When I was at university, studying English literature, I yearned to be immortalised in poetry. Who doesn’t want to be told, “She walks in beauty, like the night” or that a lover has “spread my dreams under your feet”? That was before a young man hoping to be the next Byron sent me a mercilessly bad sonnet rhyming Pelling with smelling. I returned it, underscored with red ink.
Journalist and former Politico reporter Ryan Lizza has revealed that when he was engaged to Olivia Nuzzi – a former journalist with New York magazine who has just published American Canto, an account of her entanglement with a man she calls “The Politician” – Robert F Kennedy Jr, the politician in question, sent her naughty verses he had composed during the pair’s alleged online relationship, which began after they met in 2023. RFK has denied having an affair.
I wonder if Nuzzi felt like wielding the critic’s pen on the erotic poetry she is said to have received. Lizza was understandably enraged after learning the married US secretary of health had seduced his fiancée behind his back. The verses are pitched somewhere between Harry Styles’ Canyon Moon and Marquis de Sade lite: “I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth… I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My love.” Although the line most likely to scar innocent readers is “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest”, which feels like Neil Young has shacked up with EL James’ Christian Grey and eloped to Pornhub.
What’s fascinating for lovers of literature is how RFK’s seeming poetic inspiration is deeply rooted in a bygone era: one where men were swaggering titans of eternal potency and women were young and grateful. The preordained nature of things as set out in the novels of big swinging dicks John Updike, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. Mailer even went as far as taking on second-wave feminist theory, like a bull charging a red cloak, in his non-fiction work The Prisoner of Sex. This is not a school of writing where women who dare to challenge “great men” are shown any clemency, they are merely handmaidens in service of male appetites.
Despite these caveats, I am grateful to Nuzzi for brightening dark days with cheap titillation. Even if the episode begs the question whether any of us would withstand the unveiling of our most intimate correspondence, dignity intact. Perhaps it’s only time’s laundry that sanitises the grubby streaks, bestowing smut with the patina of romance. It seems entirely possible that if the French press had uncovered Napoleon’s letter to his mistress Josephine with its exhortation not to wash, “ne te lave pas, j’arrive dans trois jours”, the sans-culottes would have collapsed in unseemly mirth.
It’s hard for casual readers, who exist outside the sacred realm of the poet’s desire, to keep a straight face when reading erotic verse
When I was editing the Erotic Review magazine, the postbag was stuffed with unsolicited filthy doggerel, mostly inspired by the writers’ other halves. Just as the school day starts with assembly, our office days began with reading choice lines to one another: “Your nipples like marron glacé make everything else feel déclassé”, or the immortal ode, “Adonis with a boner” (how I wish I’d kept them all). And there are a few lauded writers whose lines make me snigger. Take the Victorian poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his epic verse of pain and pleasure, “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)”: “Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores, When desire took thee first by the throat?/ What bud was the shell of a blossom/ That all men may smell to and pluck?” There is definitely a hint of painfully-earnest Swinburne in RFK Jr’s power-play lyrics.
The fact is it’s hard for casual readers, who exist outside the sacred realm of the poet’s desire, to keep a straight face when reading erotic verse. There’s something particularly challenging about sexual sincerity with its mawkish entreaty that the beloved submit to the suitor’s entreaties. No one knew this better than the late Sue Townsend, author of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 and ¾, who had her protagonist write to his cherished classmate: “Pandora, I adore ya! I implore ye, don’t ignore me!” It’s often hard to distinguish parody from the genuine article. Who would have thought that smart, funny Jennifer Aniston would write of then partner John Mayer, “You’ve brought luck to love. I’ve been hit by a truck in love” and not disown it?
When I first stumbled across footballer Ryan Giggs’ poem to his ex, Kate Grenville, I was certain it must be the work of a skilled satirist like Craig Brown: “I’m not gonna lie I think of you I dream of you/ Can’t help thinking pulling you was my greatest ever coo [sic]”. If you think this is bad, it’s because you haven’t yet read the heroically awful final couplet: “I’m gonna end by saying you are my love my friend my soul/ And most of all you believe in me, which makes me hard as a totem pole.” It’s also worth bearing in mind that this verse only came to light because Grenville took Giggs to court for alleged assault and coercive control. The former Man U player was cleared, but remains guilty of sins against poetry.
All of which makes it even more astonishing that a handful of greats have written verses that most recognise as expressing something universal in the realm of human desire. Poems that are read out at bedtime, on the radio and in wedding services for decades, or centuries, with undiminished resonance. Words that make lovers thrill to the core of their twinned souls: Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, “love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds”; or Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet 17, “I love you as one loves certain obscure things,/ secretly, between the shadow and the soul.” Or William Butler Yeats’ When You Are Old, “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you”; or Carol Ann Duffy’s “you’re where I stand, hearing the sea, crazy/ for the shore, seeing the moon ache and fret/ for the earth.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee, “I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/ With my lost saints.”
RFK Jr will not join these immortals, but he can at least take consolation from the fact that his former paramour, Nuzzi, is equally guilty of bad sex writing if this extract from American Canto is anything go by: “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes…” In the end, it’s hard not to feel the politician and the political hack were well matched. And that Nuzzi should be thanked for demonstrating poetry is a dish best served cold, preferably on Substack.
Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images