"An Argentine Gaucho Named Bruno. . ." [from The Best American Erotic Poems]

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Even to attempt a definition of key terms such as erotic and pornographic is a hazardous task. But about a few things there is general agreement. This is from My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late Victorian pornography written by an anonymous gentleman with a big-time itch and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures:

“Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking,” he writes. “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 central fact, the rock thrown into the previously placid pond, around which widen the circles of erotic implication. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove problematic, and the array of possibilities suggests 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. We know, in any case, 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.

In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The familiar image of the “beast with two backs” is ridiculous but accurate and therefore a valuable corrective to high-minded or romantic representations of the theme. The subject of sex gives rise to elegant aphorism (“Sex is the lyricism of the masses”: Charles Baudelaire), extravagantly mixed metaphor (“Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt”: Luis Bunuel), and exceedingly clever limericks (“An Argentine gaucho named Bruno / Declared there is one thing I do know: / A woman is fine, / A boy is divine, / But a llama is numero uno”). Sex in The Waste Land is a nightmare from which the typist may never recover, consisting of passionless caresses, “unreproved, if undesired,” from “the young man carbuncular” – surely the least desirable epithet ever conferred on a man. But then T. S. Eliot’s poem is an example of what Lee Upton calls “dysterotica,” which bears the same relation to the erotic as the world-view of 1984 or Brave New World has to Utopia. 

-- David Lehman
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from the introduction to The Best American Erotic Poems (2008)

Comments

[Ken Lauter]

Hmmmm!

This raises a few questions, doesn't it.

1)Aren't all (or at least most) poems 'erotic' in their deep structure?
2)Don't all(or at least most) poets secretly (or not so secretly)want to hump their muse?
3)Did Freud overthink it?
4)Is human sex just primate "super grooming"?

Etc. More after reading the book

[David Lehman]

1) It's a comparative, not an absolute judment; some poems are more erotic than others. "Kubla Khan" is more erotic than "Sailing to Byzantium."
2) To hump their muse? Would they really opt for such a way of phrasing it?
3) The great value of Freud's work is that he overthought everything. I try to reread "Civilization and its Discontents" annually.
4) I don't think so.
It's great to get the questions and I hope you'll have others. Thanks.