On Writing Love Poetry

Valentine's Day is coming up fast and I am so tired of reading love poems, particularly on dA. My watcher's box is continually barraged with them; they all have this staleness that would be so easy to dismiss with a little well-placed imagery, a little less cliche, a little more specifics...

Alas, no such luck.

Look, I'm not going to deny you your right to write love poetry (say that five times fast). What I will do is make an earnest plea.


Please don't rely on cliche as your crutch. That includes the following words: lips, breath, warmth, scent, touch, eyes, gaze, body, blood, finger(tip)s, skin, kiss, light. If you can, avoid these words completely. This goes for tired symbols as well, such as: heart, roses (or flowers of any kind, for that matter), Valentine, love letter, and so forth.


Please don't invoke abstracts to make your piece "universal". That includes the following words: desire, love, lust, need, want, feeling (heaven forbid!), emotion, being lost, loneliness, anger, fear, happiness, hatred (especially not "hate," which isn't the noun anyway), god, fate, sadness, perfection, brokenness, and so forth. These do not make your work universal; on the contrary, they make your work shallow because you are allowing society to dictate a very general definition for your work.

Here's where I let you in on a little secret: the universal is possible through the specific.

If you describe (not explain!) what love is to you (or to your speaker/narrator), then people will be able to find specific things to relate to.* If you use an abstract, it is mostly meaningless; its importance comes from society, culture, traditions. People already know what they know. It is more exciting to be shown something new! So give them insight into your unique perspective, don't rattle off something that's already ingrained.

_{* But please don't use this as an excuse to list off a series of specific qualities of that individual to whom it is directed.}


Please read the following:

Excerpt from VI. To Clean Your Hooves Here is a Dance in Honor of the Grape which throughout History Has Been a Symbol of Revelry and Joy Not to Say Analogy for the Bride as Uncut Blossom


crush
the grapes for wine.
You cannot imagine the feeling if you have never done it---
like hard bulbs of wet red satin exploding under your feet,
between your toes and up your legs arms face splashing everywhere---
It goes right through your clothes you know he said as we slogged up and down

in the vat.
When you take them off
you'll have juice all over.
His eyes moved onto me then he said Let's check.
Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay

and he licked.
Licked it off.
Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared
it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking. Diving.
Tongue is the smell of October to me. I remember it as
swimming in a fast river for I kept moving and it was hard to move

while all around me
was moving too, that smell
of turned earth and cold plants and night coming on and
the old vat steaming slightly in the dusk out there and him,

raw juice on him.
Stamens on him
and as Kafka said in the end
my swimming was of no use to me you know I cannot swim after all.
Well it so happens more than 90% of all cultivated grapes are varieties of

Vitis vinifera
the Old World or European grape,
while native American grapes derive
from certain wild species of Vitis and differ in their "foxy" odor
as well as the fact that their skins slip so liquidly from the pulp.

An ideal wine grape
is one that is easily crushed.
Such things I learned from the grandfather
when we sat in the kitchen late at night cracking chestnuts.
Also that I should under no circumstances marry his grandson
whom he called tragikos a country word meaning either tragic or goat.


_{Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband, pp. 29-30. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.}


It is not a perfect poem, but there are many things that it does well. The language has a great sense of interpretability---even though it is so specific---from the loaded hints at sexuality through describing the plants, to such tiny details as the double entendre at the end with "tragic or goat," which evokes thoughts of heartbreak alongside a hint at the old-world satyrs.


Now, this all sounds very challenging. What, write a love poem without even using the word "love"?! But challenges are healthy.

So... go forth. Love strongly and write powerfully, and please do mix the two.




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