A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Sonnet 36 – (Keep your eyes open when you kiss) - John Berryman

(*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.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Sonnet 36 – (Keep your eyes open when you kiss) - John Berryman

Another selection from John Berryman's sonnets has been long overdue. For some background, the 115 poems, written in the 1940s and in one volume, were a lineal account of a love affair and not published until the mid-1960s. To me, they are on a par with Neruda's, sharing a richness and passion of expression that is dizzying. Both are to be read aloud and large, be it in front of the loved one as declarations or alone, as lamentations. Either way, they are bold and cathartic, with wine or whiskey, day or night. Sometimes, the syntax in Berryman can sound "Yoda-ish" by its placement of nouns and verbs, and it takes a little bit of effort to "get" all he is doing with language. But the prize.... the prize when you do is so satisfying that you'll be ashamed of having complained. Here, in this early one in the arc of the relationship, he turns the traditional "close your eyes when kissing" on its head and riffs on it.... while sticking to the sonnet structure. Wow!

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Sonnet 36 – (Keep your eyes open when you kiss) – John Berryman

Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when

You kiss. All silly time else, close them to;

Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue

In darkness me, as I do you again

Instantly we part . . only me both then

And when your fingers fall, let there be two

Only, “in that dream-kingdom”: I would have you

Me alone recognize your citizen.

Before who wanted eyes, making love, so?

I do now. However we are driven and hide,

What state we keep all other states condemn,

We see ourselves, we watch the solemn glow

Of empty courts we kiss in . . Open wide

You do, you do, and I look into them.

John Berryman

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