The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present Edited by David Lehman; Scribner Poetry

The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
Edited by David Lehman; Scribner Poetry
ISBN: 9781416537465

8.7/10 Dropps

From Gertrude Stein to Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath to Ravi Shankar, this delightful compendium of erotic poetry spans 200 years of scintillating semantics and includes a wide variety of both canonical heavy hitters and relatively unknown contemporary authors alike. As editor David Lehman explains in his Introduction, “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’.”
The poems in this collection encapsulate this sentiment completely while effectively removing the stigma from sexual encounters by talking about them openly—thereby exposing them for the beautiful, gross, oftentimes silly, and ultimately necessary acts they truly are.

Arranged chronologically by year of poet’s birth, the poems are simultaneously sensual, literary, hopeful, romantic, and perverse. They don’t take themselves too seriously and expletives abound, yet, for the most part, they handle the subject matter with utmost deference and respect—you can tell that these poets really love sex. Some are downright hilarious—“On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica” by Jill Alexander Essbaum, “Life Story” by Tennessee Williams, and “Poem” by Ed Smith, to name a few—while some—check out Denise Duhamel’s prose-like “House Sitting” or “February” by Michael Quattrone, though I’ll leave you to deduce personal favorites on your own time—will leave you breathless and wanting more. Additional poems from Whitman, Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell, Williams Carlos Williams, Bukowski, Cummings, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, John Updike, Catherine Wagner, Deborah Landau, and so many more are also included. The book concludes with short biographies of each poet, as well as contributors’ notes giving a short history about the chosen work and explaining why it was included in the anthology.

Along the more bizarrely humorous vein, here is a choice passage from the amusingly titled concluding poem of the anthology, “Subterranean Gnomesick Blues; or, the Gnome Who Whet My Fleshy Tent” by Rachel Shukert:

“In lands where the waters are clear
And the forests virginal, where the heavens
Are full only of birds and stars—
Before writing a poem about it, I find it helpful to masturbate.
I believe this is also true of camping,
For there is no privacy once you pitch your tent.”

-Nicole Marie Rea