Melissa.Knox-Raab@uni-due.de
R12 S04 H22
Office
hours: By Zoom appointment
Phone:
183-2162
Love, Lust,
Broken Hearts: The Erotic Impulse in British and American Poetry
Mondays
12-14
R11 T04 C84
From the English Renaissance masters
to the American heart, sometimes in the same poem (“O my America! My new-found
land,/My kingdom, safelist when with one man mann’d”) this course will proceed
historically, starting with Shakespeare, Donne, Johnson, and Marvell and ending
with Billy Collins, Ross Gay, Sharon Olds Frederick Seidel and Patricia
Lockwood. Earlier sources will be drawn from the Internet. Students
should purchase The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
(2008) Ed. David Lehman from the university bookstore.
Requirements: Come to class and do all readings.
Each week, select one poem (or, if it is a long poem, one part of a poem) and
write it out in your own words, as if you were explaining it to someone who has
no idea what it means. You will hand this in, typed and double-spaced, with a
brief title expressing the meaning of the poem. (For example: “Dickenson’s
Lonely Passion”). Every student will teach one poem to the class (five
minutes).
4 April Introduction to the course. Excerpts from the works
we will read. But first, just to give you an idea of how far back the
celebration of the body, and with it, the erotic impulse in poetry goes, here’s
a famous, probably the oldest recorded secular music in England from the mid-thirteen
century: “Sumer is Icumin in”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo
11 April Shakespeare (1564-1616) sonnets, especially “My
Mistress’s Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun,” and “Th’Expense of Spirit in a Waste
of Shame,” and Donne (1572-1631) “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” “The Sun
Rising, “The Good Morrow,” and “The Flea.” Suggested (NOT required) reading: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/john-donnes-erotica. All readings are online.
18 April HOLIDAY
25 April Robert Herrick (1591-1674) “To the Virgins, to Make
Much of Time,” “Delight in Disorder,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “Corinna’s Going
a Maying,” “His Farewell to Sack,” Richard Lovelace, (1617-1657) Song to
Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair,” “To Lucasta, Going to the
Wars.”
2 May Andrew Marvell
(1621-1678) “To His Coy Mistress,” John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
“I Rise at Eleven.” In Lehmann, Erotic Poems: Francis Scott Key, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman (at least SOME of the Whitman. This last one is
long. Notice, in these poems, plenty of Greek mythology (names of gods and
nymphs) and plenty of nature. Alternate Whiteman poems: “Spontaneous Me,” “Song
of Myself XI” (online)
Lehman, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein. If
time, Emma Lazarus.
9 May Lehman, H. Phelps Putnam, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Kenneth
Rexroth.
16
May Lehman, Elizabeth Bishop, J.V Cunningham,
Tennessee Williams, Muriel Rukeyser.
23 May Lehman, Ruth Stone, Robert Duncan, Charles Bukowski.
30 May Lehman, Richard Wilbur, Kenneth Koch, A.R. Ammons, Paul Blackburn.
6
June NO
CLASS—HOLIDAY (But try any poet in the book!)
13 June Lehman, Allen Ginsberg,
David Wagoner, Anne Sexton.
20 June Lehman, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, John Updike.
27 June
Lehman, Mark Strand, Ted Berrigan, Russell Edson,
4 July Lehman, Dana Gioia, Amy Gerstler, Lucille Clifton, Frederick
Seidel.
11 July Olena Kalytiak Davis, Sharon Olds, “The Sisters of
Sexual Treasure” and, online, “The Pope’s Penis,
Love, Lust,
Broken Hearts: Excerpts from the reading
Th' expense
of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in
action; and till action, lust
Is perjured,
murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage,
extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no
sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason
hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason
hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose
laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in
pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having,
and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in
proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a
joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. Shakespeare, 1564-1616
Amarantha
sweet and fair
Ah braid no
more that shining hair!
As my
curious hand or eye
Hovering
round thee let it fly. Richard Lovelace, 1618-1657
One failure
on
Top of
another. A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) “Their Sex Life”
Whatever
happens with us, your body
Will haunt
mine—tender, delicate
Your
lovemaking, like the half-curled front
Of the
fiddlehead fern in the forest . . . Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
Lie there,
in sweat and dream, I do, and “there”
Is here, my
bed, on which I dream
You, lying
there, on yours, locked, pouring love,
While I
tormented here see in my reins
You,
perfectly at climax. And the lion strikes.
I want you
with whatever obsessions come . . . Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
You could be
sitting now in a carrel
Turning some
liver-spotted page,
Or rising in
an elevator-cage
Toward
Ladies Apparel.
You could be
planting a raucous bed
Of salvia,
in rubber gloves,
Or lunching
through a screed of someone’s loves
With pitying
head,
Or making
some unhappy setter
Heel, or
listening to bleak
Lecture on
Schoenberg’s serial technique.
Isn’t this
better? Richard Wilber (1921-2017)
A man is masturbating
his heart out,
Swimming in
the hammock of the Internet.
He rocks
back and forth, his cursor points
And selects.
He swings between repetitive extremes
Among the
come-ons in the chat rooms.
But finally
he clicks on one
World Wide
Web woman who cares. Frederick Seidel (born 1936)
I have heard
about the civilized,
the
marriages run on talk, elegant and
honest,
rational. But you and I are
savages. You
come in with a bag,
hold it out
to me in silence.
I know Moo
Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand
the message: I have
greatly
pleased you last night. We sit
quietly side
by side to eat,
the long
pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant
sauce dripping out,
and glance
at each other askance, wordless,
the corners
of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along
the sill to show
a friend
sits with a friend here. Sharon Olds (born 1942)