May Poetry Roundup (and Giveaway!): Poems That Turn Up the Heat
As temperatures climb toward the 90s here in Chapel Hill, I can’t help but turn to poems of desire. I’ve listed ten of my favorite passionate poems below.
For a chance to win a copy of Love Poetry Out Loud, a delightful anthology edited by Robert Alden Rubin, mention one of your favorite steamy poems in the Comments sections — and link to it. It could be a love poem, a summer poem, a poem with a fiery tone, etc.
I hope you enjoy the ten hotties below, and I can’t wait to check out your favorites.
—Lauren Moseley, Algonquin Publicity Assistant and resident poet
1. “What Do Women Want?” by Kim Addonizio
2. “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson
3. “Hades’ Pitch” by Rita Dove
4. “Privilege of Being” by Robert Hass
5. “Heat” by Denis Johnson
6. “Cortège” by Carl Phillips
7. “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare
8. “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken
9. “First Love” by Jean Valentine
10. “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman
Read Lauren’s own passionate poetry in forthcoming issues of The Greensboro Review and West Branch Wired.
Lauren Moseley received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a recipient of an artist’s grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Best New Poets 2009, Cimarron Review, Lumina, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry reviews can be found in The Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, and storySouth.
-
Overall Score
Reader Rating: 0 Votes
Here’s Camille Dungy reading her poem “What You Want.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1gUqePofxI
Rainer Maria Rilke “Love Song.” Not steamy, but beautiful.
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
Rainer Maria Rilke “Love Song.” Not steamy, but beautiful.
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.