The Best American Erotic Poems – Edited by David Lehman – Book Review

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 lopsided 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 Brock-Broido, 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.”