A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Advice for Good Love - Yehuda Amichai

(*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.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Advice for Good Love - Yehuda Amichai

This is the seventh poem by Amichai that I have selected. If you've read the others, you should be getting an idea about his "voice" and how strong it is. As I have noted before, to read his poems is to stand in the shadowless landscape of a noon-day sun, when every rock is both sharply outlined yet also shimmering from the rising heat. His poems are those rocks.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Advice for Good Love

transl. from Hebrew by Amichai and Ted Hughes (!)

Advice for good love: Don’t love

those from far away. Take yourself one

from nearby.

The way a sensible house will take

local stones for its building,

stones which have suffered in the same cold

and were scorched by the same sun.

Take the one with the golden wreath

around her dark eye’s pupil, she

who has a certain knowledge

about your death. Love also inside

a ruin, like taking honey out of
the lion’s carcass that Samson killed.

And advice for bad love: With

the love left over

from the previous one

make a new woman for yourself,

then with what is left of that woman

make again a new love,

and go on like that

until nothing remains.

Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)