by David Lehman
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). No one writing the cultural history of our age can omit the poet of “Howl” and “Kaddish,” psychic phantasmagoria and Jewish sorrow. Ginsberg was the quintessential Beat poet, an “angelheaded hipster” who braved ostracism and censure for the sake of his unabashedly “queer” vision of life, death, drugs, America, and the higher consciousness. The most poignant line in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966), which Ginsberg wrote at the height of the war in Vietnam, is “I here declare the end of the War!” The poem did not stop the bombings, withdraw the troops, hound a president from office, restore unity and purpose to a divided populace, or bring peace to Southeast Asia. No, Ginsberg had beaten in the void his luminous wings in vain. But the test of a prophecy does not rest in its instant fulfillment, and Ginsberg was a prophet. “Preaching and colonizing a brave new never-never world of bearded, beaded, marijuana-smoking, mantra-chanting euphoria, Ginberg set the style for the Be-Ins, Love-Ins, Kiss-Ins, Chant-Ins, sacred orgies, and demon-dispelling circumambulations of local draft boards,” Jane Kramer wrote in 1968.
Dana Gioia was born in Los Angeles in 1950. “Alley Cat Love Song” appeared in his book Interrogations at Noon (2001).
“Eros is such a universal theme in literature that to choose a favorite work is an exercise in sublimation. Selecting one masterpiece is to renounce all of the other enticing works, so let me indulge in literary bigamy. I consider Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma the most profound study of romantic and sexual love ever written, but its Olympian status makes my praise seem like the most threadbare received opinion. Let me, therefore, laud a now neglected novel, Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. The opening book of the Alexandria Quartet, Justine is a poet’s novel—slightly overwritten, weirdly plotted, and deeply subjective—but let’s not niggle. The book is also an idiosyncratic masterpiece—a feverish, brilliant, and unforgettable account of doomed (is there any other kind?) erotic obsession. Despite its faults, Justine will outlast any number of current prizewinning novels, because it explores, with a potent mixture of cruel candor and tender regret, the dark corners of the human heart.”
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943. Her most recent book of poems is Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
“I can choose a poet—Cavafy—not a single poem. My own work learned immensely from his detachment and austerity and, in many of the poems, a strange slowing down of time: in Cavafy, an expression of fatedness and irrevocability—the poems exist in a space beyond choice or reason, beyond pleasure. In prose, I love The Story of O and Duras’s The Lover.”
Linda Gregg was born in Suffern, New York, in 1942. Her most recent book of poems is In the Middle Distance (Graywolf Press, 2006).
Gregg names the Song of Solomon (the Song of Songs) “to salvage it. To preserve the possibility of saving the erotic the way it was, long ago, at its best.”
Beth Gylys was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1964. Her most recent book is Spot in the Dark (Silverfish Review Press, 2004).
“While hardly a traditional piece of erotica, Marguerite Duras’s novel L’Amant (The Lover ) transports me with its erotic vision. This exquisite novel-poem addresses the erotic as embodied in all physicality (not just human physicality) and as akin to and intensified by pain. I love the book for its brave, unflinching eye and its celebration of erotic pleasure and the way it can coexist with torment, rage, and despair.”
Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. His most recent collection of poems is White Apples and the Taste of Stone (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
“I don’t really have a favorite erotic poem. For erotic writing, I would name the ‘Penelope’ section of Ulysses. I know that Joyce is writing in the voice of a woman, apparently aided by Nora Barnacle, but I find myself thoroughly convinced, and aroused.”
Judith Hall was born in Washington, D.C., in 1951. Her most recent book of poems is Three Trios, translations of J II (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2007).
“For someone introduced at too tender an age to The Story of O (1965), criticism, like Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979), offered predictable stimuli and stimuli as anodyne. Unpredictable erotica—reading that was not disciplined, isolated violence, not pitifully beyond the pale, but lively as life—came later, an acquired taste.”
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. His books include Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005 (Ecco) and Now & Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997–2000 (Shoemaker & Hoard).
“Trying to think of erotic poems that I admire, I thought first of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ and then of Anthony Burgess’s imagination (in Nothing Like the Sun ) of the poem’s source in the relationship between the young Will Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Sexy poems: Herrick is sexy, especially ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’ The whole of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sexy in one way, and Antony and Cleopatra is sexy in another. All of Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are sexy, and the idea of Sappho’s poems, though we have only two of them, is sexy, but it’s hard to make a judgment about the poems themselves, and here we come to the fact that blurs the whole issue. Really gorgeous poems are sexy. So Hart Crane’s ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ is sexy in that way, and so is Donne’s ‘Good Friday, Riding Westward.’ And for me it’s often been the case that the poems of people I find sexy are deeply sexy. So leaving aside the fact that the most erotic poems are not necessarily poems with erotic subjects, but belong to the two categories of 1) amazing poems and 2) striking poems by people who are sexy to you, there are a few poems about desire or about sexuality that come to mind. The eleventh section of ‘Song of Myself.’ Dickinson’s ‘Wild Nights!’ and her ‘Come slowly—Eden!’ D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Gloire de Dijon’ is a sexy poem, a sort of verbal Renoir, and Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ is a sexy poem. A lot of Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly is quite delicious, and that might be a place to end this note:
Kiss my lips. She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did.
I have feathers.
Gentle fishes.
Do you think about apricots. We find them very beautiful. It is not alone their color it is their seeds that charm us. We find it a change.
Lifting belly is so strange.”
Editor’s note: See Introduction for a longer excerpt from Stein’s Lifting Belly. Emily Dickinson’s “Come slowly—Eden!” and “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” and are also included in The Best American Erotic Poems.
Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. His most recent book is Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006).
“Lynda Hull’s ‘Black Mare’ (in The Collected Poems of Lynda Hull ) is a sort of doomed erotic poem. The speaker recalls a damaged love (full of drug use, desolate hotels, elevated trains, and winter), and all the blood of the poem is in Hull’s intense lyricism, her hot, lush syntax…. For the erotic without the snow, I go to Neruda’s love sonnets.”
Tony Hoagland was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1953. His latest book is Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Craft and Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2006).
“Some of the most erotic writing I know is found in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, the famous ‘Ninth’ in particular, in which the poet queries, demands, praises, promises, and then swooningly consents to be entered completely by earth: ‘Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us?…What is your urgent command, if not transformation?’ (trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender).
“The extended passage is unmistakably the address of ardent lover to beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles. Rilke reminds us how erotic the spiritual life can be, and his enactment of this encounter conjures up, for me, a moving, breathing body. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.”
Richard Howard was bo
rn in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. His most recent book of poems is The Silent Treatment (Turtle Point Press, 2005).
“No favorites, but liberators; Jean Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs revealed to this reader and writer the pleasures, the shames, and the ecstasies of the sexual person, the mental body—not only revealed but engraved in the memory or somewhere forever.”
Langston Hughes (1902–1967). A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and began writing poetry as a teenager in Lincoln, Illinois. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in 1926. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.” In such books as The Weary Blues (1926), his first collection, and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes derived the formal or rhythmic models for his poems from music—the blues and bebop jazz in particular. His taste ran the gamut from the baroque harpsichord to the singer Bessie Smith. As he wrote in “Theme for English B,” a poem recollecting the year he spent as a student at Columbia (“this college on the hill above Harlem”), he liked getting “a pipe for a Christmas present,/or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.”
Cynthia Huntington was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1951. Her most recent book is The Radiant (Four Way Books, 2003).
“I choose Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor’s best-selling 1947 novel that was made into a movie with Linda Darnell. It’s about the plague in London and a girl who slept her way through it with a diverse bunch of male partners. This is how Debs Meyer began his review of the novel in Yank, the U.S. Army newspaper: ‘ Forever Amber is the story of a girl laid in the 18th century.’ Sex during the plague in London stays on my mind.”
Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany, in 1949. His most recent book is Tree of Smoke, a novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
“My favorite—probably the favorite of many—is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee from Me.’ It’s simultaneously sad and moving and erotic. And full of truth about love.”
Paul Jones was born in Hickory, North Carolina, in 1950. What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common was published by North Carolina Writers Network in 1986.
“Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315–c. 1370) is considered one of the greatest poets in the Welsh language. An innovator in style, range, and subject, he wrote religious verse, nature poems, praise poems, slapstick self-effacing tales of thwarted love, troubadour-influenced poems of courtly love (although the weather of Wales conspired against him often to comic effect), and of course his famous medieval Welsh erotic poems, of which this cywydd, ‘Cywydd y Gal,’ is a favorite of mine and of many others.
“Starting from a number of translations but relying strongly on Dafydd Johnston’s, I’ve moved the poem back toward the cywydd form that Gwilym developed in fourteenth-century Wales. The more I work with the various translations of the poem and try to read it aloud in the original Welsh, the more I appreciate Gwilym’s passion for sound, images, the world, and women. One thing that particularly delights me about this poem is how Gwilym manages to use the form to praise his penis and rebuke it at the same time. What man hasn’t felt that way?”
Richard Jones was born in London, England, in 1953. His most recent book is Apropos of Nothing (Copper Canyon Press, 2006).
“The erotic is beyond language, and yet, like any reader, I apprehend its treasure through the electric truth of the senses. Language touches me, arouses me—my mind is awakened, my heart quickened. The Song of Solomon bears glad witness to a husband and wife who, in the world’s lush garden, are God’s most divine and vital creations. Sexual pleasure is God’s gift to the marriage bed.
“But I am also drawn to stories like Death in Venice, or Nadja, or even ‘The Artist of the Beautiful,’ in which the erotic is idealized, and ‘love’ is a longing for Truth or Unveiled Mystery. Then I am a compassionate observer because, like the narrators of these tales, my soul is tantalized and wounded by the great quest. And yet how erotic it is when love—or is it imagination?—is tragically thwarted by madness or mortality, when human longing leads to disappointment, sorrow, and death.
“On the other hand, the binding to my copy of the life-charged Tropic of Capricorn is long broken, and the pages dog-eared and dirty.”
Jane Kenyon (1947–1995). Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Kenyon was educated at the University of Michigan, where she met the poet Donald Hall. The couple married and moved to his family farm in rural New Hampshire in 1975. Their love story has become the stuff of local legend. After Hall was diagnosed with liver cancer, Kenyon wrote poems anticipating his demise. In “Pharaoh,” for example, she wakes in the night with his “diminished bulk” beside her “like a sarcophagus.” But Kenyon contracted leukemia in 1994 and died a little over a year later, and it was he who was left to write the poems of grief and loss. “The Shirt” makes an appearance in Hall’s book Without : “Kate MacKay had me to supper/in Grafton, to read your poems/to our Hitchcock nurses./Mary hooted when I read ‘The Shirt.’/Walking to the car, I was happy/under the summer night, harsh/with stars.”
Francis Scott Key (1780–1843). The man who wrote the words of America’s national anthem was the district attorney for the District of Columbia when war broke out between the United States and Britain in 1812. On September 14, 1814, he witnessed the British bombardment of Baltimore from aboard the British prison frigate Surprise. He began writing the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner” when, despite hours of continual shelling, he saw the Stars and Stripes still flying above Fort McHenry at dawn. The Maryland native joined the Delphian Club of Baltimore in 1816 and regularly exchanged poems, puns, and toasts with fellow members. Poems, a posthumous collection, appeared in 1857. “On a Young Lady’s Going into a Shower Bath” opens with a quotation from Hamlet’s first major soliloquy.
Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927.
“I would name D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Tortoise Shout.’ It isn’t exactly an erotic poem—except, of course, from the perspective of the tortoises.”
Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California, in 1968. In 2007 Bloof Books published her latest book of poems, Drunk by Noon, as well as a new edition of A Gringo Like Me.
Knox names Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: “Intimate knowledge of another person is far more erotic to me than descriptions of sex—which can be about as sexy as a highly detailed lawn-mower manual.”
Kenneth Koch (1925–2002). Koch (the name pronounced like the soft drink) was not only the funniest poet of his generation but possibly the one who did the most to dispel the notion that the ways and means of comedy and serious poetry are mutually exclusive. A Columbia professor whose books on pedagogy (such as Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? ) revolutionized the teaching of poetry to schoolchildren, Koch adopted a jovially didactic persona in his 1975 collection The Art of Love. The lengthy title poem, a madcap spoof of Ovid, counsels the reader, who is assumed to be male, to “kiss as many women as you can” and experiment with bondage as foreplay. The poem remains Koch’s most controversial: politically incorrect, offensive to some, but so hyperbolic and high-spirited it is hard to read as anything but a work of the comic imagination. Koch’s advice to the man in love with a woman half his age is to add his and her age together, divide by two, and act as if both were the age represented by that number. This, he says, is called “Age Averaging.”
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His most recent book (with Chad Gracia) is Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Wesleyan, 2006).
“For me, the erotic has to embrace innuendo and insinuation, and it begs the human imagination to participate. Everything isn’t spelled out; the erotic is facilitated through suggestion. The sun shining through a thin, pale dress can be more provocative than an airbrushe
d frontal nude. Magic often resides in the hint, in that which is withheld. If beauty is the cornerstone of erotica, perhaps that explains why The Arabian Nights continue to beckon to me across the years.”
Deborah Landau was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1967. Her most recent book is Orchidelirium (Anhinga Press, 2004).
“Frank O’Hara’s ‘Poem’ (‘À la recherche de Gertrude Stein’) has the most gorgeous opening (‘When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen/all you have to do is take your clothes off/and all is wiped away revealing life’s tenderness’) and closing (‘since once we are/together we always will be in this life come what may’) lines. I read it to my husband at our wedding.”
Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine, in 1952. Her most recent book is Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005).
“I have loved and been influenced by the poems of D. H. Lawrence (‘Whales Weep Not’), Carolyn Forché (‘Reunion’ and ‘Kalaloch’), Sharon Olds, Ono no Komachi, and Li-Young Lee. But the piece I found most influential in writing ‘The Shipfitter’s Wife’ was in a book called The Gray Islands by John Steffler (M&N Press, 1985), a Newfoundland writer who uses a broad range of forms and styles—lyrics, anecdotes, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost stories, tall tales—to tell the story of a man’s isolation in a formidable landscape. Toward the end of the book, a couple he has only heard about share a bath for the first time. The simplicity of the language in Steffler’s poem ‘Carm’ moved me to write a poem from the woman’s perspective.”
