Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was a World War One poet best known for his sonnet “The Soldier,” which opened with these lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” The New Yorker describes him this way: “Upper-class and stiff-upper-lipped, blond-haired and […]
Bernadette Mayer, born in 1945, is an avant-garde American writer known for her stream-of-consciousness narrative style that draws heavily on her journals. Her poetry about the experience of motherhood was groundbreaking for its accuracy and honesty. Oh, yeah, and she likes to talk about oral sex, anal sex, kinky sex, and why women deserve to […]
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 […]
William Cartwright (1611-1643) was a seventeenth-century poet who was a little tired of all the “minds embracing minds” crap in the poetry he read. In this poem, he claims that love is basically a sham without sex (but that sex without love is still, well, sex). Whether or not Cartwright was fond of seventeenth-century booty-calling is a fact lost to history. […]
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. 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 […]
You may recall that a month or so back, we were in New York City to receive an IPPY Award for our latest book, 150 Shades of Play: A Beginner’s Guide to Kink. While there, we met Marty McConnell, silver medalist in the poetry category for her collection Wine for a Shotgun. When the poetry winners were each […]
photo via flickr April is National Poetry Month, so we thought we’d celebrate by sharing with you one of our favorite erotic poems. This poem by Christina Rossetti is a little more, er subtle than Fifty Shades of Grey — it’s not exactly wank material. But we were in the mood for a classic. And […]
