Last week, we gave you a taste of Pushkin the Romantic’s more romantic side. This week, we’re giving you a peak at his more playful side. (Stay tuned for a look at his truly trashy stuff, coming soon.) The following is Pushkin’s early-1800s “Advancing from the Rear”, translated by A.Z. Foreman from his blog Poems Found […]
Not only was Alexander Pushkin the father of Russian literature, he was also a very naughty boy. In the early 1800s, he wrote plays, poetry, novels, essays and also incredibly dirty erotica. In fact, in 2005 some of his adult verses were seized in a crackdown on obscene materials near Moscow. And in 2014, a Russian […]
Charles Baudelaire was the original hipster goth-kid bad-boy romantic (yes, all of those). His provocative 1857 collection of poems Fluers du mal (Flowers of Evil) covered all the good stuff: eroticism, decadence, lesbianism, lost innocence, urban life, wine, even fashion and makeup! Basically, when you want to party, leave Henry David Thoreau’s mid-19th-century nature-loving to the […]
When people think of successful female poets of the 20th century, it’s usually a dead tie (no pun intended) between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Both were gorge, both were students of poet/professor Robert Lowell, both were married with two children each, both pushed sexual boundaries in their work, both suffered from depression, both killed themselves by […]
It’s the bawdiness of some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that stays with you from high school lit class (literal ass-kissing? come on!). But it’s the first tale in this collection of stories told by pilgrims lodging at an inn — The Knight’s Tale – that’s quite the opposite of bawdy: a traditional romance of courtly love […]
Sylvia Plath did for confessional poetry what Kim Kardashian did for the selfie. Wait, that didn’t come out quite right. Sylvia Plath did for confessional poetry what Hunter S. Thompson did for gonzo journalism. Or: she did for confessional poetry what John Stagliano did for gonzo porn. You get the idea. Unlike Kardashian, Thompson, and […]
This epic poem from the Roman bard published in 8 A.D. outlines the “history” of the world through 250 transfomative-themed myths over 15 books. Sexual desire was traditionally described in ancient Rome as a burning flame (not much changes over 2 millennia), so Metamorphoses has a lot of hot imagery. But it’s not all positive. Like a provocative, […]
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is famous for his poetry and essays, and for being a transitional figure between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. He’s one of the most influential poets in the American canon, and is sometimes referred to as the father of free verse. Also, he’s famous for being the author […]
The Old Testament is one racy tome, full of love, lust, rape, incest, murder, and — perhaps worst of all — masturbation (known then as Onanism). If you can make it through all the repetitive and contradictory proscriptions, unscientific explanations, and general millennia-old nonsense, you’ll be rewarded a little more than midway through with the Song […]
Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892, was only the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (in 1923), and she is famous both for her feminist activism and also for her bisexuality and open marriage: her husband of twenty-six years was a self-proclaimed feminist who took on most domestic responsibilities so she […]
This past weekend, the two of us went to see Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields (69 Love Songs) perform at our local summer Spiegeltent. With his deep baritone, a ukulele and an accompanying cellist, he sang 26 songs, which, “for those of you insufficiently on the spectrum,” he informed us at the end, “were in […]
Forget angels and butterflies — the latest trend in tattoos is words. Check out Flavorwire’s roundup for the best literary quotes ever tattooed, for some awesome examples. We also love their feature on celebrities with literary tattoos — did you know that both Lena Dunham and Elliott Smith inked Ferdinand the Bull on their arms? […]
April is National Poetry Month, which means that children across the nation will be forced to pen odes to the color grey, or to their pet, or to some other assuredly G-rated subject. Here at EMandLO.com, we prefer to steam up the windows a bit during National Poetry Month. Sure, poetry can rhyme, it can […]
Our friend Celia Bland, who works at The Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, just down the road from us, recently published a book of poetry called Madonna Comix. It’s a large-format, fine art book that was a cross-country collaboration with the artist Dianne Kornberg; the poems feature the Virgin Mary in various modern-day incarnations: […]
APRIL IS National Poetry Month. So to have your new book of poems be named one of the Books of the Week by Publishers Weekly this week has got to feel doubly good. Thus, a big congrats to our friend Mark Bibbins, whose new book is called “They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill […]
Did you even know there were poets any more? Well, there are. We know one, and he is awesome. He is Mark Bibbins. And he will make you believe in poets again. He will convince you that they are sexy and dreamy and powerful and relevant. His knew book, just out, is called “They Don’t […]
