The Poetry of Sex
Page 1
THE POETRY OF SEX
Edited by Sophie Hannah
Contents
Introduction
1 ‘So ask the body’
Saturday Morning – Hugo Williams
The Plague – Caroline Bird
The Elephant is Slow to Mate – D. H. Lawrence
On the Happy Corydon and Phyllis – Sir Charles Sedley
No Platonic Love – William Cartwright
I Who Am – C. H. Sisson
Leda and the Swan – W. B. Yeats
‘I, being born a woman and distressed’ – Edna St Vincent Millay
And – Alison Brackenbury
I Sing the Body Electric – Walt Whitman
Figs – D. H. Lawrence
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral – Naomi Foyle
Eve to the Serpent – Catherine Smith
A Woman Waits for Me – Walt Whitman
My Black Triangle – Grace Nichols
2 ‘Also those desires glowing openly’
‘If you were coming in the fall’ – Emily Dickinson
‘First, I want to make you come in my hand’ – Marilyn Hacker
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae – Ernest Dowson
I Feel – Elizabeth Jennings
He Asked About the Quality – C. P. Cavafy
Guacamole – Kaddy Benyon
Daniel Craig: The Screensaver – Rich Goodson
Hypothetical – Maria Taylor
Found Wanting – Rosie Sandler
Young Men Dancing – Linda Chase
Sandcastles – Richard Scott
Remember, Body … – C. P. Cavafy
Love & Sex & Boys in Showers – John Whitworth
Service – Gregory Woods
O Little One – Marilyn Hacker
Troilism – Roddy Lumsden
Assurance – Emma Lazarus
Losing It to David Cassidy – Catherine Smith
A Man Greets His Wife from Her Short Break Away – Rebecca Goss
Wanting to Think – Michael Schmidt
3 ‘A night picked from a hundred and one’
Imperial – Don Paterson
Viginty Alley – Tim Liardet
Outside – Robert Frant
Amores 1.5 – Ovid
The Wasp Station – Paul Johnston
And Looking Back – A. F. Harrold
Explode – John Etchingham
The Man in the Print Room – Sarah Salway
La Noche Oscura (Dark Night) – San Juan de la Cruz
i like my body – e. e. cummings
Ur Thurs Reidh Ansur – Ros Barber
Punctuation – Claire Dyer
On being in Bed with Your Brand-new Lover – Amy Key
The Platonic Blow (A Day for a Lay) – W. H. Auden
Rhetorical Questions – Hugo Williams
Haikus to Fuck to – Leo Cookman
The Sun Rising – John Donne
Flicker – Robert Frant
4 ‘All our states united’
Tying the Knots – Anna-May Laugher
Bicycle Pump – Irving Layton
Magnets – Jo Bell
Muse – Jo Bell
The Day He Met His Wife – Peter Sansom
Conception – Sarah Salway
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps – Galway Kinnell
Their Sex Life – A. R. Ammons
Featherlite – Neil Rollinson
Casanever – Nic Aubury
The Couple Upstairs – Nic Aubury
Putting in the Seed – Robert Frost
And So Today Take Off My Wristwatch – A. F. Harrold
An Epic in Me – Eva Salzman
Ménage à Trois – Neil Rollinson
Intimacy – Elizabeth Barrett
Embrace – Rhian Gallagher
Topography – Sharon Olds
Like the Blowing of Birds’ Eggs – Neil Rollinson
5 ‘But your wife said she’
The Faithful – Dan Burt
The Sting – Patience Agbabi
In the Victoria Hotel – John Saunders
‘For each ecstatic instant’ – Emily Dickinson
‘Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short’ – Gaius Petronius
The Marriage of Consonant and Vowel – Adam Horovitz
In Defence of Adultery – Julia Copus
Office Friendships – Gavin Ewart
Her News – Hugo Williams
Story of a Hotel Room – Rosemary Tonks
may i feel – e. e. cummings
Adultery – Carol Ann Duffy
The Dark Night of the Sole – Kit Wright
‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – William Shakespeare
Cyber Infidelity – Jane Holland
To His Lost Lover – Simon Armitage
Ending – Gavin Ewart
Rubbish at Adultery – Sophie Hannah
End of the Affair – Dan Burt
6 ‘What’s in it for me?’
Badly Chosen Lover – Rosemary Tonks
Fetish – Samantha Willis
From Strugnell’s Sonnets – Wendy Cope
Message – Wendy Cope
Benny Hill – Paul McGrane
Anal Obsessive – Jane Holland
Katya is Bored – Fiona Pitt-Kethley
Chris of Dublin – Fiona Pitt-Kethley
Jaffa Cakes – Fiona Pitt-Kethley
Buggery – Don Paterson
Carmen 16 – Gaius Valerius Catullus
To His Coy Mistress – Andrew Marvell
The Flea – John Donne
Hombres Necios (Stupid Men) – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Ego – Eileen Sheehan
Annus Mirabilis – Philip Larkin
7 ‘Oh right. You people don’t remove that bit’
Bloody Hell, It’s Barbara! – Luke Wright
Sex without Love – Sharon Olds
Out of Office – Cora Greenhill
Poem while Reading Miroslav Holub in the Genito-urinary Clinic Waiting Room – Rich Goodson
King Solomon and King David – James Ball Naylor
The Walk of Shame – Nikki Magennis
Municipal Ambition – Amy McCauley
Madmen – Fleur Adcock
Can Clio Do More than Amuse? – Eva Salzman
The Final Coming – Irving Layton
8 ‘God, to be wanted once more’
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time – Robert Herrick
One Flesh – Elizabeth Jennings
To Her Ancient Lover – John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Address – C. H. Sisson
‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’ – Edna St Vincent Millay
On the French Riviera – Ian Pindar
Mick Jagger’s Penis Turns 69 – Amorak Huey
If You are Lucky – Michelle McGrane
‘You come to me quiet as rain not yet fallen’ – Brian Patten
Arrival – William Carlos Williams
Whatever Happened to Sex? – Amorak Huey
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Introduction
There are two poems in this book about the actor Daniel Craig, and none about any other Hollywood star. While the situation with regard to rock and pop legends is a little (though not much) more equitable, with Mick Jagger and David Cassidy cropping up in one poem each, it is impossible to deny that, on the actor front, this anthology is heavily biased in favour of Daniel Craig over and above all others.
I draw readers’ attention to this feature of the book because I wouldn’t want anyone to imagine I’m unaware of it. Editors of poetry anthologies, like the judges of literary prizes, are often criticized for perceived imbalances of this sort. As a co
mmitted positive-discrimination enthusiast, when I saw that a weighting in favour of Daniel Craig was a risk, I tried to redress the balance by introducing an All-Tom-Cruise shortlisting policy, but then had to abandon it when I found not a single poem about Tom Cruise, which suggests that the teaching of creative writing has been woefully inadequate for the last twenty years, or however long it is since Risky Business came out.
All might be fair in love and war (though in fact it isn’t), but all is certainly not fair in sex. Nevertheless, Daniel Craig stranglehold notwithstanding, there is much diversity in this anthology – diversity of writers, of subject matter and of approach. I am happy to report that the two poems about Daniel Craig couldn’t be more different from one another. One, by a male author, has its narrator gazing lustfully at a photograph of Craig when he ought to be working. The lust is enthusiastic and uncomplicated. The other Craig poem, by a woman, deals with the problems and potential life wreckage associated with sleeping with the actor, even though the narrator doesn’t even like him and therefore has no desire to do so – or so she says.
It would be a mistake to conclude from this exhaustive study of two poems about Daniel Craig that women and men have radically different approaches to sex and that one is more straightforwardly physical than the other. If this book suggests any kind of generalizable truth, it is surely that each writer’s experiences, psychological approach to those experiences and choice of words in expressing him- or herself are unique. Some female poets in this anthology have adopted what might be seen as a traditionally male attitude to sex, at least for as long as it takes to complete a sonnet, and could reasonably claim dual citizenship of Mars and Venus. One of my favourites included here, Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘I, being born a woman and distressed’, has a narrator who wishes to make it clear in advance that, once the carnal frolics are concluded, she will no longer have any use for her sexual partner; she wants his body but has no interest in his mind.
Outrageous, you might say, particularly if you were a close friend of the man in question. Indeed, if one wanted to take umbrage on behalf of ill-treated sexual partners, there are many hapless victims of poets to be found among these pages, as well as authors and narrators (and authors posing as fictional narrators, as a convenient relationship-saving device), who have been exploited and crushed by cads, the emotionally illiterate, the pathologically narcissistic and the infuriatingly married of both sexes. There are poems here that might seem misandrist or misogynist – Irving Layton’s ‘Bicycle Pump’, for example, or Fleur Adcock’s ‘Madmen’ – which I have included because I am more interested in the ‘Is’ of sex than the ‘Should’. We all make sexist generalizations from time to time – often after sleeping with someone whom we perceive as typifying his or her gender. ‘Men!’ we cry, or ‘Women!’ We forget to qualify our derision with the prefix ‘Some’; sexual disillusionment and a sense of proportion are largely incompatible.
There are poems in this anthology written specifically to encourage people into bed and urge them not to take too long about it – Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ being one brilliant example, and Wendy Cope’s ‘Message’ another. There are poems that take a cheerful and cavalier approach to sexual behaviour that many would regard as immoral, poems about fantasizing in the direction of one lover while being in bed with another, about continuing to use a partner’s body for low-level gratification when you know the relationship is over but they don’t. There is a poem about getting a quick blow job in a car and then making a run for it, a poem celebrating illicit sex with colleagues in the office on the grounds that it makes the daily routine of ‘wives and work’ more bearable. Balancing out all of the above are the many poems about wholesome, committed, sanctioned sex that breaks no rules at all.
There was absolutely no moral weighting in the selection I made. To make this clear, I chose to name each chapter of the anthology after a line from one of the poems it contains, rather than use titles such as ‘Married Sex (Holding Society Together)’ and ‘Adultery (Poems by Slags and Home-wreckers)’; I liked the idea of the poets being represented in their own words not only in the poems they have written but even when it came to naming the section of this book in which they would eventually find themselves. There is something dangerous about trying to define another person’s sexual experience, and what might be seen externally as coming under the heading ‘Adultery’ could well feel more like ‘Life Support’ or ‘My One Chance of Happiness’ from the inside. It is hard to define without moralizing, and the constant attempts by many to force sex and morality together – an ineptly arranged marriage of two strangers, bound to end in disaster – often leads to absurdity. As I write this introduction, David Cameron is trying very hard to ban pornography that involves simulated rape scenes between consenting adults, even though many vocal intelligent women are waving copies of Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden in the air and trying to tell their prime minister that, no, they do not wish to be raped, but that, yes, they do have rape fantasies, which are an entirely different thing and should not be banned or judged. It is possible that, by the time this anthology is published, the only sexual fantasies still legal in the UK will be those that feature Ed Miliband in conversation with a group of intersectionalist feminists who check their privilege every thirty seconds.
Meanwhile, in New York, married mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is busy being solemn and contrite at press conferences after being caught ‘sexting’ a woman who is not his wife, attaching pictures of his private parts and calling himself ‘Carlos Danger’ (which imaginative and rather sweet alias will, I hope, win him at least a few votes – particularly when one considers that Carlos Danger is an anagram of Roger Scandal, and that Roger Scandal would make a great pseudonym for a poet writing about sex).
Some, though not many, of the poems in this anthology are published under pseudonyms. Auden’s brilliant poem ‘The Platonic Blow’ was first published under another name because of its graphic portrayal of homosexual fellatio. Nowadays, fewer readers would be shocked by that, but when it comes to sex, however far societal norms progress in the direction of enlightened thinking, people will always have something to hide. Many won’t be quite sure why they need to keep their true sexual selves hidden, only that they must. For most of us, our sexual desires pose questions we cannot answer. C. H. Sisson puts it brilliantly in his poem ‘I Who Am’, one of my absolute favourites in this collection, so I will give the last word of this introduction to him, and hope that, wherever he is, he won’t be too shocked by his role as frontman of what I hope will be the raunchiest poetry anthology of the year:
So ask the body. It alone
Knows all you know, and it imparts
Little enough of what is known
To what we call our minds and hearts.
So fumbling bodies try to make
Friendship and love as best they can:
None ever was without mistake
And lies by woman and by man.
Man lies by woman, woman lies
By man, and in a common bed.
Where is the rule which truly tries
What is done there by what is said?
1
‘SO ASK THE BODY’
Saturday Morning
Hugo Williams
Everyone who made love the night before
was walking around with flashing red lights
on top of their heads – a white-haired old gentleman,
a red-faced schoolboy, a pregnant woman
who smiled at me from across the street
and gave a little secret shrug,
as if the flashing red light on her head
was a small price to pay for what she knew.
The Plague
Caroline Bird
It takes more than pants and zips
to hide my cunt, it yells in its sleep,
the town is bucking, villagers are pillaging each other.
The bodies pile up, threesomes become foursomes,
a third, it’s a plague, seven dwarves in one bed,
the policemen have permanent erections,
no one has any blood in their heads,
the vet does curious things to a horse,
a mattress outside every bank,
there’s no point trying to read a book
not unless you take it from behind.
Someone fetch a bucket, a bible, a plug,
a hook to hang these fidgeting frocks,
even that crippled tortoise looks sexy,
my leg has burnt a hole in my trousers.
The Elephant is Slow to Mate
D. H. Lawrence
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.
On the Happy Corydon and Phyllis
Sir Charles Sedley
Young Corydon and Phyllis
Sat in a lovely grove,
Contriving crowns of lilies,
Repeating toys of love,
And something else, but what I dare not name.
But as they were a-playing,
She ogled so the swain,
It saved her plainly saying,
‘Let’s kiss to ease our pain,