Hey, it's Major. Today's episode is courtesy of the poet Jason Schneiderman.

Don't worry, I'll return to your feeds on June 12th.

I am Jason Schneiderman, and this is The Slowdown.

Sonnet 135 is possibly the filthiest poem in the English language, and yet very few people know that.

I often find myself explaining that Shakespeare and the writers of his time were generally

very careful when they wrote about religion or politics, but sex wasn't really a sensitive topic

to them the way it is to us. When I teach my undergraduates Sonnet 135, I warn them that the

content is pretty racy. The first time through, they look at me like I must be well wrong.

They don't see anything sex anywhere. Then I explain the slang terms from Shakespeare's time,

and all of a sudden they are blushing as hard as I am.

I won't be sharing Sonnet 135 today. I'll let you explore it on your own, but I will say that

sometimes poems need a little bit of explaining, or not explaining exactly, but a little bit of

background. When I'm introducing poetry to a new class, I'll often give them a packet with a huge

number of poems of very different styles. One of the poems they all find baffling is a poem that

repeats a single word about a hundred times, and I let them talk about what they don't like it,

what they think it's doing. But in the following weeks, as they write parodies of that poem,

they all find each other's work very funny. Slowly, I point out that when they first encountered

that poem, it made them feel like outsiders, and they felt a little bit insulted. But as they

began to play with it, and as it became this shared foundational text, they came to love, if not

the poem, what they can do with it. Poetry doesn't aim to make outsiders, but it can do something

special when we share being insiders. Today's poem requires a little bit of that insider background

knowledge, but I think it's worth it. This poem is part of a series that the poet calls sonograms.

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