W. H. Auden’s “The Platonic Blow” is a camp classic, an over-the-top ballad portraying the ideal blowjob. Auden wrote it in New York in 1948 and relished its composition, but he later disavowed it and never claimed copyright. With its flourishes of rhyme and rhetoric, the poem survived for a long time on its underground circulation. But the impulse to censor or self-censor is much less strong today than when Auden began his poem with the smell of the locker room on a spring day, making it “a day for a lay” or “a day to blow or get blown.” I didn’t think twice about including “The Platonic Blow,” which is so well crafted that it blurs any line you can draw between erotica and pornography. The case against Robert Frost’s “The Subverted Flower” is that the scenario described therein will not quicken your libido or warm your heart. But I contend that sexual failure, as common as it is unfortunate, has its place in the literature of Eros. And this dark and uncanny poem begs to be read, interpreted, and discussed in the context of the erotic.
Readers of pornography on the judicial bench claim that they can’t define it but know it when they see it. That is as good an approach as any and has the virtue of implying that all the verbiage on the subject has left us little wiser. You can safely say that pornography “appeals to the prurient interest” whereas erotica has “literary or artistic value.” The key word in that formulation is “value,” and certainly in the making of this book I wanted poems that have added value to our lives and our culture. As I always do when working on an anthology, I welcomed suggestions from friends, colleagues, and students, and what amazed me was how little agreement there was. The disputes were less about the literary quality of the work in review than about whether it was sufficiently erotic. One person recommended Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” in which the married couple has taken tranquilizers, the woman is asleep with her back to the man, and there is a heavy sadness in the air that I took as the very antithesis of the erotic. I know that readers will approach the contents of this book with its title in mind and that therefore poems of a certain subtlety or covert sexual agenda will fit nicely. But I also know that no definition will come in handy to justify my decision to include Frost’s “Subverted Flower” and not Lowell’s “Man and Wife.” It is finally a matter of judgment, instinct, and nerve, and the editor has no choice but to trust his own responses to the serious contenders. Every poem in The Best American Erotic Poems has given me pleasure, most of them have taught me something, and the general assembly delights me with its variety and energy.
Following William Gass in On Being Blue (1976), I believe there are multiple ways that sex can enter a work of writing, including “direct depiction,” the use of “sexual words,” “displacement” (the use of metaphor), and “the use of language like a lover.” I wanted examples of all these. Gass’s idea that the act of writing can itself be erotic makes a lot of sense to me. There are poems that display, in his words, “not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” I am partial to wit in poetry and was intent on including comic and satiric poems in a variety of registers, but I was also deeply attracted to poems that had the sort of hot-blooded passion that you find superbly in D. H. Lawrence. “Be still when you have nothing to say,” Lawrence wrote. “When genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
Over a hundred years after Freud and his disciples argued for the centrality of sex in the formation of the human personality, what was once a contention has become an axiom. Hormones reign and sex sells. If anything, the amount of sex in our cultural life has grown. Nudity onstage in theatrical productions of Marat / Sade and Oh, Calcutta! was sensational in the 1960s but is no big deal today. We are, says the New Republic columnist Britt Peterson, “awash in raunch culture.” She tells of “alt-porn, a new hipster genre” of movie, in which “the smut itself is becoming more upper-middle-class: urbane, ironic, self-aware, and intellectually as well as sexually titillating.”[1] Eve Fairbanks, another New Republic diarist is okay with the knowledge that if you Google her name you get links to “rambling, bawdy paragraphs done in a stream-of-consciousness, misspelled, arbitrarily capitalized style, like a dirty parody of Finnegans Wake.” The Internet has lifted veils, opened closets, and made a host of fetishes and perversities seem not exactly normal or routine but ubiquitous and therefore legitimate. If every individual can aspire to his or her own website, the value has to be on disclosure, not reticence. “Teens blog details, true or made up, about their personal lives that their elders would have blushed to put in their diaries.”[2] Women’s erotica has taken off as a publishing category somewhere between mass romance and outright porn. Sample titles: Bound, Big Guns out of Uniform, and Gotta Have It.[3] In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan reports on the “teenage oral-sex craze” and wonders how it came about that America’s girls are “on their knees.” All over Chicago, where Flanagan lives, “in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral sex on as many boys as they can.”[4] Flanagan is appalled at the phenomenon. Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair is breezy in contrast as he propounds the view that the blowjob is America’s “signature sex act.” Hitchens talks about Deep Throat, Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita, and The Godfather, not to mention the fabled Oval Office vestibule in the Clinton White House, in pursuit of his story: “how America grabbed the Olympic scepter of the blowjob and held on tight.”[5]
In this context it is not a surprise that poets would write openly and rhapsodically about their sexual lives and dreams. What is eye-opening is the lusty freedom and literary skill with which they have celebrated their erotic imaginations. When I am asked to talk about new trends, the emergence of a voluptuous body of erotic poems is almost always first on my list. It seems that nothing is off-limits to the contemporary poet. Office sex, first sex, oral sex, cybersex (“in a tangle of Internet”), solo sex, sex from the other’s point of view, voyeurism, bondage, parables of gardens with snakes, allegories of flowers and bees, dreams of horses or swans, and the use of a gin bottle as a surrogate lover: They’re all here. And no terms are forbidden from use. There is almost a mini-genre of poems devoted to the attractions and drawbacks of such words as “fuck,” “cunt,” “pussy,” and “orgasm.” Not that the liberal sprinkling of profanities assures anyone of anything. “I cannot honestly say I see any noteworthy improvement in our life, thought, or writing, now that `fuck’ can be heard and seen in public,” William Gass wrote in On Being Blue, “because its appearance is as unmeant and hypocritical as its former absence was. We fear to seem a prude.” Point well taken: Marlon Brando in an undershirt clinching with Eva Marie Saint in a slip (in On the Waterfront, 1954), or Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles embracing on a yacht (in The Lady from Shanghai, 1948), will get your blood going faster than any number of nude scenes in more recent films. Nevertheless, the greater freedom of vocabulary in tandem with a loosening of moral or religious restraint has spurred poets to tackle subjects formerly taboo, and they have done so with such freshness and style that you can’t help taking notice.
[1] Britt Peterson, “Porn with a Silver Spoon” (The New Republic, June 4, 2007), p. 64.
[2] Eve Fairbanks, “The Porn Identity” (The New Republic, February 6, 2006), p. 34.
[3] Matthew Flam, “More Heat Between the Covers” (Crain’s New York Business, February 20, 2006), p. 37.
[4] Caitlin Flanagan, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica” (The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2006, p. 167
[5] Christopher Hitchens, “As American As Apple Pie” (Vanity Fair, July 2006), p. 54.
from The Best American Erotic Poems, ed. David Lehman (Scribner, 2008), the book that dared to promote such poets as Nin Andrews, Laura Cronk, Terrance Hayes, Jennifer L. Knox, Michael Quattrone, Mark Strand. Paul Violi, Bill Wadsworth, Maggie Wells, and Kevin Young
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