The Best American Erotic Poems

by David Lehman

  Catherine Wagner was born in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar). Her most recent book is Macular Hole (Fence, 2004).

  “Anything by Robert Herrick, for the roughness of his verbs (which are dressed in silk, but barely). Also, Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov, because the narrator makes his beloved and me both squirm, she with passion, I with titillated annoyance. Squirming should always happen in layers. And finally, for delaying my gratification to an absurd degree, 1960s romance novels about nurses, such as Emergency Nurse, by Peggy Gaddis, 1963 (‘“You’re a very nice girl!” Dr. Latimer said.’).”

  David Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio, in 1926. A Map of the Night will be published by the University of Illinois Press in early spring 2008.

  “My favorite erotic poem is ‘No Platonic Love’ by William Cartwright (1611–1643). It’s a very modern-seeming poem from three and a half centuries ago. Four stanzas of exactly rhymed, conversationally easy metrical poetry, witty and wise, and throughout, the poet maintains his own unmistakable voice. Such pieces, erotic or otherwise, are not very common in English or American poetry. It’s as rhetorically balanced as the best of John Donne, a number of whose erotic poems are also favorites of mine.”

  Maggie Wells was born in Mission Viejo, California, in 1977. Her chapbook Corey Feldman and the Flamingo, a Dialogue: The Struggles of an Icon was published by PressBody Press in 2007.

  “‘Hot Ass Poem’ by Jennifer L. Knox first reads as a satire of the type of man who wanders the streets frothing at the mouth over every ass crossing his path. Sure, it is hilarious and ridiculous as written. To me, though, ‘Hot Ass Poem’ is super-erotic. This block of rambling, building (nearly to climax) text is so very animalistic in its obsession with the ass that the actual owner of the ass becomes irrelevant. Crazed with lust, the narrator moves from ass to ass to ass (a human, a dog, even a building) like a bloodhound tracking prey. One reason humans evolved into nearly bald creatures is that apes with more prominent asses (preferably bald, pink, and swollen) attract the most mates. This poem pulls from the essence of attraction in that sense, and dives deep into the wet core of primal eroticism.”

  Edith Wharton (1862–1937). The author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth wrote “Terminus” in 1909 after a “secret night” of intense lovemaking with Morton Fullerton, the American-born correspondent for the London Times, whom the unhappily married novelist had met two years earlier and with whom she had fallen hopelessly in love. Fullerton was as suave as he was unreliable, a seducer adept at breaking hearts. The couple spent the night of June 4 in Suite 92 of the Charing Cross Hotel in London. The next morning Fullerton sailed for New York. In later years he maintained that Wharton began writing “Terminus” in bed that night in a postcoital rush. Commenting on the poem, Wharton’s biographer Hermione Lee notes that Wharton “does not quite say that spending the night with her lover in a railway hotel makes her feel like a prostitute, but she does want to identify with the women before her who may also have lain awake all night listening to the orgasmic ‘night-long shudder of traffic’ and ‘the farewell shriek of the trains.’ Like them, she has to face the ‘terminus’: the ending of the night and the journey onwards under ‘the hand of implacable fate.’” In her journal, Wharton, then forty-six, wrote, “I have drunk the wine of life at last. I have known the thing best worth knowing.”

  Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Whitman celebrates the body with unabashed ardor, believing it to be holy. “The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,” he writes in “Song of Myself.” In the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), “I Sing the Body Electric” lacked the phrase that became its title, which Whitman added a year later, along with the entire last section of the poem. Today the homoerotic dimension of his work is generally recognized. Noting that “Song of Myself” has many passages that are “clearly masturbatory and jismatic,” Jeffrey Meyers calls Whitman “Wally the Wonker.” Harold Bloom sounds less scornful: Whitman “proudly speaks for Onan. As a god, Walt resembles an Egyptian deity masturbating a cosmos into existence.” As a man, he offers the virtues of a democratic vision (“it is as great to be a woman as to be a man”) and the promised liberation of American poetry from the yoke of received tradition (“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”). In his prose foreword to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman says that one true test of a poem is whether it might “help breed one goodshaped and well-hung man, and a woman to be his perfect and independent mate.” His influence is boundless. It is apparent not only in the Allen Ginsberg poem in this volume but in Wallace Stevens’s assertion that “the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world” and A. R. Ammons’s belief in an illuminating “radiance” that looks unflinchingly into “the guiltiest/swervings of the weaving heart.”

  Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921. His most recent books are Collected Poems 1943–2004 (Harcourt, 2004) and a translation of Pierre Corneille: The Theatre of Illusion (Harcourt, 2007).

  “The erotic is most attractive when it is not impersonal, but accompanied by love or affection. It is important that Julia’s name appears in the title of such a poem as ‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast,’ by Robert Herrick.”

  C. K. Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936. His Collected Poems appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006.

  “Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ is one of the sexiest pieces of writing ever, while at the same time it makes wise and gentle mockery of our helplessness before the force of lust. It’s also very funny, and sad, and Shakespearean, which means poetically lavish and openly and elaborately and rapturously carnal. Here, for example, thwarted Venus to her Adonis:

  ‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;

  Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

  Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,

  Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’”

  Lisa Williams was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1966. Her second volume of poems, Woman Reading to the Sea, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2008.

  “Regarding erotic writing, I’ve always liked that of Anaïs Nin. Her erotica is fearless, imaginative, and strange—like dangerous but very interesting dreams: You know you should wake up, but you don’t quite want to. And she can be both raunchy and delicate; much erotic writing seems to indulge in one or the other to a limiting extreme. I like to think the two can coexist, and I hope I make that a little evident in my poem.”

  Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). The world knows Tennessee Williams (born in Columbus, Mississippi) as a major playwright, but he also considered himself a poet, publishing two volumes of poetry during his lifetime: In the Winter of Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). Like his plays, Williams’s poems shiver with pathos, move with dramatic tension, and express a sardonic wit. He idolized Hart Crane, lifting the title of his play Summer and Smoke from Crane’s “Emblems of Conduct,” and quoting from Crane’s “The Broken Tower” for the epigraph of A Streetcar Named Desire. The living, burning, crying struggle that he admires in Crane’s poetry is what Williams explores throughout his own oeuvre, from his portrait of Blanche DuBois to the two nameless lovers in the poem included here.

  William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). Dr. Williams supported his family as a pediatrician in the town of his birth, Rutherford, New Jersey; he would write poems between house calls and hospital visits. “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” Williams wrote. “It isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.” Williams committed himself to colloquial idioms and rhythms, and his best poems can serve as object lessons in the value of lining and line breaks in free verse. In his book On Being Blue, William Gass argues that sex enters writing in any of several ways, including “direct depiction,” the use of “sexual words,” “displacement” (the use of metaphor)
, and “the use of language like a lover.” Like the rock in Conrad Aiken’s “Sea Holly,” the tree in “Young Sycamore” is an energetic instance of what Gass calls “displacement.” By the end of the poem, the phallic tree seems to have become a satyr with a horn on top.

  Catherine Wing was born in New York City in 1972. Her first book of poems, Enter Invisible, was published by Sarabande Books in 2005.

  “My favorite piece of erotic writing—perhaps better described as writing that’s glancingly erotic—is the sonnet ‘Winter Wheat’ by Paul Muldoon. To risk, as Frost would have it, saying the poem in worse English: The narrator is outside with a woman in the preliminary stages of a sexual encounter as he watches a plowboy off in a distant field. If playboy watching plowboy seems not enough to warrant arousal, the poem ever so delicately unbuttons its not so subtle rhymes (lobe/globe, groan/roan, urge/splurge) with the sexiest syntax, two parts delay, one part awkward advance—just as sex outside with a stranger might be. But my favorite, and no doubt the weirdest element of the poem, is all the borderline-prelingual somethings that clutter up and stagger about in twelve of the poem’s fourteen lines: ‘The plowboy was something his something’ or ‘in her something something ruff’ or ‘I might have something the something groan/of the something plowboy….’ There is no greater crippler of language than sexual desire, and even as I’m never exactly sure what those mysterious ‘something somethings’ are, I know I want more than some of it.”

  Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1956. Her most recent book is Late (BOA Editions, 2003).

  “I may be confusing the erotic with the romantic, but I think the debt ‘Bareback Pantoum’ owes to the old Alfred Noyes poem ‘The Highwayman’ is pretty obvious. The dictionary defines erotic as ‘arousing sexual desire or excitement,’ and romantic as ‘suggestive of the feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love,’ so the two aren’t really so far apart. I first encountered ‘The Highwayman’ as an impressionable adolescent, but it still makes me swoon—its darkness and danger and rhythm; the obsessive quality of the repetition; the mysteriousness and beauty of the imagery. And yet there’s only that one kiss in all the poem: the landlord’s black-eyed daughter loosening her cascade of hair over his breast and the highwayman kissing its waves in the moonlight. Maybe all romantic love is in some way doomed, and sexual love is, of course, so entwined with physical mortality; but it seems to me that longing—and here’s a whole landscape of longing—makes us feel most deeply and achingly alive.”

  C. Dale Young was born in London, England, in 1969. His latest book of poems is The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007).

  “I remember quite well both the shock and glee I felt when I first read E. M. Forster’s Maurice. I was seventeen at the time, and I had never read anything that had, at its core, same-sex love. I had no idea such novels existed, much less novels written by ‘great’ writers like Forster. For this reason, despite its somewhat tame storyline considering the contemporary lust for the graphic, Maurice remains my favorite. It opened my eyes to so many possibilities.”

  Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. His most recent book is embryoyo (Believer Books, 2007).

  “‘Reciprocal love, the only kind that should concern us here,’ begins the section ‘Love’ in André Breton and Paul Éluard’s surrealist collaboration The Immaculate Corpse. What follows is a surrealist Kama Sutra in which various positions are given marvelous and funny names. ‘When the woman is on her back and the man lies on top of her it is cedilla.’ The distinction between erotica and pornography is legalese, useless and impossible, while sexual energy is always ever-possible and variously useful to the debacle of use. A funny thing happens to language when it gets in the realm of sex: It defies whatever divorce we abstract of sign from signified and becomes oversaturated with referent, flushed so that nearly any word not only refers to its object, action, or state, but also some wondrous, lubricious arrangement of limbs, of mouths. Virginia creeper. Opening a window. In Éluard and Breton’s uproarious, horny catalog, it is as if Adam (forgive the phallocentric moment, or rather, allow the phallocentric its turn), when he was about naming the things of the world, was really naming all the things he’d done, wanted to do, with Eve simultaneously. (For one of Eve’s versions, I recommend Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly.) What are the famously surreal umbrella and sewing machine doing on that operating table, anyway? Making love, of course, said Max Ernst.”

  Editor’s note: See Introduction for an excerpt from Stein’s Lifting Belly.

  Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1970. His most recent book is For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 2007).

  “I’m not sure I have a favorite work of erotic writing—but my favorite bit of agape writing is probably Dante’s La Vita Nuova. In its balance not just of emotion and analysis but of poetry and prose, ‘The New Life’ manages to capture a full range of feeling—to be ‘new’ in terms of both form and feeling. There’s something awfully erotic about that.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks go to my colleague Mark Bibbins and to the various assistants and advisers I enlisted for this project. I came to depend on Nick Adamski, Jill Baron, Laura Cronk, Steven Dube, Sarah Ruth Jacobs, and Michael Quattrone for suggestions, opinions, and research. An editor needs all the help he can get, and it gives me pleasure to acknowledge the many other individuals who made recommendations or gave me the benefit of their thinking. The list includes Nin Andrews, Molly Arden, Sally Ashton, Danielle Ben-Veniste, Erin Burke, Brian Carey Chung, Siobhan Ciminera, Victoria Clausi, Marc Cohen, Billy Collins, James Cummins, Peter Davis, Elaine Equi, Erica Miriam Fabri, Jenny Factor, Amy Gerstler, Roger Gilbert, Anna Ojascastro Guzon, Judith Hall, Stacey Harwood, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Tony Hoagland, John Hollander, Ron Horning, Richard Howard, Deborah Landau, Reb Livingston, Sarah Maclay, Cate Marvin, Alexandra Mendez-Diez, Honor Moore, Geoffrey O’Brien, Karl Parker, Megan Punschke, Allyson Salazar, Liesel Tarquini, Lee Upton, William Wadsworth, Matthew Yeager, Stephen Young, and Matthew Zapruder.

  In my graduate literature seminar at the New School in spring 2007, we devoted two sessions to a consideration of contenders for inclusion in this book. The students who engaged in this candid discussion merit acknowledgment: Komo Ananda, Jaclyn Clark, Julia Cohen, Jennifer Fortin, P. J. Gallo, Evan Glasson, Yotam Hasass, Kathleen Khouri, Christie Ann Reynolds, Paige Taggart, and Michael Wilson. For help in locating contributors, thanks go to Billy Merrell and Robin Beth Schaer of the Academy of American Poets. For an account of his experience publishing Auden’s “The Platonic Blow,” I am indebted to Roger Lathbury. Fred Courtright handled permissions with aplomb.

  As ever I am indebted to my agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu of Writers’ Representatives, and to Molly Dorozenski, Erich Hobbing, and Daniel Cuddy of Scribner. Alexis Gargagliano worked closely on this project from the start, easing its progress from conception to delivery. I am very lucky to have her as my editor.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made of the publications from which the poems in this volume were chosen. A sincere attempt has been made to locate all copyright holders. Unless specifically stated otherwise, copyright to the poems is held by the individual poets.

  Kim Addonizio: “The Divorcée and Gin” from Tell Me. Copyright (c) 2000 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

  Ai: “Twenty-Year Marriage” from Vice: New and Selected Poems. Copyright(c) 1999 by Ai. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Conrad Aiken: “Sea Holly” from Selected Poems, Oxford University Press. Copyright (c) 1961 by Conrad Aiken, renewed (c) 1989 by Mary Hoover Aiken. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

  Sandra Alcosser: “By the Nape” from Except by Nature. Copyright (c) 1998 by Sandra Alcosser. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press.

  Elizabeth Alexander: “At Seventeen.” Used with the permission of the author.r />
  A. R. Ammons: “Their Sex Life” from The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons. Copyright (c) 1990 by A. R. Ammons. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Nin Andrews: “How to Have an Orgasm: Examples” from The Book of Orgasms. Copyright (c) 2000 by Nin Andrews. Reprinted with the permission of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

  Sarah Arvio: “Mirrors” from Visits from the Seventh. Copyright (c) 2002 by Sarah Arvio. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Ellen Bass: “Gate C22” from The Human Line. Copyright (c) 2007 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

  Ted Berrigan: “Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s” from The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of Alice Notley.

  Elizabeth Bishop: “It Is Marvellous…” from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Copyright (c) 2007 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.