Portrait of Old Friends.

Valentine’s Day, with its often-saccharine greeting card verses and glossy commercial sentiments (not to mention its frequent misquotations of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson), is at hand once again, and what better time of year than to give that tricky (and oft-abused) specimen—the love poem—a subversive spin?  I’m not talking about writing penny dreadfuls or anguished emo laments (we are not Death Cab for Cutie here).  I’m talking about defying expectation completely with regards to what a “love poem” is and/or should be.  In a sense, the love poem (as it is known in contemporary popular culture) is very much akin to the ode, in that the tone and subject matter of its address tends to elevate the “you” with the use of high language and often ornate imagery.    The purpose of the exercises that follow are to invite you to write against this sense of elevation while still retaining, in some way, at least a loose engagement with the intimacy, tenderness, or intensity of the close gaze in which the speaker of a love poem might hold the object of his or her affection.  To, in short, write against and across cliché and into something that is bold, surprising, and new.

Prompt: Write an “unromantic” love poem.  Some ideas:

1. Write a love poem that specifically avoids the use of any words or gestures which might traditionally be associated with the genre  (For example,  a sonnet that avoids words like “love,” “lips,” “kiss,” “flowers,” “soul,” “heart,” “tongue,” “forever,” “time,” “youth,” “beauty,” “heat”, “soft,” “blood,” “sun,” “flame,” “darkness,” “arms”).  If you’re stuck, try writing an inversion of a famous love poem to start you out.

2. Write a love poem that focuses the speaker’s gaze on a mundane, miniscule, technical, inanimate, messy, awkward, or even grotesque task, process, or object, rather than on a subject of conventional beauty. (Think: the very famous WCW poem,  “This Is Just to Say,” which focuses on plums; or even the spirit of John Donne’s “The Flea,” which uses a parasite as its primary metaphor)

3. Write a love poem that engages with an aesthetic of sparseness, remoteness, or sterility (both sonically and imagistically), rather than with one of superfluousness.

4. Write a love poem that takes the aesthetic of elevated excess to its extreme, such that it becomes wildly surrealistic, or grotesquely decadent, or even campy (à la gurlesque).

5. Write a love poem that limits its exploration of its subject to only one, non-visual sense (i.e. smell, touch, taste, or sound).

6. Write a love poem that  does not take the form of a direct address (e.g. “I” to “you”).  Or try eliminating the first and second person completely.

7. Write a love poem addressed to an object of ambiguously romantic or non-romantic love (for example, a stranger, a child, a public figure who is known for something other than their beauty or glamour) and which engages with that subject in terms of the everyday or mundane. (Think Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade  with a Book and the Rattle from a String of Pearls” or Marc Vincenz’s “Taishan Mountain“  from LR, Issue 2).

Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus"

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & The Visual Arts” in our posts.  We’re interested in ways in which poetry and the visual arts speak to one another, inform each other’s practices, and blend with one another on the page.  We’ll begin with an examination of ekphrastic poetry, and will eventually move on to explore other areas of intersection – the book as a physical object of beauty, for example, and broadsides and typography (poetry as visual art).  We also hope to feature conversations poets who engage in both the visual arts and poetry, as well as a couple of posts about visionary experimental figures like Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, who pushed the boundaries of text as object.  Our prompts this month will also work in with our theme, and (we hope) will provide exercises that ask you to creatively engage with and perhaps try out some of the topics we’ll cover in our Editors’ Picks and Interview posts.

For this week and the beginning of next, we’ll be focusing on ekphrasis and ekphrastic poetry.  The Academy of American Poets’ website gives what I think is a helpful definition of ekphrasis: “poetry confronting art.” The  idea of the image which confronts and subsequently moves the poet to speak is clearly reflected in what is perhaps one of the best loved examples of American ekphrastic poetry: William Carlos William’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” based on Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.”  In his poem, Williams interprets the actions of the figures in the painting, highlighting the isolation of Icarus’s action in the larger context of the scene — while country people go about their daily lives, herding sheep and plowing fields, Icarus is visible only as a tiny pair of legs attached to an unseen body already engulfed in water.  Only one man looks up to the sky, but has already missed the action.  Williams plays powerfully on the desolate futility that he reads into Breughel’s interpretation of the myth:

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Williams’ poem is certainly a famous one.  But perhaps my favorite meditation on the commonalities between the work of the poet and painter in creating imagery that will resonate in the mind of the viewer or reader is Robert Lowell’s Vermeer-inspired poem “Epilogue,” which I will leave you with:

Epilogue
by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

[Text of "Epilogue" courtesy of poetryoutloud.org.  To read more about ekphrasis, visit this article on the Academy of American Poets' website.]