A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Contradictions: Tracking Poems - Adrienne Rich

(*Depending on the speed of your internet connection, it may take a couple of minutes to load the first time. *)

"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.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Contradictions: Tracking Poems - Adrienne Rich

My selection comes from Rich's work from the mid-1980s, when her reputation was more than solidified as a leading poet and a strong feminist (and lesbian) voice. Born in 1929, she led a conventional life (husband, three kids) until the 1960s, when she found an adult voice ignited by the socio-political changes of that period. (Crap, this is sounding like a college paper...) I first encountered Rich in 1974 through her volume - Diving Into The Wreck - that won the National Book Award that year. She isn't known for her love poetry: her passion is for the "bigger" themes of her struggles to liberate herself (and women of her generation) from the restraints of male-dominated society, but such energy as is diverted to "Love" produced poems with heat. (There is a volume called Twenty One Love Poems that's worth the effort to find and read.) I like this one for its compactness in painting a specific place and time, particularly the line "stopping to laugh at a joke", which says so much about the people and the relationship.
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3.

My mouth hovers across your breasts

in the short grey winter afternoon

in this bed we are delicate

and tough so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

tough and delicate we play rings

around each other our daytime candle burns

with its peculiar light and if the snow

beings to fall outside filling the branches

and if the night falls without announcement

these are the pleasures of winter

sudden, wild and delicate your fingers

exact my tongue exact at the same moment

stopping to laugh at a joke

my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter

Adrienne Rich - American

1 comment:

Colleen said...: I really like the daytime candle's "peculiar light" and the way the outside world is so removed (because the lovers are so wrapped up in their pleasure)...

"...IF the snow/begins to fall...and if the night falls without announcement/these are the pleasures of winter..."

Lovely!; June 18, 2010 at 1:03 AM

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