When I spot W.S. Merwin’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair at my local used bookstore, I buy two copies. One for me, and one for my beloved. I’m still fishing around for a topic for my monthly blog, and here it is. One book now ready for marking. The other, for giving. But then: What do I know about writing a love poem?
First thought: Well, nothing.
Second thought: Oh, wait. At our first meeting, I did what I’ve never done: I gave my date my 2nd book of poems, Armor, Amour. We talked at the coffee shop, went home separately, and surprise: he called me that evening. I read your poems, and they’re hot. I’d like to come over. What’s your address?
I must tell my publisher/editor that the beautiful format for the book—creamy pages that open lengthwise to reveal my concatenations, strings of words that felt like O’Keeffe paintings as I wrote them—sparked a beautiful relationship that has inspired me to write more love poems. Thank you, Sandy Meek and everyone else at Ninebark Press!
As I re-read Neruda’s slim volume (I gave my last volume to someone else, of course), written when he was only 19, I see hallmarks of the best love poems:
Have a beloved that you feel passionate about and speak intimately to that subject. A person? Not really—maybe your love is mythic. Maybe it’s not human (more on that in Part II). For Neruda, his love was but an icon of what he wanted love to be. His poems arrive from a youthful and elemental loneliness and are about longing for two women, apparently, that he cannot have. He writes in his first poem “Body of a Woman”:
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
Love object = woman as weapon? Not quite kosher these days, but an essential oxymoron that survives.
Make the love fantastical. Neruda studied French and the symbolists. He’s been placed in the Modernismo movement because of his sensuous language and audacious imagery that invokes the spiritual. In his sixth poem, Neruda proclaims:
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.
This may be a matter of taste, but when time starts galloping across the page, I’m all in. As the poet Olga Broumas once taught me: Noun your verbs, and verb your nouns.
Make the whole world animate. Every poem rocks with personification. The human is the world, and the world is human. In “White Bee,” he writes:
Here is the solitude from which you are absent.
It is raining. The sea wind is hunting stray gulls.
The water walks barefoot in the wet streets.
From that tree the leaves complain as though they are sick.
Know that it’s your desire that makes the world of the beloved. Neruda has constructed his love from fragments, which is all we have:
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in the letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
(from “Every Day You Play”)
And finally—at least for Part I—thrive on contradictions:
Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,
lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once, …
Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves,
your parallel body yields to my arms
like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul,
quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.
(from “Drunk with Pines”)
Now brace yourself. In Part II, as Whitman says, I will contradict myself. Although Neruda won the Nobel Prize, his poems are just one way to write a love poem. There are other ways. For instance, a good love poem shouldn’t be fantastical, it should be earthy. And second, not to psychoanalyze Neruda, but if you’ve idealized your beloved, you’re in big trouble.
In Part II, I’ll look at the works of poets Ocean Vuong and Gregory Fraser, among others. If you know of a good love poem, please… pass the title on in the comments.