But really, what is love? - Robert Creeley and Kim Konopka

I keep rereading the first poem of “For Love” but I can’t seem to make any conclusions about what is going on. I was going to choose a different poem to discuss, but my confusion seemed in part what this poem is about. 

The speaker (which I assume is Creeley) says all/ that I know derives from it teaches me.” The speaker is indebted to love and cannot escape its presence. Even though his knowledge comes from love, he can’t seem to fully grasp what love is and what it does.

As the reader, I feel that I am also chasing down a meaning too complex to name. This effect in part comes from the speaker referring to love in many different ways. When referring to love, the speaker users the pronouns “it” and “you” with metaphors mixed in between, thus making it difficult to understand what this love is. One of my favorite stanzas is when the speaker changes his mind and wrestles with how to refer to love: If the moon did not…/No, if you did not/ I wouldn’t either, but/ What would I not// do,

Love cannot be encompassed in definitive metaphor. But, the mixture of vague references also indicates that maybe love isn't the sole subject of this poem. I assume love is a primary subject, but the title “For Love” is followed by the dedication “for Bobbie.” So I’m left wondering if there are moments when Bobbie or a figurative lover is the subject.

So, rather than being a poem that definitely tells the reader what love is, the speaker seems in the process of deciphering love.  The enjambment across stanzas adds to this effect by mystifying when one thought ends and a new one begins.  “Let me stumble into/ not the confession but/ the obsession I begin with/ now. For you// also (also).” Placing “for you” at the end of the stanza reiterates the obsession while introducing the new thought of the next stanza.  

I can’t pin the exact feeling of this poem, but the speaker experiences of vastness and self-awareness carries over to me as the reader. In contrast, many love poems give specific metaphors or anecdotes to theorize about what love is.  Kim Konopka’s poem “I Want” is an honest and relatable poem that forgoes vagueness in favor of specific examples of daily love. The speaker isn’t caught in a self-aware search of how love consumes her; rather, she is focused on her desire to serve and love the other person in the tangible present.

I Want 

by Kim Konopka

I want

to shove my clothes
to one side of the closet,
give you the bigger half.
Quietly I’ll hide most of my shoes,
so you won’t know I have this many.

I will
rearrange furniture to add more,
find space on my shelves
for your many books,
nail up the placard that says
poets do it, and redo it, and do it again.

I want
to share a laundry basket,
get our clothes mixed up,
wait for the yelling
when my reds run wild
into your whites
turning them a luscious pink,
your favorite color of me.

I will
move my pillow
to the other side of the bed,
lay yours next to mine,
your scent on the fabric
always near me,
even on nights you’re away.

I will
buy a new bureau to hold your
thousand and one black socks,
find a place for all those work boots,
the ones I refer to as big and ugly.

I want
more pots and pans to wash,
piles of them leaning high
from late night meals
cooked naked and drunk,
red wine pouring into
a sauce of simmering
tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil,
kisses bitten between bites,
and platefuls of our late hours,
stacking up into dawn.

I want
to stock cupboards, closets, and pantry,
fill the house with us.
I want to gain weight with you
because our love,
our love makes me fat.

Bonus: Bo Burnham's song "Love is" is filled with specific silly and offensive images of love. He is a musical comedian with an affinity for shocking statements, so heads up. 

Colliding Worlds - Adrienne Rich and Henri Cole

“Poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so. ”

—C. D. Wright

I love the intimacy of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, especially in the ways she invites the reader into her poems. The opening of “Shooting Script” brings the reader inside the poem by creating an image of conversation: “We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.” This complex metaphor indicates the reader and the language of the poem are situated in a conversation.

While the poem opens with a relational metaphor, the language of the poem shifts back and forth between isolation and conversation. The content of the poem creates a sense of movement by shifting between the ideas of dialogue verse monologue. Rich uses nature imagery such as the hermit penetrating a shell to contrast the themes of monologue and dialogue, inside and outside, isolation and community.

Each line of the poem hinges on the idea of an endless conversation established with the first line of the poem. Grammatically, the lines after the first full sentences are appositives that flesh out what exactly is this "endless conversation." The conversation is sometime intimate and effective like the relationship between the wave and the rock: “The wave changed instantly by the rock; the Rich changed by the wave retuning over and over.” The cyclical imagery appears again as the waves are described as endlessly returning to the rock.  

However, this endless conversation also incorporates moments of waiting. Rich uses the image of an empty shell to illustrate how waiting for monologue to become dialogue is part of the cycle of language: “Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.” The inside of the shell is separate from whatever may enter to create the “wheel of endless conversation” (In this poem, the hermit crab is what enters to create dialogue). Throughout the poem, the shell is characterized by the way it waits for someone to enter its inner world. Rich compares the shell to “a monologue that waits for one listener.” These rich metaphors make this first poem is a perfect opening for “Shooting Script” as it captures the themes of language and inner and outer worlds that appear throughout the rest of the poems.

Henri Cole’s poem “Gravity and Center” uses an honest and intimate tone similar to Rich’s poetry. The speaker apologizes for not being able to say “I love you,” and struggles with his desire of the “inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man.” This desire is coupled with the desire of freedom and “the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond.” This poem captures the intense, yet impossible, desire of our inner feelings to commune with outer world, "the sound of water poured into a bowl." 

“Gravity and Center”

Henri Cole, 1956

I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say

you love me. The words, like moist fingers,

appear before me full of promise but then run away

to a narrow black room that is always dark,

where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,

devouring the thing I feel. I want the force

of attraction to crush the force of repulsion

and my inner and outer worlds to pierce

one another, like a horse whipped by a man.

I don’t want words to sever me from reality.

I don’t want to need them. I want nothing

to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,

or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,

or the sound of water poured into a bowl.

For extra fun:

Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Outer—from the Inner” also uses the image of a wheel as she writes about seeing the unseen.  

See also the poems by Lars Gustafsson to further explore this theme.

Rivers that Remain: Langston Hughes and Tess Taylor

I remember feeling moved by Dr. Smith-Mckoy’s reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at the recent African-American read-in.  Her reading did justice to the fluid form and the intimate tone of the speaker. The speaker feels connected to rivers that are “ancient as the world and older than the/ flow of human blood in human veins” and connect the speaker with African-American history and heritage (line 2-3).  By recalling rivers like the Euphrates, the speaker acknowledges the African history reaches back to the beginning of humanity.

Yet, the speaker is not just telling the readers that this history exists; rather, the speaker is deeply connected with these rivers as if he has lived through all its history. The speaker can claim actions such as “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” and “I heard” because the impact of this history directly affects him/her. Furthermore, history and heritage not only affects the speaker, but is part of his/her identity. The speaker confesses, “I’ve known rivers” and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”.

The individual’s soul carries the dignity of this rich history, while also experiencing the consequences of corruption.  For example, the speaker recalls: “I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset,” indicating the tension of having a heritage and identity that is both beautiful yet tainted (line 9-10).

Much of Hughes’ poetry is a reminder that history does not disappear; these old rivers are physical reminders that people are deeply connected to both dignified and dark heritages.  This poem tells a different historical narrative (which is verified by physical nature) than what is often told.   

Tess Taylor’s poem “Eighteenth Century Remains”  traces physical objects or “remains” from the eighteenth century. Taylor’s choice of the word “Remains” functions as both noun and verb.  As a noun, the word indicates a literal objects from the past that still exist. As a verb, the word implies these historical objects have action and an operational presence in contemporary society.  

------------------------

“Eighteenth Century Remains”

By Tess Taylor

   Albemarle County

The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.

A pit cut deeper than the plow line.

Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

plantation land mapped field

for carbon, ash, traces of human dwelling.

We stand amid blown cypresses.

Inheritors of absences, we peer

into the five-by-five foot ledge.

Unearthed painstakingly, these shards:

two pipe stems, seeds, three greening buttons.

Centuries-old hearthstones are still charred,

as if the fire is only lately gone.

“Did they collect these buttons to adorn?” But no one knows.

“Did they trade, use them for barter?”

Silence again.

Light, each delicate pipe stem,

something someone smoked at last

against a sill-log wall that passed as home,

a place where someone else collected

wedges of cast-off British willowware.

Between vines, a tenuous cocoon.

A grassy berm that was a road.

A swaying clue

faint as relief at finding something left

of lives held here that now vanish off

like blue smoke plumes I suddenly imagine—

which are not, will not, cannot be enough.