How To Write a Love Poem
Pt. 3: Love & Line Breaks
This week’s post is part of a three-part series on “How to Write a Love Poem.” Be sure to read Amy Pence’s first and second entries if you haven’t already.
As we stood in line at a book-signing, a friend and non-poet asked a young grad student with a Kim-Novak-platinum-twist and a serious mock black turtleneck what she writes about. I loathed the question at her age and still do, so I admired her quick answer: “death, love, and break-ups.”
It’s funny—doesn’t that cover it?—and it’s not. What is (romantic) love but eventual death or a break-up? My last two blogs explored the how-tos of writing love poems, but this one is purely about wonder. The work I love flits between all three of the broad topics the young poet listed, yet always grounds us in the particular. The poet Ocean Vuong is that wonder.
I say “work” rather than poetry because Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous defies its category. It is also lyric poetry; it also appears to be memoir. There’s the narrator’s lucid and naturalistic writing about his love for Trevor, a closeted gay, that covers the push-pull of their relationship and Trevor’s eventual addiction and death. There’s some honest and sexy writing in several scenes as well as the tenderness that the narrator feels for him signified in his reverence for the hair at the nape of the narrator’s neck (a Vertigo moment again):
How could such a hard-stitched boy possess something so delicate, made entirely of edges, of endings? Between my lips, it was a bud sprouted inside him, possible. This part is the good part…Not the squirrel shooter…Not the one who, in a fit of rage I can’t recall the cause of, shoved me into a snowbank…This part, this flick of hair, was what made him stop his truck in the middle of traffic to stare at a six-foot sunflower on the side of the road, his mouth slack.
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