RFK Jr's porny sins against poetry Rowan Pelling

When I was at university, studying English literature, I yearned to be immortalised in poetry.

- Rowan Pelling

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.

The 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” - the politician in question, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 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 poetry Lizza said she received. He was enraged after learning she had been seduced by the married US health secretary. The verses are pitched somewhere between Harry Styles's 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.” But the line most likely to scar readers is “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest”, which feels like Neil Young has shacked up with EL James's Christian Grey and eloped to Pornhub.