"Eros seizes and shakes my very soul like the wind on the mountains shaking ancient oaks," Sappho wrote in the 6th century B.C. Long before brain scans and the study of love hormones, poets attempted to define the erotic, to sing it and to lament it. Walt Whitman championed it: “Singing the muscular urge and the blending, / Singing the bedfellow’s song, (O resistless yearning!)” Robert Herrick bemoaned its loss: “HELP me ! help me ! now I call / To my pretty witchcrafts all ; / Old I am, and cannot do / That I was accustomed to / Bring your magics, spells, and charms, / To enflesh my thighs and arms” And the contemporary poet Heather McHugh wonders at its bedeviling nature: "What a thought somebody had! (or some no-body) out of the breathless blue, making us double up like this, half gifted and half robbed." This special event, offered in conjunction with the Philoctetes series, Sextet: Six Roundtables on the Biology and Psychology of Sex and Love, will plumb the erotic from the perspectives of three poets, who will read from and discuss their work and others.

Charles Martin is a poet and translator. His verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was winner of the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets for 2004. His most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at Syracuse University, in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and currently teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program and the Sewanee School of Letters. In 2005, he was named Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

Sharon Olds is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Her first book of poetry, Satan Says, received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second book, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Gold Cell, The Father, The Wellspring, Blood, Tin, Straw and The Unswept Room. Her latest collection is One Secret Thing. She received a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Grant in 1993, part of which was designated for the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. From 1998-2000 she was the New York State Poet Laureate. Professor Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Professorship at NYU.