A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: In the History of Our 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.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

In the History of Our Love - Yehuda Amichai

With this selection, Amichai solidifies his lead as the most represented poet here. And deservedly. (Do "click" on his name on the left column to see why. You'll agree and also see the biographical information on an amazing life.) In this one, the analogy used in the last stanza to convey connectivity and isolation is just brilliant. It takes Donne's "no man is an island" a step further, and that is just a great finish to the earlier lines' riff on permanence/impermanence. There is also no doubt that Amichai is writing from deep experience. It's the voice of a man who has loved well, loved deeply and loved completely.... and, thus, knows also the weight of loss. What's striking to me about Amichai's love poetry is how powerfully and passionately he can write about both that state of grace that is being "in love" AND its aftermath. (Sadly, just calling it a "state of grace" defines it as being a finite interval. And do all "states of grace" inevitably have a "fall"? ) I envy that ability to express joy and sorrow equally well, as my own best writing is skewered towards the latter....
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In the History of Our Love

transl. from Hebrew by Ben and Barbara Harshaw

In the history of our love, always one is

A nomadic tribe, the other a nation on its own soil.

When we changed places, it was all over.

Time will pass us by, as landscapes

Move behind actors standing in their places

When they make a movie. Even the words

Will pass by our lips, even the tears

Will pass by our eyes. Time will pass

Every one in his place.

And in the geography of the rest of our lives,

Who will be an island and who a peninsula

Will become clear to each of us in the rest of our lives

In nights of love with others.

Yehuda Amichai - Israeli

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