On Love Poetry

David Crews
5 min readApr 14, 2020

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first published in Adanna Literary Journal (2012)

“The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, 1908

Once, to prepare a best man speech, I looked up the definition of love, hoping my joy for words might give me the inspiration (and the courage) to stand in front of a couple hundred people to speak about something I pretty much knew nothing about. The dictionary provided the following definition: Love, an ineffable quality or state of being.

Possessing at that age — and, I’d like to point out it was a long, long time ago — such a limited vocabulary I soon found myself thumbing backward through the dictionary looking for ineffable, only to find: unable to express or define in words. How great that was! Not even twenty-four short hours until I’d be mic-in-shaking-hand, sweat dripping down my back, my voice cracked and magnified over the vast distances of banquet halls, and here I was playing hide-and-seek with both Merriam and Webster. But no sooner did the realization come to me: write what you think about love, because they don’t know what it means either.

At some point, we end up at love’s essential paradox: not being able to define it allows poets and artists to continually reimagine it. The love poem, however, more than any other subject perhaps, forces an artist to move beyond the immediacy of the moment. The poet must acknowledge the myriad lyrics pulling one back into the vast history of love, the countless poems that already line the pages and pages of anthologies and collections, while conceiving, at the same time, some way to make love new.

One of my mentors, in a letter, once asked me: What is the difference between poetry which acts like poetry, and poetry which is poetry? What’s the difference between the gesture and the real thing? Ross was, at the time, trying to instill in me the idea that poetry (like any art) must continually sound foreign, must see the subject at obtuse angles, resonate with strange harmonies. Only then, would we be assured our poems did more on the page than simply retell old stories, share the visions of familiar dreamers, and sing the songs we already know by heart.

“The woman of deep song,” Lorca wrote, “is called Pain.” Love does not link individuals to a common understanding of the human condition. Love is an ideal. Which is why at every juncture, it must at all costs deny sentimentality, otherwise it fails to speak its inherent truth: what binds all people is pain. This dialectic returns me continually to love’s end, how in order to truly write love, to know what it means to love, perhaps we must first feel the absence of love.

Perhaps the best thing a love poem can do is show us how fragile and fleeting our desires, how quickly and easily love leaves us. Or, to help us understand the importance in cherishing what we love since nothing in life is forever. These thoughts often arouse uncontrollable utterings that spring forth in some of the most compelling love poems. Love as obsession. Love as pitfall. Love as monotony. Love in fear. Love as danger. Love trapped. Love as torment. Love without escape. Love falling.

“Without impediment,” writes Linda Gregerson, “the lover would have no need to resort to poetry.” Maybe the love poem must remain as mysterious as love’s own interworkings. Maybe the love poem means to show us the parts of ourselves from which we often shy away. Though how to put into words the heart’s condition? The love poem must simultaneously picture desire and personify fear. It must lay claim to the joy of love while hinting at its vast loneliness. It must be obsession as much as disillusionment. It must usher us toward a sense of completeness, right before it deceives us in its transitory nature to disappear. It must bring us into the immediacy of the moment, while reminding us of the vast empty space of eternity.

Of course, I write all this, still knowing so little about love and the love poem. So carefully, I then, listen to the sentiment of others. Once, at a reading, W. S. Merwin looked up for a moment to preface his next poem and said, “It’s not what you love, but how you love it.” Merwin’s wisdom speaks to the heightening sense of control many of us feel in our daily lives. That intense grasp of which we keep hold over what it is we love. Thus, it becomes the object itself, the end of our desires that maintains significance, finally superseding the actual act of loving. And in so doing, we miss the mark.

In order to bring to the page the love poem’s essential ineffability, in order to insure we neglect sentimentality, neglect writing poems that act like poems, we must somehow give voice to how we love, the individuality of experience that each of us hides, how love consumes our entire sense of being, how love climbs into our bodies and shakes the leaves until they fall, how love wraps and traps us in our own sense of longing and distance and desire. So the love poem edifies us: to truly love means we must first love enough to let go.

Think of Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Kiss. Think of the kaleidoscopic color, the strength of an embrace, the melting of forms into a oneness. (All perhaps beautifully romantic.) But this joy does not come without jeopardy. It does not come without precipice, a potential fall. It does not come without the vast golden void that surrounds and reminds us of time’s undefinable future.

(after Gustav Klimt’s painting)

What’s under those robes? How is her neck
not broken? And some I know
would not like her on her knees.
But her face. In all this symbolism
and color — the precipice of black-eyed susans
and blue flax and (what must be) cosmos
(too dark for showy primrose), all the yellow
or gold, god, whatever, call it honey
and the washings of daytime stars — your face.
I know that red of your cheeks, the frame
of your eyes (like parentheses)
and your eyes
how they open in the morning (like iris).
When I think of kissing your mouth
the scent of wildflower in a field’s far distances
and when my hands pull your head into mine
your hair like grass.
It’s somewhere between vista and horizon
air, dirt. Please open your mouth
there are worlds spinning beneath our feet
my fingers tremble, space
sinks, the pines calling.

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