The Best American Erotic Poems

by David Lehman

  “First might not be best but might be most powerful. In Indianapolis, in the seventh grade, Mike Mauro, a friend of mine who was a couple of years older and the brother of my first love, Maria, tried to teach me how to masturbate. The first part of this ritual entailed biking over to Cossell’s drugstore and ‘hocking’ (shoplifting) two sexy paperbacks to help get us into the mood. I forget the title of Mike’s, but it did the trick later in the evening; my own was The Bachelor’s Guide to Women, which didn’t. My family soon moved out of the neighborhood—there was a rumor that a black family had bought a house a few blocks away—and I lost touch with Mike and, more sadly, Maria. But a mere few months later, in a different drugstore on Shadeland Boulevard, I hocked another book, And When She Was Bad, about a nymphomaniac named Ellie Dannon and her unsuspecting husband, Dick Sterling, and soon found the bliss (and compulsive behavior patterns) Mike had promised. Ellie had some sort of something pressing on some sort of gland that caused her to need to have sex with anyone who put his hands on her breasts. Finally, I thought, after all those years in Catholic schools—a sign God might actually exist! Even as I stood in the drugstore aisle, reading avidly, I knew I’d said good-bye to the land of The Bachelor’s Guide to Women forever.”

  J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985). A proponent of the plain style, Cunningham (born in Cumberland, Maryland) studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford University and resisted modernism even more strenuously than Winters did. A brilliant epigrammatist in the manner of Martial, whom he translated from the Latin, Cunningham wrote with wit, concision, and sometimes ribaldry. Robert Lowell, among others, felt that Cunningham was the “greatest modern master of the comma.” The classical nature of his enterprise clashes fruitfully with the totally American and anti-classical subjects he brought into his poetry, such as the deleted expletives in transcripts of Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes or the distractions at a Las Vegas casino.

  Olena Kalytiak Davis was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1963. Her most recent book is Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (Tin House/Bloomsbury, 2003).

  “Sure, I’ve had nightstand copies of Delta of Venus and The Story of O, but mostly (or perhaps momentarily), it seems my reading has been unbelievably chaste. Nabokov and Steve Almond, I guess. A couple pretty good e-mails.”

  Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Among our greatest poets, the reclusive “Belle of Amherst” was unknown in her lifetime and died without an inkling of her posthumous fame. Dickinson derived her homemade stanza form from the church hymnal; she fashioned her own audacious system of punctuation centering on the dash. Telling the truth but telling it slant, her poems communicate sensual pleasure, ecstatic release, “solemn nameless need,” and a terrifying but longed-for violent consummation: “One—imperial—Thunderbolt—/That scalps your naked Soul—.” When Bernini in his marble Ecstasy of St. Theresa uses erotic means to advance a religious theme, or when John Donne does the same in his Holy Sonnets, the spectator or reader may conflate the spiritual pretext and the sexual metaphor. In Emily Dickinson’s poems, the imperatives of Eros and those of a personally conceived heaven exist in a yet more complicated relation. Dickinson attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary at a time of rampant Christian revivalism. She resisted the pressure to convert, doubting not the existence of God but the obligation to submit to him. In her poems, she wrestles with the deity to such an extent that a scholar may contend, as Cynthia Griffin Wolfe does, that Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel of the Lord in Genesis serves as Dickinson’s biblical archetype. A reading of the poem beginning “In Winter in my Room” may illustrate Freud’s program of dream interpretation on the one hand and his theory of the uncanny on the other.

  Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1941. His most recent book is Mystery, So Long (Penguin, 2005).

  “There is a novel entitled The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini (1988), which is the best depiction of sexual obsession, in fiction, that I know.”

  Nicholas Roeg adapted Dobyns’s novel in his 1994 movie, Two Deaths.

  Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953. His most recent book is Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007).

  “There are contemporary erotic poems I love—by James L. White, Allen Ginsberg, and Thom Gunn—but I have to name Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ as the one favorite I’d never want to be without. For its expansive, generous love of the speaker’s body and bodies in general, and for its astonishingly forthright and sometimes weird moments: the soul giving the self a blow job; the sky sending forth ‘libidinous prongs’; the singer aroused by the night (‘Press close barebosomed night!…Mad naked summer night!’). Whitman blurs his pronouns and the subjects he’s addressing until all of creation seems sexually charged, the world a grand congress of sexual forces, even the wind, ‘whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me…’ Whitman’s great outpouring is so exuberantly horny that it can’t stop at the body of any single beloved, but must move out and out, encompassing more and more in the circumference of desiring, and thus sexuality slips right into the realm of the soul.”

  Denise Duhamel was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1961. Her most recent book is Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

  “My favorite erotic poem is E. E. Cummings’s ‘i like my body when it is with your,’ which is playful and mysterious in such passages as this:

  …slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

  of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

  over parting flesh…

  “The pubic hair in the poem becomes part animal, part lightning; the ‘what-is-it’ underneath is divine, that for which there is no poetic name. In a poem that is both sexy and tender, E. E. Cummings describes the beloved’s eyes as ‘big Love-crumbs.’”

  Robert Duncan (1919–1988). An avowed homosexual at a time when such an admission ran the risk of literary rejection, Duncan (born in Oakland, California) was educated at Berkeley. He taught at Black Mountain College and is often considered in the company of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. Duncan became a respected figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Of “The Torso,” Gregory Woods has written that the poem’s “shifting focus corresponds with that of a man kneeling to fellate his lover: the collar bone, chest, navel, and pubic hair are examined in turn. But the occasion of the poem involves the two men in reversed roles. While the speaker’s mind moves down the torso of the lover, the lover himself is on his knees, fellating the speaker. The fantasy of the one duplicates the deeds of the other.”

  Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935. His recent books are The Rooster’s Wife (Boa Editions, Ltd., 2005) and En Afton På Grisarnas Teater (Karneval förlag, Stockholm, 2007).

  “Of all my readings in erotica, the most erotic has come from the pens of various science writers who have described the primal sensual event called the ‘big bang.’”

  Lynn Emanuel was born in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1949. Her most recent book is Then, Suddenly (University of Pittsburgh, 1999).

  “My favorite piece of erotic literature is the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Anne Rice writing under the name A. N. Roquelaure. The novels, published between 1983 and 1985 and still in print, are, as Rice describes them, ‘novels of discipline and surrender.’ Over the course of the books, the heroine, Beauty, is awakened and punished—for being beautiful. In her erotic slavery, Beauty becomes completely objectified, and as she becomes less and less herself/a self, the power of her masters and punishers to inflict suffering upon her is erased. The trilogy composes a meditation on the ways in which the vanquished can and do seize power. This is a thinking person’s eroticism.”

  Janice Erlbaum was born in New York City in 1969. Her latest book is Have You Found Her (Villard, 2008).

  “My favorite work of erotic writing is a short memoir by Honey Bruce, wife of Lenny, originally published in a late-1970s issue of Playboy magazine I found when I was nine. She loved her husband pretty hard. The whole issue was good, as I recall—it made me want
to become either a Bunny, a stripper, or a junkie comedian.”

  Jill Alexander Essbaum was born in Bay City, Texas, in 1971. Her new book is Harlot (No Tell Books, 2007).

  “Must I pick just one? I’ve memories of a schoolgirl self as she riffles through doggedly dog-eared pages of Harold Robbins novels, scanning for sentences that steam. Or in junior high, the thumbing, strumming me raptly wrapped up in the vulgar divulgences of a certain Secret Garden (er, that’s Nancy Friday’s and not Frances Hodgson Burnett’s). But for the pearly pinks of greatest price, my warring Puritanical/Prurient selves must always and evermore return to the ( oh so very ) Good Book. A voluptuous buffet of bawd! Care to fellate? ‘And his fruit is sweet to my taste’ (Song of Solomon 2:3). Desirous of down-going? ‘Come…blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out’ (Song of Solomon 4:16). How about a straight-up lay? ‘And I went unto the prophetess’ (Isaiah 8:3). Feeling indiscriminate? Tomcattish? ‘Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers’ ( Jeremiah 3:1). On and on it goes ( and under and on top of and from behind… ). But for my favorite perverse verse, I’m keen to point to one that—were I equally inclined and indecorous—I might assign to particularize my own prickly proclivities: ‘There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses’ (Ezekiel 23:20). Preach it, sister!”

  Jenny Factor was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1969. Her book Unraveling at the Name appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2002.

  “I was once hopelessly in love with an entirely unavailable woman. While she expressed no passion toward me, she would from time to time hand me poetry she thought I would like. Like all frustrated lovers, I took these little tokens deep into my own breath. One such donation was Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons —a sonnet collection that transformed the rest of my life. Marilyn Hacker’s verse novel tells of a doomed love affair between a student and a teacher. The semantic sizzle is astonishing. ‘Age is not the muddle of the matter,’ Hacker writes. And she ingeniously rhymes ‘geste héroïque’ to ‘a fit of pique.’ (Incidentally, I later discovered Hacker’s tonal twin in John Berryman’s Sonnets, 1967—another sexy little volume.) But it was the seventeenth sonnet in the collection that delivered the major blow. Hacker writes: ‘First, I want to make you come with my hand/While I watch you and kiss you, and if you cry ’ (emphasis added). I blinked. Imagine a woman being moved to tears like that! I kept the page open on the bedstand overnight. Was there more to this sex thing than I had thought? I closed the book and bit hard into Eve’s apple.”

  Alan Feldman was born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1945. His most recent book is A Sail to Great Island (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

  “Tough to choose a favorite. In English literature, I remember having a serious crush on Chaucer’s Criseyde. I found the middle stanza of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee from Me’ very sexy and empathized with his feeling of love slipping through his fingers. But among Americans? So much in Whitman and Dickinson: Section 11 in ‘Song of Myself’ re the twenty-ninth bather; Dickinson’s ‘Wild Nights—Wild Nights!’ I’ve always loved Prufrock’s neurotic, erotic love song, and Pound’s ‘The River Merchant’s Wife,’ so understated and heartbreaking: ‘I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/Forever and forever and forever./Why should I climb the look out?’ William Carlos Williams was such a lusty admirer of well-formed women, as in his ‘The Young Housewife,’ though my favorite is ‘Danse Russe,’ in which he’s attracted to himself! I greatly admire Bishop’s villanelle ‘One Art,’ which, I take it, is about the loss of a dear love (to suicide?). And Frank O’Hara’s whole series of love poems to the dancer Vincent Warren, tracing the arc of their affair; ‘Joe’s Jacket’ and ‘Steps’ would be just two of my favorites. And Kenneth Koch’s goofy, funny, and infectiously joyous ‘To You,’ which begins ‘I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut/That will solve a murder case unsolved for years.’ Robert Creeley’s ‘The Warning’: ‘For love—I would/split open your head and put/a candle in/behind the eyes.’ And Alan Dugan’s anguished self-crucifixion in ‘Love Song, I and Thou.’ More recently, I’ve been impressed by the way Sharon Olds gets sex, along with all its ferocity and bodily fluids, into poems like ‘Greed and Aggression.’ In prose, I’ve always enjoyed Updike’s description of women’s bodies, beginning as early as ‘A & P,’ with its two scoops of vanilla ice cream.”

  Editor’s note: Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” is included in The Best American Erotic Poems. Beth Ann Fennelly was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1971. Her latest book is Unmentionables (W. W. Norton, 2008).

  “Twenty years ago, there was a zoo in the Czech Republic that lost its funding and fell on hard times. Several cages became so decrepit that animals of different species were combined. A young peacock was put in a tortoise’s cage, and because the peacock was nearing sexual maturity, it imprinted on the tortoise. Wherever the tortoise lumbered to, the peacock followed, shrieking and shimmying its fan of iridescent feathers in a display both comic and tragic.

  “I suppose such adolescent imprinting is to blame for my spectacularly bad taste in erotica; I confess that the sexiest thing I’ve ever read is Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews. I was in sixth grade. I’d heard older girls talking about the book, and I checked it out of the library, although my parents had forbidden it. I used to sneak it into the bathroom and read it in the tub. Filled with violence, incest, a wicked grandmother, and a deep, dark attic, it spoke to me on some über-Freudian level.

  “Much like the peacock’s, my passion was doomed. One day while I was reading in the bath, my mother walked in, so I drowned the book under the bubbles to avoid detection. After she left, I dried it with my sister’s hairdryer and tried to return it in the library book drop, but the pages were swollen and wavy. The librarian made me pay forty hard-earned babysitting dollars for a new copy, and I was too embarrassed to check it out again. Perhaps it’s just as well I’ve never reread it as an adult. I’m sure it’s atrociously written. I seem to remember a lot of exclamation marks. Let it fester in the attic of my imagination, where the roots of those flowers have merely grown deeper with the passage of time.”

  Bob Flanagan (1952–1996). Born in New York City, Flanagan grew up in Glendora, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. The obituary that appeared in The New York Times on January 6, 1996, described him as a “former cystic fibrosis poster boy” who became a poet and performance artist. Ordinarily, victims of the disease do not reach adulthood, and Flanagan was said to have been one of the ailment’s longest-living survivors. “He attributed his longevity in part to his ability to ‘fight pain with pain,’ by which he meant that he took control of his suffering through the ritualized pain of sadomasochism” in his performance art, wrote Roberta Smith.

  Robert Frost (1874–1963). Although Frost wrote “The Subverted Flower” early enough to have included it in his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913), his wife, Elinor, forbade him to publish it in her lifetime, perhaps because it is based on an unfortunate episode in their courtship. The poem appeared in the 1942 collection A Witness Tree when its author was sixty-seven. Randall Jarrell described “The Subverted Flower” as “sinister, condemning, tender.” Frost himself claimed that the poem concerned frigidity in women, and it is extraordinary how many able commentators either fail to challenge this claim or evade discussion of the poem. It is likely that the flower is allegorically the boy’s penis, and his actions (“A hand hung like a paw,/An arm worked like a saw”) suggest the “shame” of masturbation or of coerced oral sex interrupted only by the arrival of the girl’s mother. Is the “foam” at the end of the poem evidence? What does the sustained animal imagery signify? The puzzles of “The Subverted Flower” will take more than one reading to solve.

  Isabella Stewart Gardner (1915–1981). Isabella Stewart Gardner was the great-grandniece of the founder of the museum in Boston that bears her name. “The Milkman” was publish
ed in Poetry magazine in 1952 and in her first book, Birthdays from the Ocean, in 1955. Her poems reflect the influence of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” philosophy on the one hand and the rich sonority of Dylan Thomas’s poems on the other. Her pleasure in the opposite sex is palpable: “How struts my love my cavalier/How crows he like a chanticleer/How softly am I spurred my dear;/Our bed is feathered with desire/And this yard safe from fox and fire.”

  Amy Gerstler was born in San Diego, California, in 1956. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost Girl (Penguin, 2004).

  “The first book I encountered that focused on sex was the two-volume set of The Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis. My parents had a battered copy of this tome, and around age nine, I noticed it in our family room on a very high shelf just under the ceiling. As I was on the hunt for books with sexual content, finding this one was like hitting a gusher. I made a project of dipping into The Psychology of Sex whenever my parents went out. This involved climbing up on a cabinet in order to pull the heavy books from their perch, and then sitting atop the cabinet to read, so that when I heard my parents at the door, I could quickly replace the books on the shelf, get down, run to my room, and simulate being a model citizen. These books were not, I now realize, intended as erotic literature, but they were among the first books that served that purpose for me, and therefore I am fond of them. They have a place of honor in the office I write in today. They were my introduction to how exciting science could be. I liked the old-fashioned practice of giving the names of sexual acts in Latin (which gave me many hours of excited puzzlement as I tried to decipher, via context, what these key words might mean), not to mention the sexual case studies and anecdotes, the fascinating cavalcade of human activities and longings considered ‘aberrant,’ and the delicious practice of sneakily reading something deemed forbidden. There was a long section on the erotics of modesty that influenced me deeply. A few months after I discovered The Psychology of Sex, I noticed on another part of that lofty shelf a paperback copy (also rather tattered) of a novel called Lolita. I’d heard this was a racy book, so I tried to read it. My memory of this first reading of Nabokov’s masterpiece is dim, though I do remember finding a lot of it confusing. There was an image of Humbert staring worshipfully at one of Lolita’s pubic hairs in a dry bathtub, and he compared it to a question mark. This image electrified me, and I have never forgotten it.”