erotic poetry | sudden weather

  
  you should know,
  I only meant to recite
  a poem of love and gratitude,
  but seeing you tonight?

  forgive the weather
  that pinches buds into cries
  of burst leaves—for the runoff
  between April’s thighs.
  
  sudden weather
  by me
  February 1st 2021

Alongside all my other projects, I’m working on pulling together a collection of erotic haiku and poems. Thought I’d post some along the way. I want to write one erotic poem for each week of the year—many already written. This is part of an effort to gradually collect all my writings in one place. These for my belovèd muse, Erato, the muse of the erotic, poetry and lyric poetry.

April 29th 2021

    lovers
        in from the rain—both of them
            wet

           
    34: April 29th 2021 | bottlecap

• About Haiku
• A Very Brief Art of Haiku
• Roughly Mondays & Thursdays

Review: Concupiscent Consumption

• Reviewed and added to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies

A new collection of erotic poetry, brought to my attention by the author, is available at Amazon entitled Concupiscent Consumption. The poetry is by LindaAnn LoSchiavo and the poems are written in blank verse, a rarity, and that makes me keen to review them. Not only do I get to discuss the content of the poems, but the abilities of the poet as well.

Let’s start with the first poem. LoSchiavo sets the tone with intimations and hints of childhood sadomasochism.

"Experiencing pizzichilli young—
All Neapolitan adults intent
On giving children sharp affection: kissed
With possibility of pain required—
I learned to squirm, becoming fruit, firm, ripe,
And ready to be pinched on shameless buds
Called cheeks. Italians like operatic
Intensity: emotions leaving marks..."

LoSchiavo isn’t going to start off with the usual erotic clichés—heat, fires, burning, floods, sparks, electricity, etc… She starts with pizzichilli—sharp little kisses. One imagines the nip of teeth but LoSchiavo only describes the kisses as leaving marks. Our erotic experiences as children, influenced by other children and adults for better or worse isn’t usually something that’s discussed in an erotic context. To do so, even when not in an erotic context, often leads to politically and culturally motivated accusations that have nothing to do with the actual experience. But self-censorship is it’s own kind of violence.

Interestingly, LoSchiavo’s poem will leave the reader confused. She will go on to describe the kisses as “cockpit bombs” that “assaults kids” who “try escaping yet endure”, “confused from then, torn, victimized.” This is after LoSchiavo has described herself as “becoming” fruit, firm and ripe—erotically charged imagery—and as ready to be pinched on “shameless buds”. Having gotten that far, more than a few readers will wonder if she means nipples, but in the next line she ham-handedly adds “called cheeks”, so ham-handed that one wonders if she’s correcting the reader or correcting herself. But the whiplash continues. After describing herself as being victimized, she nevertheless asks if and when she should live “for opportunities like this” [italics being my own]. There will surely be those who would characterize this behavior as typical of sexual abuse. On the other hand, one’s first erotic experiences can be ambiguous without there being any abuse. The erotic tension between awakening desire and ambivalence toward the same is a theme that runs through a number of LoSchiavo’s poems.

The overall impression, at least in the first poem, is of a poet not quite in control of her subject matter or poetic technique. She writes poetically rather than writing poetry. And one may write an ambiguous poem deliberately, but there’s a thin line between the ambiguous and confusion. Is one supposed to treat this poem as an erotic poem, signaled by the conventional erotic imagery of “fruit, firm and ripe”, or as something more troubling?

Part of the poem’s confusion arises, I think, from the awkward blank verse and poor punctuation. LoSchiavo will leave out articles and syntactic connectives, or simply opt for poor grammar if it achieves an iambic line: “With possibility” instead of “With [the] possibility”;  “from then” instead of “from then [on]”; “mind and soul reenter fate’s… pain… know compromised enjoyment” instead of “mind and soul reenter fate’s…pain… know[ing that] compromised enjoyment”. This sort of awkwardness adds to an unfortunate impression of hesitance, uncertainty and impatience—qualities that, to a greater or lesser extent, are found in the poems that follow—and they lend the poems the feeling of sketches and first drafts. An example of this might be the poem Vagina as Orchid Boat.

Chinese call the vagina “orchid boat,”
The blotchy darkness universal man
First changes places through on win-lose seas
Of birth, still wearing this name on his tongue,
Air-tight, invading dreams’ closed crescent eyes...

The first stanza almost reads like notes for further development and I get lost in LoSchiavo’s gnomic grammar. What does “first changes places through on win-lose seas/ Of birth” mean?

All that said, writing traditional verse isn’t easy (and good for her for trying). She avoids the stock, clichéd imagery that so often mars erotic poetry while infusing her poetry with an impish sense of humor. Invitation to a Kiss, one of her best poems in my opinion (along with Soda Jerk), begins:

Some kisses are consumer errors. You’d
Try taking them back if you could. I’m hooked
On kisses warming me like cognac, poured
On my lips, heat transferring. [...]

Flashes of humor are found throughout her poems along with refreshingly playful but also charged associations.

All winter, fig trees huddle under tarps,
Enjoying long pajama parties, stark
Naked, their branches tied, unable to stretch.
This hibernation—their adolescence—
Creates desired sweetness through its stem. [...]

~ Sticky Figs

I say charged because, and perhaps not intentionally, the imagery may remind the reader of LoSchiavo’s first poem. With pajama parties, the reader is drawn back into the world of childhood, of nakedness, of tied “branches” or bondage, and the inability to stretch. The first poem’s themes of childhood, the erotic awakening and confusion of sadomasichism, matures into an adolescence desiring that “sweetness through its stem”.

LoSchiavo’s poems The Baby-Sitting and The Girl Can’t Help It turn this tension into a source of eroticism in its own right. Clearly, in The Baby-Sitting, “love’s stupendous spectacle” is not where the erotic tension lies, but rather (and presumably) in someone else’s “master bedroom” with someone else’s child sleeping down the hall. On the other hand, the poet doesn’t clarify who she’s sleeping with or when, only that “we stayed up late” when baby-sitting. For all we know she could be referring to the baby’s father; and there again a kind of ambiguity arises. The reader might well question the reliability of the poet/narrator. Was this really love? How old was she? And how old was he? LoSchiavo may have intended none of this, but intentionally or not, the gnomic qualities of her poetry make what’s not said as important as what is.

Because it immediately follows The Baby-Sitting, LoSchiavo’s poem The Girl Can’t Help It almost seems like a commentary on the former poem.

Across America, most mothers hissed,
“Don’t be like her!” A movie star famed for
Her simmering stoked sex appeal was not
Most women’s norm in 1956.

The poet is unapologetic and the lovemaking, both public (in a drive-in) and private (inside the car) could almost be a metaphor for the book itself—both revealing, “as car springs swayed, we gave it away”, and ambiguous by virtue of being in the car. The reader, to an extent, must draw their own conclusions as to what’s going on in LoSchiavo’s book. At moment’s she’s explicit, but mostly one has the feeling she would rather maintain some distance with poetic gestures, figurative language and such stock erotic imagery as is found in Kinetic Kissing. Though that’s also the most interesting facet of the book—a flawed woman writing flawed poetry that’s full of ambiguity.

And the whole can be read as a sort of autobiography beginning and in childhood, with the eroticism wakened by ambiguously bruising kisses, and ending with the unambiguous My Dominatrix:

He’s staring at my breasts. They’re needling him,
Restrained and forced to obey whips and canes,
Skyscraper pain controlling time lust topped.
Men tell me that I’m good at this. [....]

Where she has fully realizing the erotic awakenings experienced in childhood. She is now the one tying the branches, the one restraining, leaving marks, and drawing the desired sweetness from the stem.

All in all, I would call LoSchiavo’s short collection of poems the work of a poet acquainted with the tropes of poetry, with meter, figurative language and metaphor, but not one who has mastered them—which isn’t to say her poems don’t have their inspired moments: “Lovemaking is the smile sewn through my skin,” or “my willow soul seeks moisture under dirt”. These are fine lines. Also, I think her collection will appeal less to those seeking explicit eroticism and more to those interested in the interior landscape of a woman’s sexual awakening and maturation.

Your words and steady gaze have made me blush.
I drop five dollars in your jar and leave
Without my shake because I’m staying here
Two more weeks and imagining how we
Will taste right after, mixed in with the dark. [...]

~ Soda Jerk

• Of note, the author has asked that I mention her poetry collection, “A Route Obscure and Lonely“, as also recently released.

• The Book One poem per page, nice font, and readable.
• Comparisons This book compares to Libidacoria by 4play by Kristie LeVangie in that these books may be thought of as autobiographical or semi-autobiographical.
• You and your Lover Trying too hard to be poetry and literary to set any fires, but if you’re fantasizing about tying your lover up or down, you will find a kindred spirit.
• Embarrassment The beautiful cover will make it obvious to everyone on the bus and subway what you’re reading.

Sex ♥♥♥
Art N/A
Romance ♥♥♥
Look & Feel ♥♥♥♥♥
Poetry ♥♥♥
Index N/A

July 27th 2019

love-
   making afterward—her skin cool as the pond- 
        water
      
208: July 27th 2019 | bottlecap

• About Haiku

 

February 9th 2019

·

·

as
····the wood stove goes out—my lover grows
········brighter
·

·

·

40: February 9th 2019 | bottlecap

·

• About Haiku

 

All We Know of Pleasure

A little while back I objected to Fence Magazine’s claim that it published poetry out of the mainstream. If you really want to be out of the mainstream (said I) shunned, censored and (depending on the country) possibly killed or imprisoned, try writing freely and openly about sex—about our erotic lives and imagination in poetry, stories or fable.  Just this December, Tumblr banned all depictions of sex and nudity. And while the ban excludes written erotica, one wonders how long that exemption will last.

So where are all the poets?

Our love of the erotic is what helped make us human. My own belief is that our ability to desire another imaginatively is not the byproduct of our imagination but the other way around. Our imagination is the byproduct of our sexual drive and desire—Eros. If a species doesn’t procreate, then it perishes. Nature’s trick was to use our imagination, to use our most potent organ. (As is often said: Sex is in the brain.) All our art, literature, and music is the byproduct of erotic desire. And that’s hard for the many who conceive of the human mind as made in God’s image rather than the fabricator of desire—or the devil’s as some might say. So, while some quarters are still fussily censoring our erotic imagination, the world’s earliest art, going back even to the Neanderthals, is erotic.

The world’s earliest surviving poetry is erotic—Sappho. In the relatively recently discovered and ancient trash heap at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, texts dealing with erotic subject matter seem to have been significantly more popular than religious or spiritual texts (far more popular than the words of Jesus apparently). Vicki Leòn’s observers, in her book, The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, and Longing in the Ancient World:

Again, amid the masses of papyri hidden in the ancient ruins of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, archeologists and researchers discovered a tantalizing fragment of a sex manual, a work of art by a Greek woman called Philaenis. This find provided even more shocking because it revealed that women of Greco-Roman times not only behaved as lasciviously as men, but they also wrote about the imaginative sex they’d had (and/or had fantasized). ¶ Philaneis lived during Hellenistic times, on the Greek island of Samos or perhaps or perhaps Leicidia (accounts disagree). She may have been the courtesan that inspired the coining of the word pornography. Whatever her day job, she began her literary odyssey by coming up with the killer title of her book. She called it On Indecent Kisses. her erotic manual was clearly popular (judging by its mention by other writers, plus the number of papyrus fragments found at multiple sites), and centuries later would provide inspiration for Ovid’s bestselling Ars Amatoria (the Art of Love.) [p. 37]

I’m guessing, though I don’t know, that Philaenis’s work might have been poetry, especially if it inspired Ovid.  And it’s telling, perhaps, that Ovid’s work survived while Philaenis’s did not (as is the case with the erotic writing of women throughout history and cultures). Nothing silences women like suppressing erotica.

So, you would think, that in a nation where freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, far more erotica might be written, and yet poets who veer from the mainstream are few and far between, and the unwillingness of sellers, publishers, and merchants to trade in erotica remains a constant: Amazon, Apple Inc., Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, for example. Never mind the hundreds of “avant garde” poetry publishers too frightened to accept erotic poetry.  Choices are few.

And so, when I read about poets and/or publications touting their bona fides as writers and publishers of trending, out-of-the-mainstream poetry because they’ve invented a new typography, a new way to upend syntax and grammar, or a freer way to make free verse free all in the name of socially accepted and approved content, the whole notion of avant garde flies right out the window.

This doesn’t mean to say that writing erotic poetry is a sufficient end in and of itself. While there’s a lot of bad poetry that gets a pass because of its trending subject matter and style, there’s nothing like bad erotic poetry to spotlight the mediocrity of the poet. If you want to write erotic poetry with any kind of lasting literary value, emphasis on literary value, then it’s the least forgiving (most out of the mainstream) genre you could possibly choose. Which is to say, Erotic Literature is the most challenging and difficult genre to master. Trendy content isn’t going to save you. Not only are you sailing against the headwinds of what’s socially acceptable, let alone publishable, but erotic writing is itself a mine field of cliché and insipid sentiment. Few writers come out of that killing field alive—not even those who should know better. Curious? Here are the winners of this year’s bad sex award.

That said, and having to say it again, if you’re a poet and you really want to be avant garde and out of the mainstream, write erotic poetry. And if you really want to live in Davy Jones’s locker, use meter and rhyme to do it. And if you want to make your mark in history, make it literature.

And that brings me to All We Know of Pleasure: Poetica Erotica by Women, an anthology of contemporary women’s erotic poetry published just this year—2018. The editor is Enid Shomer. On the back cover of the book, you’ll read the following: “poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader.” How’s that for a claim?

Poetry that actually excites the reader.

I haven’t read the collection from cover to cover, but I’ve read enough to include it among my favorites. The poems are, that I’ve read so far, all free verse but for a poem by Molly Peacock called Lullaby, it starts:

Big as a down duvet the night
pulls the close Ontario sky
over the naked earth. Here we lie
gossiping in a circle of light
·
under our own big comforter,
buried nude as bulbs. I slide south
to grow your hyacinth in my mouth.
[…] [p. 40]

Now that’s something you don’t read every day. Though I wouldn’t have minded if some other poets had tried something other than free verse, the quality of their poetry is nevertheless first rate. What novelist has come close to putting together anything like Carolyn Creedon’s erotic cry?

[…]I want to lay
you, on a bed without a towel, without a curtain, without a good enough
reason. I want to wear a white dress stained with certain possibility, like an autograph
like a river’s ripe with spawn, like a signpost, like a season,
like a dam come all undone. [Wet, p. 116]

Not to miss is the nice internal rhyme of reason and season along with the pun on dam (and damn) in the last line. This is good stuff.

The anthology is divided into three parts: The Discovery of Sex, The Ordinary Day Begins, When This Old Body.  Each section showcases about thirty poems, so this is not a chintzy collection. From June Sylvester Saraceno’s The Ordinary Day Begins: 

at my desk
the screen blinks on
numbers begin their race
but inside me, the throb
of your last morning thrusts
continue, echo
you in me […] [p. 65]

To poems that aren’t strictly a celebration of temptation and pleasure:

you push your mouth against mine
i want to tell you
you have come to the wounded for healing.
like you, i am
imperfect flesh, and my
experience of violence has made me
no less likely to harm you [….]

[Kai Cheng Thom, the wounded for healing, p. 126]

But grief too. These are poems that refuse to be less than literary simply because they’re erotic. Any poet who aspires to write more than the same mainstream avant garde poetry of the last hundred-plus years, should read this book if only to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of cliché so typical of erotic sentiment. Who would have thought that BDSM could be elevated to the delirious lyricism of Sheryl St. Germain: 

[…]
Tonight when I close my eyes
the sky will fill with lovers
binding the wrists of lovers,
the night will tie its blindfold
over the earth’s eyes, and I will
dream of how to speak—oh
·
kiss me with lips I have to imagine;
hold me in a room I can’t escape.

[Blindfolds, Ropes, p. 104]

Not that’s poetry, poetry that excites the reader, that’s truly on the fringes of the approved, and that carries on the nearly silenced voices of Sappho and Philaenis.

• The Book About 7 by 5. Good paper. Readable. One poem per page. Nice font. Brief biographies of the poets can be found at the back of the book but, unfortunately, no index.
• Comparisons This book belongs on your bookshelf alongside The Poetry of Sex, intimate kisses; Passionate Hearts; The Erotic Spirit; The Best American Erotic Poems.
• In Translation A transliteration of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid.
• You and your Lover Poems for women to love women, for women who love men, and for men who to want to peer behind the curtains of women’s desires.
• Embarrassment An understated copy and title makes it easy to read on public transit.

Sex ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Art N/A
Romance ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Look & Feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Poetry ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Index ♥

• See Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies for this and other reviews of Erotic Anthologies.

September 5th 2017

·

in
····from rain—her clothes clinging to her lover
········too
·

·

·

248 September 5th 2017 | bottlecap

• About Haiku

April 10th 2017

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mists
····rising—the nakedness of an April
········shower
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100 April 10th 2017 | bottlecap

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• About Haiku

May 19th 2016

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lovers
·····in the afternoon—grass clippings under her
········skirt
·

·

I wrote and rewrote yesterday’s haiku. I may finally have it the way I want it. Nice thing is, having almost written 200 haiku, I feel as though the whole of the collection is like a larger poem; and maybe something I can be pleased with.

·

I think about these little poems on and off through the day.

·

When I’ve written my 366th haiku, I’m not sure I’ll want to stop. It’s easy to be swept up by life and altogether forget the small defiances of writing. I have, at times.

·

195 May 19 2016 | bottlecap

·

• About Haiku

Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • Three Books Added

Reviewed and added the following books to Erotic Poetry, Love & Passion • A review of Poets & Anthologies:

• Erotiku by Lisa Marie Darlington
• The Poetry of Sex edited by Sophie Hannah
• The Literary Companion to Sex edited by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

You will find it below and appended to the larger review linked above.

Erotiku: erotic haiku for the sensual soul
by Lisa Marie Darlington

This is a book I really looked forward to getting my hands on. Anyone who’s been following my blog knows I love haiku and erotic poetry in general. Erotiku has only been fitfully available at Amazon, mostly OP or of Limited Availability. When I saw it available at list price with a used book dealer, I snagged it.

The cover is great; unfortunately, the poetry not so much. Like so many western authors, Darlington seems to have walked out of the haiku tutorial at ‘three lines‘. The author herself doesn’t go much beyond this description in the book’s brief introduction. She writes:

 

“Haiku is known to follow the metrical 5-7-5 syllable structure, yet I have revised it to take on a more contemporary form. It’s composition does not follow any kind of syllable rule, yet it still holds true to the three line pattern.”

As if that were all that made a haiku (or senryu for that matter). At the close of the introduction she’ll write that “western haiku tries to imitate old Japanese Haiku with little understanding”. The criticism, unfortunately, is applicable to the entirety of her collection.

The book is thick with one haiku per page. You’re essentially buying blank paper. Having said that, Darlington’s presentation isn’t all that different from other haiku collections. She hints at aesthetic reasons for doing so, maybe to savor each poem individually. The problem is that there’s really not that much to savor. The best senryu and haiku are rich with allusion and suggestiveness. They invite the reader to conjure what the poet leaves out. The reward is traditionally a realization of nature’s interconnectedness (haiku) or the humorous foibles of our humanity (senryu). There’s a broad spectrum between these two, but all the best haiku and senryu serve as an imaginative starting point, not end point. And that’s the problem with Darlington’s erotiku. They’re too often an end point.

Kama Sutra Art

Selected positions
Kama sutra art
Of intense connection

A “poem” like this (presented the way she centers them in her book) has nothing whatsoever to do with haiku or senryu. It’s little more than a statement in three lines. There’s nothing remotely erotic other than by association. The reader is likely to respond: Yes, and? This is Darlington at her least successful and unfortunately typifies, to a greater or lesser degree, too many of her haiku (which I think number around two hundred?—I’m guessing since there are no page numbers).

Arched Out in Pleasure

Her slender body
Curved to the couch
Back arched out in pleasure.

This is more typical of Darlington’s erotiku.  They are descriptive prose passages in three lines. The reader will find lots and lots of these. I suppose it’s erotic/pornographic, but that’s as far as it goes—an end point rather than a starting point. There’s no sense of narrative or realization. By way of comparison, a rare (and possibly) erotic haiku by Basho:

to get wet passing by
a man is interesting
bush clover in rain

This was translated by Jane Reichhold who comments: “The euphemism ‘to get wet’ was often used in tanka where the reader could decide how this happened, from rain, dew on flowers, tears, or sexual activity.” And this, in my view, is profoundly more erotic than Darlington’s essentially three line descriptions of pornography. The reader is invited to finish Basho’s haiku. Is it really erotic? If so, what happened? Did they have a quickie? Is she wet because she was turned on or because he fucked her? Is she the bush clover? Is he the rain? Or is it simply a coincidental spring rain the makes her wet as she passes by a man?

Other issues I have with Darlington’s erotiku are her tendency toward “pigeon English”:

Thighs asphyxiating

Thighs asphyxiating
Around neck and shoulders
Squeezing like a heart attack.

Erotic clichés:

Hot Fire

Hot fire
Kindling, the passion
That burns like Hell.

Descriptive redundancy, verbosity and too many adjectives:

Your tongue walks

Your tongue walks
Heavily, up against
The surface of my naked skin.

She doesn’t need up, surface (as this is implied) or naked (also implied). It’s her skin his tongue walks on, after all, not her clothes. (Too great a use of adjectives and overstatement are probably Darlington’s most consistent failings.)  Or consider the following where only needlessly appears twice:

Sexy Thong Panties

She buys sexy thong panties
To only please
Herself only.

And does the reader need to know they’re sexy? It’s overstatement that repeatedly mars Darlington’s poetry.

Also, whether the decision was deliberate or simply not a part of their tradition (or language), Japanese poets never made use of like or as. The idea of the simile was there, but was handled far more subtly and to greater effect. Unfortunately, the simile is all too frequent in Darlington’s poems. [Note to western poets: Haiku aren’t glorified similes. Don’t write simileku]:

His Raising Blade

His raising blade
Cutting through; like shears –
Through her wilted flower.

(There again, through needlessly appears twice.)

A bit like a broken clock though, Darlington gets it right every now and then:

Stirred by Moonlight

Stirred by moonlight
The afterglow of sex
Glistens

This is actually quite good. There’s a play on the notion of afterglow that works nicely with moonlight. If only she had written more like this.

However, in fairness to Darlington and having written all this, I think it’s worth pointing out that the book is a record of her sexual awakening. As she points out in the first sentence of her Forward: “Not to [sic] long ago, I shunned myself from erotic pleasure. ¶ Not only did I find it dirty, filthy, downright skanky and vulgar – but degrading as well… ¶ Then, through my greatest despair, came the union of my lover. He showed me that through lovemaking and experiencing of such erotic explosions, that sex wasn’t something to be ashamed of, yet something to be celebrated and explored.” My heart goes out to her. Anyone brave enough to publish a book like this and to share their erotic life with other readers deserves some praise.

If you’re willing to set aside literary expectations and willing to read the book as a kind of awakening and erotic autobiography (in a series of three line poems) then I highly recommend it.

• The Book About 8 by 5. Good paper. Readable. No page numbers. No index. Sans serif font.
• Comparisons This book compares to Seduction in the 1st Degree: A Collection of Erotic Poetry, by Lisa Marie Candield. The poetry may be amateurish in both, but if one’s willing to trade that for exuberance, then both books beautifully compliment each other.
• You and your Lover Maybe you’ll be inspired?
• Embarrassment Be prepared to explain yourself if you happen to leave this on the coffee table, but then maybe that’s a good thing.

Sex ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Art N/A
Romance ♥♥
Look & Feel ♥♥♥♥
Poetry ♥♥
Index N/A

The Poetry of Sex
Edited by Sophie Hannah

Finally, a title that says it and means it. In case you were wondering, this is indeed a book of poetry about sex. And to keep things short and sweet: I consider this to be one of the best anthologies available. Without hesitation, I rank it among my other favorites: intimate kisses; Passionate Hearts; The Erotic Spirit; The Best American Erotic Poems.

The editor, Sophie Hannah, is delightfully playful in her introduction, fully aware that her selection is weighted toward the actor Daniel Craig (you’ll just have to read it). Compare Hannah’s playfulness to the starched-underwear snootiness of Peter Washington’s Everyman collection: Erotic Poems (if you want to ‘compare and contrast’). Hannah has no problem with the pornography that is, much to the apparent shock of many a literary editor, the defining attribute of sex and erotica.

The book is divided into sections with the headings:

• ‘So ask the body’
• ‘Also those desires glowing openly’
• ‘A night plucked from a hundred and one’
• ‘All our states united’
• ‘But your wife said she’
• ‘What’s in it for me?’
• ‘Oh right. You people don’t remove that bit’
• ‘God, to be wanted once more’

Each section has about 19 or 20 poems, and that adds up. Not an inconsiderable collection. The poems range from Catallus, though Shakespeare, and to contemporaries like Hannah herself, Rubbish at Adultery, and Sharon Olds (who, though I don’t much care for her mainstream poetry, easily writes some of the best erotic poetry around). I suppose what differentiates Hannah’s collection from the other anthologies is her sense of humor. Though there’s only so much scope for that preference in pre-20th century poetry, she nevertheless finds some choice nuggets. In her contemporary choices her nose for the humor in erotic literature really shines:

Their Sex Life
A.R. Ammons

One failure on
Top of another

Or this poem by Irving Layton:

Bicycle Pump

The idle gods for laughs gave man his rump;
In sport, so made his kind that when he sighs
In ecstasy between a woman’s thighs
He goes up and down, a bicycle pump;
And his beloved once his seed is sown
Swells like a faulty tube on one side blown.

But I also don’t want to give the impression this anthology is just for laughs. It’s not. The difference is in allowing that sex isn’t always about overheated stares, cataclysmic orgasms or the ecstasy of “spiritual”, quote-unquote, unions. Sometimes sex is just sex—fun, funny, and as dirty as you want it to be. It’s books like this that persuade me that all the best writing of the latter 20th and early 21st century is in erotica. The rest, in my opinion, is largely a morass of mediocrity.

• The Book About 7 by 5. Good paper. Readable. One poem per page. Nice font. The best of index of any erotic anthology to date: Index of Poets, First Lines and Titles. I mean, to all the others: How hard is that to do?
• Comparisons This book belongs on your bookshelf alongside intimate kisses; Passionate Hearts; The Erotic Spirit; The Best American Erotic Poems.
• In Translation One or two from the antiquities.
• You and your Lover Got a poem you want her to read? All you have to do is remember the poet, the title or the  first line.
• Embarrassment Only keep this on the coffee around toddlers who can’t read titles.

Sex ♥♥♥♥♥♥
Art N/A
Romance ♥♥♥♥
Look & Feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥
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The Literary Companion to Sex
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

This is a book published in 1992 and I’m not sure why I haven’t gotten round to reviewing it until now. It’s easily one of the most comprehensive anthologies of not just poetry but of sex and erotica in literature of any kind. In other words, you’ll find not just passages of poetry but passages from the Bible, Drama, Elizabethan pamphlets, short stories and novels. At 415 pages, there’s a wealth of material grouped, as the introduction puts it, into “five wide periods”:

• The Ancient World
• The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
• The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century
• The Nineteenth Century
• The Twentieth Century

Among other luminaries, you will find the earily 20th century’s great egotist, Frank Harris. Going back to the ancient world you will read passages from Aristophanes, Ovid, Terence, and Apuleius. Selections from the Middle Ages include a literary passage from the Chinese author Wang Shih-Chen but are mostly limited to examples from the English. The author, in the forward,  suggests a reason for this. She writes:

“The manual type of book can be seriously boring. Even at fourteen, I can remember all those ‘yonis’ and ‘lingams’ of The Kama Sutra turning me off, not on, as I perused it under my desk during scripture lessons. It was hard for me to find a likeable passage in either that or The Perfumed Garden. ¶ In the end I decided that my criteria for choosing would be these: realism, humour, or the unusual—preferably all three. It was important to find realistic writing, simply because there’s so little of it.”

Fair enough. I’m inclined to agree with her, though one might fairly ask if her selections don’t reflect her own cultural biases. I’m not asserting they do, but the question arises. Are readers in India turned on, rather than off, by yonis and lingams? — or do they also prefer cunts and cocks in their literature?

Some other observations she makes are, I think, worth mentioning.

On the ancient world:

“The writers of the ancient world, in the main, proved to be the most open and unashamed about sex, although a slightly prurient, shocked tone crept into their news reportage (the sensationalist historians, Suetonius and Procopius). But are journalists of today any different?”

On the Middle Ages:

“The Middle Ages and the Rennaisance, although bawdy, were overshadowed by religion and doom. Conversely, their religious writing often had sexual overtones. The fate in hell of the aduleress in Gesta Romanorum provides a memorably kinky image of tortured womankind that must have provided good masturbation material for pious monks everywhere.”

On the 17th century:

“By the time we reach the seventeenth century, dildoes, and jokes about them, are big news, as are venereal diseases. The Restoration and the eighteenth century provide a period of frankness similar to that of the ancient world. It’s probably the easiest period in which to find good sex writing.”

On the 19th century:

“I knew from the start that the nineteenth century would give me the biggest problems. Apart from some good French literature and Byron, what was I to include? Literature became schizophrenic during Victoria’s reign. Sex didn’t happen in official literature, but it happened nonstop – to an unrealistic extent – in The Pearl and other underground writing. Kinkiness was in. ¶ Apart from mainstream writing and underground pornography, there’s a third tradition in the nineteenth century — one that’s often ignored. Isolated individuals had begun to collect folklore. Writing for ‘the learned reder’, these writers could be a little franker than those who wrote for the mass market, like Dickens. And mercifully, their style is usually of  far higher quality than that of the average nineteenth-century pornographer. These folk tales hark back to older traditions, keeping alive the bawdy spirit of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.”

On the 20th century:

“By the twentieth century we are into mixed territory. I sensed curious affinities across the eras — Apollinaire’s erotic novel with Rochester’s Sodom; one of e.e. cummings’s poems with an anonymous seventeenth-century one; Eskimo Nell and Procopius’s Empress Theodora — another fucker of cosmic proportions. There is also, alas, a great deal of bad writing. Authors frequently make great claims for their own honesty, only to get bogged down in prurience and their own embarrassment. I avoided all passages that talked about waves beating on shores. (That sort of writing’s only permissible if the couple are doing it on a beach.) Still, on the plus side, there is a tremendous range of ideas and experience in the writing of the twentieth  century — everything from bestiality to vibrators.”

And that ought to give you a flavor for the kind of erotic writing Pitt-Kethley has anthologized. If you’re looking for a collection offering literature besides poetry, you can’t do better than this (as far as I know). Consider this the best anthology of erotic literature currently available.

 

• The Book About 8 by 5. Acid paper. Will yellow over time. Readable. Nice font. An index of authors only.
• Comparisons For the erotic connoisseur, this book belongs on your bookshelf alongside the poetry of sex, intimate kisses; Passionate Hearts; The Erotic Spirit; The Best American Erotic Poems.
• In Translation Mainly antiquities, Chinese and some French.
• You and your Lover Not the kind of tome to snuggle between yourself and your lover, but if you’re wondering whether your great (to the tenth power) grandparents liked it the way like you like it, this is the book.
• Embarrassment A high brow addition to your accidentally discovered coffee table collection. Your guests may want to borrow it. Your only embarrassment will be in having to ask for its return — please?

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