The Best American Erotic Poems Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID LEHMAN

  POETRY

  When a Woman Loves a Man

  The Evening Sun

  The Daily Mirror

  Valentine Place

  Operation Memory

  An Alternative to Speech

  Day One

  NONFICTION

  The Last Avant-Garde:

  The Making of the New York School of Poets

  The Big Question

  The Line Forms Here

  Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man

  The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection

  COLLABORATIONS

  Poetry Forum (with Judith Hall)

  Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins)

  EDITED BY DAVID LEHMAN

  The Best American Poetry (series editor)

  The Oxford Book of American Poetry

  Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

  The KGB Bar Book of Poems (with Star Black)

  Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms:

  85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems

  James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger)

  Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery

  SCRIBNER POETRY

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by David Lehman

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by David Lehman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SCRIBNER POETRY and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007047100

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6440-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6440-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by David Lehman

  [organized chronologically by year of poet’s birth]

  FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780–1843)

  “On a Young Lady’s Going into a Shower Bath”

  EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

  “Song” [“I saw thee on thy bridal day”]

  WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

  “I Sing the Body Electric”

  GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823–1890)

  from Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love

  EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)

  “Come slowly—Eden!” (#211)

  “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” (#249)

  “He fumbles at your Soul” (#315)

  “I groped for him before I knew” (#1555)

  “In Winter in my Room” (#1670)

  EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887)

  “Assurance”

  EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)

  “Terminus”

  ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

  “The Subverted Flower”

  AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)

  “Anticipation”

  GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946)

  from Lifting Belly

  WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)

  “Peter Quince at the Clavier”

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)

  “Young Sycamore”

  CONRAD AIKEN (1889–1973)

  “Sea Holly”

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)

  Sonnet [“I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex”]

  E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)

  “as /we lie side by side/my little breasts […]”

  H. PHELPS PUTNAM (1894–1948)

  “Sonnets to Some Sexual Organs”

  HART CRANE (1899–1932)

  “Episode of Hands”

  LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)

  “Desire”

  KENNETH REXROTH (1905–1982)

  from The Love Poems of Marichiko

  W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)

  “The Platonic Blow”

  ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979)

  “It Is Marvellous…”

  J. V. CUNNINGHAM (1911–1985)

  “It Was in Vegas”

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911–1983)

  “Life Story”

  MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980)

  “What I See”

  MAY SWENSON (1913–1989)

  “A New Pair”

  ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER (1915–1981)

  “The Milkman”

  RUTH STONE (born 1915)

  “Coffee and Sweet Rolls”

  THOMAS McGRATH (1916–1990)

  from Letter to an Imaginary Friend

  ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–1988)

  “The Torso” (Passage 18)

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–1994)

  “Hunk of Rock”

  HAYDEN CARRUTH (born 1921)

  “Assignment”

  RICHARD WILBUR (born 1921)

  “A Late Aubade”

  JAMES SCHUYLER (1923–1991)

  “A photograph”

  LOUIS SIMPSON (born 1923)

  “Summer Storm”

  ROBIN BLASER (born 1925)

  “2nd Tale: Return”

  KENNETH KOCH (1925–2002)

  “To Orgasms”

  A. R. AMMONS (1926–2001)

  “Their Sex Life”

  PAUL BLACKBURN (1926–1971)

  “The Once-Over”

  ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997)

  “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman”

  JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995)

  “Peeled Wands”

  FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966)

  “To the Harbormaster”

  DAVID WAGONER (born 1926)

  “Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love”

  GALWAY KINNELL (born 1927)

  “Last Gods”

  DONALD HALL (born 1928)

  “When I Was Young”

  ANNE SEXTON (1928–1974)

  “December 11th”

  RICHARD HOWARD (born 1929)

  “Move Still, Still So”

  ADRIENNE RICH (born 1929)

  “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)”

  SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)

  “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”

  JOHN UPDIKE (born 1932)

  “Fellatio”

  MARK STRAND (born 1934)

  “The Couple”

  TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983)

  “Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s”

  RUSSELL EDSON (born 1935)

  “Conjugal”

  LUCILLE CLIFTON (born 1936)

  “to a dark moses”

  FREDERICK SEIDEL (born 1936)

  “Heart Art”

  MARGE PIERCY (born 1936)

  “Salt in the Afternoon”

  C. K. WILLIAMS (born 1936)

  “Ethics”

  CHARLES SIMIC (born 1938)

  “Breasts”

  BILLY COLLINS (born 1941)

  “Pinup”

  STEPHEN DOBYNS (born 1941)

  “Desire”

  ROBERT HASS (born 1941)

  “Against Botticelli”

  LINDA GREGG (born 1942)

  “Kept Burning and Distant”

  SHARON OLDS (born 1942)

 
; “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure”

  LOUISE GLÜCK (born 1943)

  “The Encounter”

  SANDRA ALCOSSER (born 1944)

  “By the Nape”

  PAUL VIOLI (born 1944)

  “Resolution”

  ROBERT OLEN BUTLER (born 1945)

  “Walter Raleigh, courtier and explorer, beheaded by King James I, 1618”

  ALAN FELDMAN (born 1945)

  “A Man and a Woman”

  BERNADETTE MAYER (born 1945)

  “First turn to me…”

  HONOR MOORE (born 1945)

  “Disparu”

  STAR BLACK (born 1946)

  “The Evangelist”

  ELLEN BASS (born 1947)

  “Gate C22”

  AI (born 1947)

  “Twenty-Year Marriage”

  JANE KENYON (1947–1995)

  “The Shirt”

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (born 1947)

  “Lust”

  MOLLY PEACOCK (born 1947)

  “She Lays”

  JAMES CUMMINS (born 1948)

  “The Body Is the Flower”

  HEATHER McHUGH (born 1948)

  “Gig at Big Al’s”

  LYNN EMANUEL (born 1949)

  “Dreaming of Rio at Sixteen”

  DENIS JOHNSON (born 1949)

  “Poem”

  DANA GIOIA (born 1950)

  “Alley Cat Love Song”

  PAUL JONES (born 1950)

  “To His Penis”

  WILLIAM WADSWORTH (born 1950)

  “The Snake in the Garden Considers Daphne”

  MARC COHEN (born 1951)

  “It Never Happened”

  JUDITH HALL (born 1951)

  “In an Empty Garden”

  CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON (born 1951)

  from Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese)

  PAUL MULDOON (born 1951)

  “The Little Black Book”

  BOB FLANAGAN (1952–1996)

  from Slave Sonnets [“I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now”]

  DORIANNE LAUX (born 1952)

  “The Shipfitter’s Wife”

  PETER SERCHUK (born 1952)

  “The Naked Women”

  DENNIS COOPER (born 1953)

  “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade”

  MARK DOTY (born 1953)

  “Lilacs in NYC”

  TONY HOAGLAND (born 1953)

  “Visitation”

  RICHARD JONES (born 1953)

  “Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed”

  HARRYETTE MULLEN (date of birth unknown)

  “Pretty Piece of Tail”

  KIM ADDONIZIO (born 1954)

  “The Divorcée and Gin”

  SARAH ARVIO (born 1954)

  “Mirrors”

  DEAN YOUNG (born 1955)

  “Platypus”

  AMY GERSTLER (born 1956)

  “Ode to Semen”

  SARAH MACLAY (born 1956)

  “My Lavenderdom”

  CECILIA WOLOCH (born 1956)

  “Bareback Pantoum”

  CATHERINE BOWMAN (born 1957)

  “Demographics”

  ED SMITH (1957–2005)

  “Poem”

  NIN ANDREWS (born 1958)

  “How to Have an Orgasm: Examples”

  CARL PHILLIPS (born 1959)

  “I See a Man”

  DENISE DUHAMEL (born 1961)

  “House-Sitting”

  ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (born 1962)

  “At Seventeen”

  OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS (born 1963)

  “Francesca Says More”

  BETH GYLYS (born 1964)

  “Preference”

  LISA WILLIAMS (born 1966)

  “On Not Using the Word ‘Cunt’ in a Poem”

  DEBORAH LANDAU (born 1967)

  “August in West Hollywood”

  JEFFREY McDANIEL (born 1967)

  “When a man hasn’t been kissed”

  RICHARD SIKEN (born 1967)

  “Little Beast”

  JENNIFER L. KNOX (born 1968)

  “Another Motive for Metaphor”

  JANICE ERLBAUM (born 1969)

  “The Temp”

  JENNY FACTOR (born 1969)

  “Misapprehension”

  CATE MARVIN (born 1969)

  “Me and Men”

  CATHERINE WAGNER (born 1969)

  “Lover”

  C. DALE YOUNG (born 1969)

  “Maelstrom”

  BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY (born 1970)

  “Voluptuary”

  KEVIN YOUNG (born 1970)

  “Étude”

  JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM (born 1971)

  “On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica”

  BETH ANN FENNELLY (born 1971)

  “Why We Shouldn’t Write Love Poems, or If We Must, Why We Shouldn’t Publish Them”

  TERRANCE HAYES (born 1971)

  “Preface”

  CATHERINE WING (born 1972)

  “Eye-Fucked”

  ROSS MARTIN (born 1973)

  “Body Cavity”

  SARAH MANGUSO (born 1974)

  “Reverence”

  RAVI SHANKAR (born 1975)

  “Lucia”

  LAURA CRONK (born 1977)

  “From the Other”

  DANIELLE PAFUNDA (born 1977)

  “Courtesy”

  MICHAEL QUATTRONE (born 1977)

  “February”

  MAGGIE WELLS (born 1977)

  “Sonnet from the Groin”

  NOAH MICHELSON (born 1978)

  “Valentine”

  HEATHER CHRISTLE (born 1980)

  “Letter to My Love”

  RACHEL SHUKERT (born 1980)

  “Subterranean Gnomesick Blues; or, the Gnome Who Whet My Fleshy Tent.”

  Contributors’ Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Sex contains all, bodies, souls,

  Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,

  Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk

  All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties,

  delights of the earth,

  All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,

  These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

  Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,

  Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

  —Walt Whitman,

  from “A Woman Waits for Me”

  David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999) and The Perfect Murder (Michigan, 2000). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003. He teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City and offers an undergraduate course each fall on “Great Poems” at NYU. He edited the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman has collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull), and with Judith Hall on a “pl’em,” or “play poem,” combining words and images, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts). He initiated the Best American Poetry series in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship a year later. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

  INTRODUCTION

  by David Lehman

  In My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late-Victorian pornography, the author, an anonymous gentleman with a raging libido and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures, writes, “Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking…. It is not a graceful
operation—in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.” The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of “coupling” to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an “operation” no finer than urination or defecation, and “more ridiculous.”

  Call it fucking or call it making love: The “process of coupling” is the fact at the center of all erotic speculation. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. The word’s effect is like that of the tarot card of the lovers dealt upside down: the same meaning in the form of its negative inversion. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove inadequate to the ramifications of the act. The many possible ways of talking about it, that great pronoun—or as Freud would have it, id —suggest that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily, as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. In any case, we know that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior, sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, “most people try to do as much of it as they can,” and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.