A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Topography - Sharon Olds

(*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.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Topography - Sharon Olds

You can't get more "contemporary" than Sharon Olds (1942- ) or writing that is more personal and touching on some of her favorite themes: sex, the body, family. She is somewhat controversial, but definitely popular, partly because her poems are so accessible and not "intellectual", as she will be the first to acknowledge. (Writing in free verse also doesn't hurt accessibility.) Regardless, it's been "good enough" with academics and critics to win her major awards and teaching posts, etc. I chose this one because there is more playfulness in the eroticism vs. some of her others.
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Topography

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states untied, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Sharon Olds - American

1 comment:

sacco said...: I just want to comment and this one is particularly compelling. Especially since yesterday at a meeting, the group stood up and said the pledge of allegiance and when we sat down, someone under their breath said..."yea, if we really did have justice for all.."; April 8, 2010 at 1:00 AM

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