The Best American Erotic Poems

by David Lehman

  Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). Most famous for “The New Colossus,” her sonnet that articulated the meaning and mission of the Statue of Liberty, Lazarus was the daughter of a prosperous Sephardic merchant in New York City. She corresponded with Emerson, translated Heine, and became, in response to news of vicious pogroms in Eastern Europe, a Zionist and champion of Jewish refugees. While she made a significant contribution to the history of the prose poem with such works as “The Exodus,” she did her best work in the sonnet form. Unpublished until long after her death, “Assurance” is the most erotically explicit of her sonnets. “She wrote the poem as a dream vision and left it undated not to elude us but to redirect us,” Esther Schor writes in Emma Lazarus (2006). “What the poem exposes is her unconscious, and it tells us that she met it—if not a female lover—face-to-face.”

  Amy Lowell (1874–1925). Born into a wealthy patrician family, Amy Lowell identified herself with the Imagist movement in poetry championed by Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). After Pound and Lowell fell out, he dismissed her version of their doctrine (“Amygism”) and ridiculed her as a “hippopoetess,” a reference to her chronic weight problem caused by a glandular condition. But Lowell was a far better poet than standard anthology representations imply. In 1912 she met the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, a widow eleven years her senior, who became her companion and lover. The relationship gave her the emotional support she needed to write her best poems, which display, in Honor Moore’s phrase, “the bald audacity of her eroticism.”

  Sarah Maclay was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1956. Her most recent book is The White Bride (University of Tampa Press, 2008).

  “I keep returning to W. S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair —in part for sentimental reasons. Picking up this small blue volume—discovered, by chance, on a night table after wandering through the Valley of Fire—was a turning point that led me back to my own voice. Many years later, I was asked to read poem ‘XIV’ at my friend Dina’s wedding, in a cathedral, and the words flew out of my mouth like wind, like birds, into the vastness. It was an astonishing experience. None of us could speak for more than a minute. To utter the words of the poem, to obey also its silences, is to enter a kind of magic. There is a lyric purity in these poems that seems to withstand even our age of irony. The degree to which Neruda trusts space and breath in his phrasing, his orchestration—and trusts, as well, the power of image, the power of metaphor, the power of synesthesia, the power of transformation of one thing to another—allows every border, between man and woman, between eras, between countries, between languages, between inner and external, to erode.”

  Sarah Manguso was born in Newton, Masschausetts, in 1974.

  “I like Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work (1961), which he published under the pseudonym Ogdred Weary. The book’s pornography is implied, and its readers are led to imagine every possible erotic pleasure and horror. ‘Still later, Gerald did something terrible to Elsie with a saucepan.’ Gorey illustrated the book just as suggestively.”

  Ross Martin was born in New Jersey in 1973. He is the author of The Cop Who Rides Alone (Zoo Press, 2002).

  “Everything by Olga Broumas. She makes me feel like a natural woman.”

  Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1969. Her most recent book is Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande, 2007).

  “Poem #520 by Emily Dickinson. The lover, as sea, spills its ‘Pearl’ into the speaker’s shoes; she then meets him in the ‘Solid Town.’ I prefer sex in poems to be implied yet explicit, as opposed to graphic. Someone once successfully seduced me with this poem. I will always be grateful to him for turning me on to it. Unforgivable pun.”

  Bernadette Mayer (1945) was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. Her most recent book is Scarlet Tanager (New Directions, 2005).

  “I love and have always loved and been inspired by W. H. Auden’s ‘The Platonic Blow,’ because it is great.”

  Editor’s note: Auden’s poem is included in The Best American Erotic Poems.

  Jeffrey McDaniel was born in Philadelphia in 1967. His most recent book of poems is Splinter Factory (Manic D Press, 2002).

  “I don’t know about favorites, but ‘may i feel said he’ by E. E. Cummings has a certain charge to it and could be exquisite read aloud in two voices.”

  Thomas McGrath (1916–1990). Born in Sheldon, North Dakota, McGrath studied in England as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He became a committed leftist during the Great Depression, was investigated by the FBI, and was later blacklisted after a defiantly uncooperative appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Copper Canyon Press reissued his Letter to an Imaginary Friend in 1998.

  Heather McHugh was born in San Diego, California, in 1948. Her books include Eyeshot (Wesleyan University Press, 2003).

  “Archilochus was a soldier and a lover. Dating from the era soon after Homer, he wrote what would have been among the founding works known by literate Greeks. Thanks to the depredations of time and the deteriorations of papyrus, what we contemporary readers have of him are mere fragments—but what fragments! Full of spunk and blood, they suggest how powerful the conjunction of those two arenas (the battlefield and the bedroom) has been in human history. This latest fragment to be discovered (it was first published only in 1974) combines both of his characteristic fields—with aggressive elements (his denunciation of another woman) abutting tender ones (in the course of a young girl’s deflowering). The result is what Guy Davenport called ‘fireworks on the grass.’ The friction in art between the intimate and the outright, the personal and the public, the lyric and the satiric, has always made sparks. The uncontainable sensual trembling of the girl (and the ejaculation of the man) reach us across the millennia (that the dead can tremble and come!). And a more cerebral factor—our knowledge that the text has survived into our day by virtue of its having been wrapped around a mummy—makes for the sort of contextual frisson only time can confer on an act of writing—as the Big Death wrapped its cloak around the Little One.”

  Here, in Davenport’s translation (1995), are the last three stanzas of the fragment:

  I slid my arm under her neck

  To still the fear in her eyes,

  For she was trembling like a fawn,

  Touched her hot breasts with light fingers,

  Straddled her neatly and pressed

  Against her fine, hard, bared crotch.

  I caressed the beauty of all her body

  And came in a sudden white spurt

  While I was stroking her hair.

  James Merrill (1926–1995). A son of the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm, James Merrill went to Amherst College, traveled a good deal, lived on several continents, befriended many younger writers, wrote novels and plays, and crafted a body of work that made him one of the major poets of his generation. A master of intricate forms and ingenious wordplay, he could elevate a spoonerism into an instrument of metaphysical wit: “The lean tree burst into grief.” Merrill generated the material for The Changing Light at Sandover, his visionary epic of apocalypse and afterlife, from a thousand and one nights at the Ouija board with his partner David Jackson. Asked about this use of the Ouija board, Merrill said, “Don’t you think there comes a time when everyone, not just a poet, wants to get beyond the self? To reach, if you like, the ‘god’ within you? The board, in however clumsy or absurd a way, allows for precisely that.”

  Noah Michelson was born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1978.

  “I remember reading Adrienne Rich’s 21 Love Poems when I was fifteen years old and finding, suspended in the thick of the other twenty poems dealing with love and loss and discovery and disappointment, ‘(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered).’ I was mesmerized by Rich’s ability to straddle two worlds—the sexual and the emotional—combining the graphic with the metaphorical, creating something beautiful and raw in the same space. Up until that point it had always seemed to be either/or, all or
nothing, and I realized it didn’t have to be that way, and usually, it wasn’t—that the telling of the erotic, the telling of a certain kind of truth, could happen gracefully, honestly, and without fear.”

  Editor’s note: Rich’s poem is included in The Best American Erotic Poems.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). “I am a harlot and a nun,” Millay wrote when the sexual freedom she displayed in her life and her poems had become the stuff of gossip and rumor. Born in Rockland, Maine, on George Washington’s birthday in 1892, Millay graduated from Vassar in 1917 and moved to Greenwich Village, where she gravitated to the center of a vivacious group of artists, writers, and actors. “She formulated for a new generation of young women a standard of sexual defiance and ‘heroism’ which, in spite of its romantic coloring, was marked by truth and pathos,” Louise Bogan wrote, adding that Millay had the ability to transcend the faults to which she was prone, such as sentimentality and self-regard. “Many of her sonnets are in the great tradition; and that she was, by nature, a lyric poet of the first order, is an incontestable fact.” In 1937 John Crowe Ransom criticized Millay’s poetry for what he called “a deficiency in masculinity.” It is a perplexing charge. The sonnet offered here is no less feminine for its use of a phallic image associated with such poets as William Butler Yeats and Hart Crane: the tower as a projection of the self.

  Honor Moore was born in New York City in 1945. Her most recent book of poems is Red Shoes (W. W. Norton, 2005).

  “I consider The Story of O by Pauline Réage to be one of the great works of the twentieth century. I like it for its purity, the directness of its female voice, its relentless insistence on the danger inherent in erotic hunger, the candor of its supplicating vulnerability—and for its revelation of what Brenda Shaughnessy has called ‘the divine grief at the center of desire.’ It was in response to Réage that I wrote ‘Disparu,’ which I consider a poem of erotic ebullience and sexual happiness.”

  Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His most recent book of poems is Horse Latitudes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

  “It’s hard to beat John Donne’s ‘On His Mistress Going to Bed’ for the forensics of fornication.”

  Harryette Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama. Her most recent book is Recyclopedia (Graywolf Press, 2006).

  “Some of my favorites are by Japanese writers: The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country and House of the Sleeping Beauties. A combination of frankness and indirection appeals to me, which is why I also enjoy the earthiness and double entendres of blues songs such as ‘My Handyman’ and ‘Banana in Your Fruit Basket.’”

  Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). “I am the least difficult of men,” O’Hara once wrote. “All I want is boundless love.” A central figure of the New York School of poets, he worked as a curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art and dashed off poems during his lunch break. He wrote a monograph on Jackson Pollock and was planning retrospectives on Pollock and Willem de Kooning when he died of injuries sustained in a freak car accident on the beach at Fire Island. At his funeral, the painter Larry Rivers said that some sixty New Yorkers, himself among them, considered O’Hara to be their best friend. Rivers painted a huge O’Hara Nude with Boots in 1954, the year the poet wrote “To the Harbormaster” for Rivers.

  Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, California, in 1942. Her most recent book is Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002 (Knopf, 2004).

  “I guess one of my favorites would still be the Song of Songs—for so long, it was the only erotic writing I’d heard or seen. And there was something about that repetition—‘I want to kiss you with the kisses of my mouth’ (but now I look it up and see it is ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’!)—as if there had been any other kisses the speaker could have kissed with! Even as a child, even in church—or especially as a child in church—I felt the power of that.” Danielle Pafunda was born in Albany, New York, in 1977. Her most recent book is My Zorba (Bloof Books, 2008).

  “For educational value and kicks, my girlhood favorite hands down: The Pearl (A Journal of Voluptuous Reading—the Underground Magazine of Victorian England). Epistles, odes, ditties, novellas, masquerades, nascent sexisms, pseudo-taboo, burgeoning hang-ups, absurd biologies, and all manner of sexing/sexualizing the soon-to-be modern lovers—including what must be the serialized debut of that wiggety-wack wishful thinking, Fanny Hill. Camp hyperbole, for sure, but every lewd, scintillating, scandalous, and fevered impulse of the twentieth century nestles inchoate in The Pearl. I literally split my crumbling 1979 edition (sadly out of print) with a friend on the eve of our college departures. Sarah, if this crosses your desk, I think it’s time to trade halves.”

  Molly Peacock was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1947. Her books include Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems 1975–2002 (2002).

  “The inspiration for ‘She Lays’ is an erotic poem by the twelfth-century Chinese poet Li Ch’ing Chao, called ‘To the Tune “Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch”’ in the Kenneth Rexroth translation. It can be found in Rexroth’s Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese. It’s a pretty tame example of eros, but it’s the first poem by a woman about a woman masturbating that I ever read, and it’s still my favorite work of erotic writing. Here are the three lines that captured me in my early twenties, and still do: ‘Gently I open/My silk dress and float alone/On the orchid boat.’ I only sensed its subject at first, because it took me a while to discover that the orchid boat is a euphemism for female genitals, an image of a vulva. Some people find it difficult to look an actual orchid in the face for that reason. Li Ch’ing Chao’s images, so solitary and so sensuous give a picture of what it is like to be alone with oneself in an erotic way, especially because the woman in the poem is ritualized and formal as she stages her art of masturbation. Inspired by her, I wrote ‘She Lays’ and even used the image of the orchid boat. When I wrote the poem, in my early thirties, I was reading a great deal of fiction, and I always wondered how the characters would masturbate. Disappointingly, none of the novelists ever said. But centuries before, Li Ch’ing Chao did and, because of Kenneth Rexroth, I was lucky enough to hear her.”

  Carl Phillips was born in Everett, Washington, in 1959. His most recent book is Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986–2006 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

  Phillips names Thom Gunn’s “The Hug” and cites “how it looks at the intersection of trust, flesh, and the particular history that two people make between them—what continues to resonate, even past a later estrangement, between the two. To my mind, this is what pushes the erotic past sex, past geometry and physics.”

  Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936. Her recent books are the novel Sex Wars (HarperPerennial), the poetry collection The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf), and Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken).

  “‘Salt in the Afternoon’ is a summer poem. I have written many poems about love, about sex, about both. The imagery comes from the sea, of course, which we contain within us and which I live near—about a mile from the Bay and about a mile and a half from the ocean. All the shells are ones I have picked up walking on the beach. Locally, we are famous for oysters, and we have many squids and clams. The association between salt water and sex seems obvious to me. Our bodily fluids are salty.

  “When I was very young, anything about sex could get me excited, including veiled references in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When I was older, I liked well-written erotica. Now what I find most interesting are the women’s fantasies collected by Nancy Friday over the years and published in various collections. What other women fantasize about interests me far more than most polished erotic writings. I also find erotic fan writings sometimes fascinating. None of these is really designed for an audience, so there is something potent and uncensored about them. We all know about men’s sexual fantasies, but women’s are a much more o
bscure subject.”

  Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and won a Fulbright to Cambridge University, where she met and married the English poet (and future poet laureate) Ted Hughes. Plath’s actual father taught German at Boston University, wrote a treatise on bees, and died when his daughter was only eight. Nevertheless, the poet wrote a ferocious assault on “Daddy,” whom she depicts, in the poem of that title, as a fascist and a brute. In her journals, published in 2000, Plath wrote about the first time she and Hughes had sex (“Washed my battered face, smeared with a purple bruise from Ted”), making a mental note to “consider yourself lucky to have been stabbed by him.” Plath separated from Hughes in October 1962 and took her own life four months later.

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). As a young man, Poe, the inventor of the detective story and peerless teller of tales of terror, had courted and wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. The engagement was broken off after Poe entered the University of Virginia, where he lasted one year, accumulating gambling debts that his foster father refused to pay. Sarah Royster married another man, and Poe wrote “Tamerlane,” “Bridal Ballad,” “Sonnet to Zante,” and possibly “Annabel Lee” about this early love and loss. The poem beginning “I saw thee on thy bridal day” was written at the time of Sarah’s wedding in 1827, with final revisions made in 1845. Poe’s love survived marriages and decades. In the last year of his life, he became engaged to Sarah, then a widow, for the second time.