If “porn poetry” is defined as poetry that’s supposed to turn people on, then we have no tradition of porn poetry in English. What we have instead is a bunch of what might be called “exhilarating nastiness”: poetry that’s basically a revenge against sex, a way of processing anxiety.

Don’t get me wrong. The material I seem to be dismissing is my favorite stuff in the world. Rochester, Swift, Seidel: they are disgusting and great. I have no real complaints about these guys. They speak to my concerns.

Still, these days, I’ve become interested in expanding my borders beyond what I call “therapeutic art.” My anxieties ain’t going nowhere; they’ll be here when I get back. How about some poetry that comes straight out of delight and high spirits? Poetry that never heard of revenge or consolation.

But allow me to do justice to revenge and consolation. Look at the following piece, not well known, by the Earl of Rochester (1647–1680):

Song of a Young Girl to Her Ancient Lover Ancient person, for whom I

All the flattering youth defy,

Long be it ere thou grow old,

Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;

But still continue as thou art,

Ancient person of my heart. On thy withered lips and dry,

Which like barren furrows lie,

Brooding kisses I will pour,

Shall thy youthful heat restore

(Such kind showers in autumn fall,

And a second spring recall);

Nor from thee will ever part,

Ancient person of my heart. Thy nobler part, which but to name

In our sex would be counted shame,

By age’s frozen grasp possessed,

From his ice shall be released,

And, soothed by my reviving hand,

In former warmth and vigor stand.

All a lover’s wish can reach

For thy joy my love shall teach,

And for thy pleasure shall improve

All that art can add to love.

Yet still I love thee without art,

Ancient person of my heart.

I remember the time I asked one of the undergraduates in the poetry section I was TAing to read this piece aloud. People couldn’t believe the thing was written in the seventeenth century. There was squirming.

I asked the students to describe the tone of the piece, and one of the brilliants said it was the tone that corresponds to the smile on the Grinch’s face when he first conceives the idea of robbing Whoville.

Is the poem’s “revenge” aspect clear? The poet feels the inadequacy/falseness of love patter, the absurdity/falseness of the old deal between the sexes, and the inevitability/truth of “age’s frozen grasp.” He writes a poem that laughs, ha-ha, in the sight of the devil and in the face of this congregation. The whole thing is founded on the writer’s affecting an above-it-all smirk, and one is consoled by that smirk, exactly because it shows it’s possible not to be reduced to despair by all this.

Wisecracks are often so. It doesn’t even matter when they’re not witty. The point is that the speaker was not reduced to silence.

I’m making this sound more gruesome than it is. The poem is delicious; I’m just pointing out that we satirize sex because in part we’re mad at it. And this is surely why Andrew Marvell said that Rochester was the only modern satirist who had his head screwed on straight. (Marvell’s exact expression was that Rochester was “the best English satirist and had the right vein.”)

But.

None of this—none of Rochester in general—has anything to do with the straightforward and generous act of deliberately turning the reader on. English-language poems almost never do this. Any turning on they achieve is quite accidental. Check out your nearest Anglophone anthology of “erotic” poems. They’re written on sexual themes, but they’re not erotic. Rochester will be in there. Marvell’s “Coy Mistress.” Donne’s “Flea” ….

(KEY EXCEPTION TO WHAT I JUST SAID: gay erotica. Somehow that community gets that versifying images and situations designed to induce dreamy desire in the reader is quite sufficient. Everybody else seems to think that it’s not enough to describe a luscious sexy scene. There has to be some “complexity” or spoof involved.)

Traditional Indian literature is different. It has books and books of poems whose only point is to send your mercury to the top of the tube. I wrote a little bit about one such book here. But I also want to mention Kumārasambhava. This was Kālidāsa’s last poem, supposedly. Anyhow, it’s unfinished: eight cantos made of sequences of lyrical quatrains—and one of the cantos simply describes, at immense length, the goddess’s body as she is sitting in meditation, very still, trying to prove something, I forget what. I have not forgotten the descriptions, however. Nobody would.* I urge whoever’s interested to read the Clay Sanskrit Library version, translated by David Smith (New York University Press, 2005).

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* Sample stanza, not from the canto I was just talking about:

Anyonyam utpīḍayad utpal’|âkṣyāḥ

stana|dvayaṃ pāṇḍu tathā vivṛddham

madhye yathā śyāma|mukhasya

tasya mṛṇāla|sūtr’|ântaram apy a|labhyam. The lotus-eyed girl’s pale breasts,

pressing against each other,

so grew

that between them,

with their black nipples,

there was not room

even for a lotus fiber. [Kumārasambhava I.40]