Love. Oh, love. The rapturous feeling that courses through us when we see someone—or something—that fires our passion, catapults our world, and stretches our eyes and heart into a new way of being.
We all know it, we all feel it, yet when it comes to expressing this most essential of human emotion—such as today on Valentine’s Day—we often turn to poets and poetry.
Susan Leary, a lecturer in the department of English and author of two collections of poetry, suggested that all poetry speaks to the emotion of love.
“Every poem is a love poem, even if love is not explicitly at its center,” she said. “Whatever our subject may be, we wish to take good care of it—to dignify it in our depictions. That impulse is love itself.”
Poets strive and very often struggle to get the words just right, and Leary suggested that every poem is, in fact, a love letter to language itself.
“Whatever we wish to say, we think: ‘How to say it best, how to say it as precisely as we mean it?’ Poetry gets as near to this wish as possible,” Leary pointed out.
Christell Roach, a graduate assistant in the last semester of her Master of Fine Arts degree, asserted that all poetry is conversation and that we use the same language proficiencies, such as making comparison, using similes and metaphors, when we converse.
“Poems imitate conversations—the most intimate conversations we have with ourselves and that we wish we had with others,” said Roach.
Yet to make a poem “sing,” poets accentuate the use of these other proficiencies, such as confidence with using syntax, knowing how to use space on the page, and how to break up a line.
“When it comes to love, emotion, and longing, literary proficiency gets to the heart of understanding that poems are built,” said Roach. “Poems don’t just plop on the page; they’re built brick by brick. And it’s important to have a willingness to take a poem apart to see and examine the pieces to really read and engage a poem.”
She adds that paradox and conceit, an elaborate or especially surprising sustaining metaphor, are important in her poetry, which stems from the Black tradition of call and response in music.
“The paradox and the conceit invite the reader into the poem, almost like a trick,” she said. “It serves as the invitation to see what I’m seeing, to see with someone. There’s a true difference between seeing what someone is seeing and seeing with a person.”
A poem requires both writer and reader to slow down and literarily breathe the emotions. Leary has long considered a poem to be a retaliation against time.
“A poem is revengeful this way, though it enacts that revenge rather beautifully,” she said.
“This is especially true of the love poems I’ve written for both my husband and my brother. The poems about my husband allow me to believe, if only briefly, that he and I will be alive forever, while those poems about my brother, who has already passed, allow me to believe he is alive again,” she explained. “Poetry is astonishing in that it allows one to say, in infinite ways—I love you always.’’
Poetry exists in a wide range of forms, and it seems paradoxical that such an unruly beast as love is often best contained in highly structured form. Some of the most popular and most-often cited as “best” love poems are in the 14-lined, intricately rhymed sonnet, such as Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet XI or Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, 71, or 65.
“Love is often thought to be an emotion of excess and intensity. We simply cannot contain it. We must express it or else,” Leary asserted. “With the sonnet, however, we are given a form for that feeling that helps make it less overwhelming, perhaps more understandable. The sonnet is alleviating in this regard.”
Today is Valentine’s Day, but maybe not too late to pen a poem to someone you love. What suggestions for the endeavor?
Roach emphasized the importance of trying to capture all of the person—the good and the imperfections.
“If someone were to write a love poem to me, I’d want them to tell more than just the things they love because then you flatten me out, and it becomes a very porous picture.”
One of her favorite poems, Mari Evans’ Celebration, captures this sense. While Roach is not sure it’s a romantic poem, she believes the impulse to bring in the whole person speaks to the essence of love.
“Love poems touch on the wholeness of a person, and they’re poems where the receiver can see their reflection in them. They’re seeing the beautiful that someone else sees but also the things we may want to hide about ourselves—such as ‘you’re chewing with your mouth open, and I love that,’ ” she said.
“When I think of love poems, I think of words like ‘anyway’ and ‘in spite of,’ like ‘I love you anyway,’ ” Roach added.
Leary recommended the importance of moving into the emotion and focusing on the particularities and peculiarities.
“Love is a version of attentiveness, so begin there,” Leary suggested. “Begin in observation. Begin in detail. Begin, quite simply, with love.”
