|
Enid Shomer’s edited collection All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women is now available from Blair Publishing! Poets in the anthology include Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Elizabeth Alexander, Ada Limón, Robin Becker, Lucille Clifton, among many others. |
Excerpt from the Introduction of the Anthology
By Enid Shomer
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was a dearth of erotic reading material—the “dirty stuff” that all of us, boys and girls alike, eagerly sought. A dog-eared copy of Leon Uris’s Battle Cry was furtively passed up and down the rows of my seventh-grade homeroom class with the “good parts” underlined. Later, we discovered entire books that were steamy--Lady Chatterley’s Lover prime among them. At an age when we were innocent yet starved for information, such a book was a treasure trove, though it often confused and sometimes even frightened us. Would someone lace flowers in our pubic hair?
None of what we read was poetry, and none of it was written by women.
Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf explained to a skeptic that the reason there were so few good women writers was precisely the same reason there were so few bad women writers: that is, there were so few women writers at all. Thanks to the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, the floodgates have been flung open, making available a rising tide of erotic literature. These women’s voices are insistent, determined to share the experience of what it is like to live in a woman’s body. Whether driven by love or lust or both, the poems in this anthology affirm womanhood at the most visceral level, unburdened by shame. They don’t just describe the erotic; they reenact it, capturing in words the variety and idiosyncrasy of sex.
By Enid Shomer
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was a dearth of erotic reading material—the “dirty stuff” that all of us, boys and girls alike, eagerly sought. A dog-eared copy of Leon Uris’s Battle Cry was furtively passed up and down the rows of my seventh-grade homeroom class with the “good parts” underlined. Later, we discovered entire books that were steamy--Lady Chatterley’s Lover prime among them. At an age when we were innocent yet starved for information, such a book was a treasure trove, though it often confused and sometimes even frightened us. Would someone lace flowers in our pubic hair?
None of what we read was poetry, and none of it was written by women.
Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf explained to a skeptic that the reason there were so few good women writers was precisely the same reason there were so few bad women writers: that is, there were so few women writers at all. Thanks to the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, the floodgates have been flung open, making available a rising tide of erotic literature. These women’s voices are insistent, determined to share the experience of what it is like to live in a woman’s body. Whether driven by love or lust or both, the poems in this anthology affirm womanhood at the most visceral level, unburdened by shame. They don’t just describe the erotic; they reenact it, capturing in words the variety and idiosyncrasy of sex.