of O, I suppose, was. But I read those books so long ago I am not sure what my reaction to them was.”
May Swenson (1913–1989). Swenson grew up as the eldest of ten children in a Swedish-speaking Mormon household in Logan, Utah. She wrote sexy poems on subjects ranging from carnal knowledge to films based on Ian Fleming’s spy novels (“The James Bond Movie”) and the national pastime (“Analysis of Baseball”). She remains an undervalued treasure. Richard Wilbur wrote that Swenson “trusted her craving to go beyond the self and her rapture in making imaginative fusions with the other. In consequence, her poems find the erotic in all forms of natural energy and, whether they speak of nebulae or horses or human love, are full of a wonderfully straightforward and ebullient sexuality.”
John Updike was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1932. His most recent book is Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (Knopf, 2007).
Updike names “ Her by (I think) Anonymous. It contains some real sexual psychology.”
Paul Violi was born in New York City in 1944. His most recent book of poems is Overnight (Hangi
ng Loose Press, 2007).
“A popular choice, I bet, though it has had its share of silly detractors over the last couple of decades, Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is one of my favorite short poems, erotic or otherwise. It’s so full of life, it reads like a short play, a dramatized syllogism, wildly passionate and irrefutably logical. Witty, allusive, intimate, sexy, playful, serious, intense—the tonal shifts, imagery, and sheer artistry are stunning. Ornithologists are not convinced that mating eagles clutch, tumble, and cannonball down the sky, but I still think Marvell got it right.”
William Wadsworth was born in New York City in 1950. The Physicist on a Cold Night Explains, a chapbook, was published by Breakaway Press in 2002.
“My favorite piece of erotic writing is the collection of poems by Paul Verlaine entitled Femmes/Hombres, which was not published in full until the 1970s because the poems were considered too scandalous until then to see the light of day. The book (published in English in Alistair Elliot’s translation under the title Men/Women ) is, quite simply, the dirtiest book I know. Not only does Verlaine (on occasion in collaboration with Rimbaud) write equally enthusiastically about heterosexual and homosexual love (between both sexes), but he treats with particularly earthy relish some erotic practices still considered today to be on the margins of sexual taboo. My runner-up would be ‘The True Confession of George Barker,’ by one of the great neglected bad-boy poets of England. The book-length poem is a rollicking Byronic tour de force written in the stanzas of Villon’s testament; it was banned in England when it was first published in 1950 and almost brought down the BBC for broadcasting a reading from it.”