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"Passages IV" - Charcoal and acrylic by Elena Peteva. Now in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I fell in love with it, had my chance to acquire, vacillated, and by the time I decided ..... lost it. Both for its symbolism and my encounter with it as a love-and-life lesson on when heart and eye should out-vote the brain, there could be no other image more apropos. "Love is the universal migraine"wrote Robert Graves in the poem "Symptoms of Love". And, like an actual migraine, it renders us paralyzed and wordless to describe: regardless of the stage (or state) of a "love connection"' we feel as though no one else has ever felt as we do. Since my first "migraine", poetry has been the palliative for its course. Exhilarated or despairing, elated or dumb-founded by an affaire de coeur, someone talented has expressed my feelings better, more vividly, eloquently, and passionately. My goal is to post one poem each day for a year as an exercise and meditation on the subject.
The poems come from a poetry collection accumulated over a life-time of marveling at the sometimes-madness-sometimes-misery of being in love but always always in awe of the mystery and hope, whether as the pursuer or the pursued.
In his poem "Amar" (To Love), which is posted here, Carlos Drummond de Andrade writes of the heart as being a bottomless reservoir of Love. He urges that we must continue to ladle it out, whether after a loss or when that Love has fallen on parched earth, because that's what we are meant to do - nay, we must do. No other poem speaks as much to me in encouraging that optimistic, hopeful view.
Part of my objective for the project is to see how re-reading, selecting, and commenting on so much "love poetry" would affect my own energy, spirit, receptivity, and capacity to love. It led - eventually- to a rumination about Love, which you can find here: “Talking About Love Is Like Dancing About Architecture” .
So, while you await the next lift-off, are already soaring or just barely crawling away from a crash, may these poems - by the gifted and the mad, the famous and the (somewhat) forgotten, spanning centuries and cultures -show you that your anguishes and ecstasies are shared and universal.
Intimations, Declarations, Persuasions, Celebrations, Separations, Desolation: these are the stages of a love affair, as characterized by Jon Stallworthy for his anthology of love poetry. I have followed the same protocol in tagging the poems here.
Harrison Tao March 1, 2010
Since poets may be represented more than once, photos and biographical information will be only with the first posting of a poem by each. This site is quirky for navigating to a particular poet. They are listed in order of the number of their poems that I have selected.
John Berryman (1914- 1972).... His poetry is brilliant wild and he himself a big - and tragic figure in American poetry: another of the "founders" of the Confessional style that committed suicide. I was in college when that happened, vaguely remember reading about it, but didn't know his poetry well-enough then to be affected. This one is one of my all-time favorites, a declaration of love that IS "..fresh as a bubble breaks..". Goes well with a big Burgundy, an aged Gouda perhaps, and someone who expected the usual..... Some of Berryman's poems are dazzling but require effort, as your brain will have to make new synapses for his imagery. (Don't start with the "Dream Songs"!) You must read this one aloud and with passion! --------------------------------------------------
Sonnet 23
They may suppose, because I would not cloy your ear - If ever these songs by other ears are heard - With ‘love’ and ‘love', I loved you not, but blurred Lust with strange images, warm, not quite sincere,
To switch a bedroom black. O mutineer With me against these empty captains! Gird Your scorn against above all this word Pompous and vague on the stump of his career.
Also I fox ‘heart’, striking a modern breast Hollow as a drum, and ‘beauty’ I taboo; I want a verse fresh as a bubble breaks, As little false... Blood of my sweet unrest Runs all the same - I am in love with you - Trapped in my rib-cage something throes and aches! John Berryman - American
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