Review by New York Times Review
Verse rousing and raunchy, by American poets old and new. DAVID LEHMAN'S anthology "The Best American Erotic Poems" is actually two anthologies. The first is a sampler of faultless poems about sex by dead Americans like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens. There are some nice, smart, surprising choices: William Carlos Williams's "Young Sycamore" rather than his better-known "Queen Anne's Lace," and Frost's savage poem "The Subverted Flower." A few dead Americans famous for doing things other than writing great erotic poems, like Francis Scott Key and Emma Lazarus, make an appearance; their poems are neither great nor really very erotic. As with many anthologies, you can't believe the exclusions: nothing by Marianne Moore? No H.D.? What about Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos"? Now that's a great, even a really great, poem, and, as its title suggests, it's also pretty erotic. Does America truly possess, as Lehman claims, a "vital ... tradition of erotic poetry"? Not on the evidence of this lop-sided book, which devotes three-quarters of its pages to verse written in the last 50 years, an era when, as Lehman puts it, "hormones reign and sex sells." Contemporary poets have written excellent erotic poems, and some of them are included here: "I see a Man," by Carl Phillips; "The Couple," by Mark Strand; "The Encounter," by Louise Glück. But you would learn more about eros, and more about poetry, if you read any single volume by any one of these poets, or by James Schuyler or Paul Muldoon; single poems in anthologies (Lehman allows only one poem per author, with the baffling exceptions being Emily Dickinson and Olena Kalytiak Davis) cannot possibly convey a great writer's force. Can it be that William Wadsworth's or Paul Violi's best erotic poems are better than Frank O'Hara's second or 10th or 50th best? I'd like to see someone make that case. It's good to encourage people who otherwise wouldn't read older poems to take a little Hart Crane with their Mark Doty, but it's odd to leverage a few old names merely to inflate the value of the new ones. And it's hard to know what Lehman means by "best" even in reference to the last 50 years. How can a single, minor, posthumously published poem by Elizabeth Bishop, "It Is Marvellous ..." stand in for her entire career? (What about "The Shampoo" or "Crusoe in England"?) Why is there no poem by John Ashbery, that most intimate and cunning poet of desire, or by Frank Bidart, who wrote a whole book called "Desire," or by Henri Cole or Lucie BrockBroido, poets whose work is saturated by thwarted eros? These choices feel deliberate, and Lehman ought to justify them, especially when precious space is devoted to John Updike's "Fellatio," perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject, which begins (reader, I kid you not): "It is beautiful to think/ that each of these clean secretaries/at night, to please her lover, takes/ a fountain into her mouth." Ours is an era of plentiful but repetitive erotic writing, an age of "copper-lidded eyes" and "green eyes flecked with yellow," of a "backbreaking orchid" and an "orchid boat," of hyperlegible Freudian metaphor (silos and fountains, copper pipe and cowboy hats) and its counterpart, the forensic, literal overcorrection (aureoles, Formica countertops and AA batteries). The body parts alone oppress you: lips, testicles, shoulders, eyes, over and over again until you would rather inhabit some spirit realm where bodies are outlawed. Theme-based anthologies have the unintended effect of making poets seem trapped by their subjects: there is no more variation among poets in this book than there would be in a book called, for example, "The Best American Patriotic Poems." Individual poets shouldn't be blamed, though poems like Updike's or like Dean Young's "Platypus" ("I want to watch your face contort/like bacon as it fries") are bad by cosmic design, not individual choice. Lusty poems by straight men are, in our era, usually prone to failure - though a cat lover might appreciate the literary power, lost on me, of Dana Gioia's "Alley Cat Love Song," which begins "Come into the garden, Fred,/For the neighborhood tabby is gone." But the real problem is anthologies. The many young poets represented here, most of them (Lehman makes a point of this in his introduction) young women, seem much less original than they would if encountered on their own terms. In a magazine, I might like a post-crab-boil sex poem about (ouch!) the sting to one's "sweet meat" from bay seasoning on a lover's fingers. Here it feels no different from the dozens of other poems that make raunchy metaphors out of unlikely foods, weird animals and western topography. If you find yourself in a book with an orchid on the cover, its petal languid and its pistil looking ready for action, it is really best to have written an anti-erotic poem like A. R. Ammons's bleak two-line "Their Sex Life" ("One failure on/Top of another") or Jill Alexander Essbaum's funny "On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica" ("She stood before him wearing only pantries/and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze"). Or do as W. H. Auden had the foresight to do: write something really filthy. His poem "The Platonic Blow" is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester - I can't even talk about it here. Let's just say it makes mincemeat of Updike's dainty secretarial fellatio. Anthologies like this one are best viewed as contests (best metaphorical labia! best profane blazon!), and dear old Auden wins this one by a knockout blow. Dan Chiasson is a poet and literary critic. He teaches at Wellesley College.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lehman's cheerfully eclectic, determinedly accessible and defiantly sex-positive collection-a savvy extension of his successful Best American Poetry franchise-marches from an unlikely beginning ("On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath" by Francis Scott Key), past Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, through the modernist era (Conrad Aiken's truly sexy "Sea Holly") and on to the present, where poets male and female, gay, straight and bisexual, describe bodies and pleasures in an array of verse forms. Sestinas abound; Lehman also finds a villanelle, a pantoum, a brace of sonnets and, not surprisingly, lots of swinging free verse. Lehman's best choices give off both heat and light: Dennis Cooper remembers the aches of eighth grade; Maggie Wells's "Sonnet from the Groin" approaches her own sex organs with bounce and honesty; and Bernadette Mayer's echoic couplets in "First turn to me..." evoke the lucky days at the start of a great romance, when sexual wishes are commands. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
