hilltopics images people features wednesday, february 14.2001 for comments, contact kristielliott at 864-4924 or features@kansan.com
romantic pathetic lessons in lyrical love
by ryan m. devlin * kansan senior staff writer
n
early everyone has written or received love poetry. Often, that poetry is a noble and pure expression of humanity's crowning emotion. Just as often, however, our attempts at love poetry are just plain bad.
A Proto-Mock Elizabethan Love Lyric (for you my sweet...) by Ryan Devlin
It was in a moment of definitive serendipity that, after having just been assigned a story on love poetry for the Kansan, I found a poem. It was unsigned, folded neatly, and sitting under a desk in a classroom. The poem began:
"Something's gone wrong/I can't help but think/Emotions refuse/To show up on ink./This is the last/Poem I'll ever write For the girl who used/to make all things right..."
The work, entitled "The Last Valentine's Day Poem," went on to profess a lingering and unrequited love for a woman who had left the author four years ago.
The poem, for all its attempts at genuine emotion, ultimately failed. Rather than trusting his inner voice, the poet's emotions seemed to take a back seat to lines like: "Four years have passed / And, as all things must/ Her love for me / Has turned to dust."
"Love poetry is the language of the purser," said Patrick Hennessy, Kansas City, Kan., senior and self-professed amateur poet. Hennessy, who counts "No Second Troy" by William Butler Yeats as his favorite love poem, said that most people, and particularly men, had trouble expressing their feelings of love outright. He said they often used poetry as a somewhat distanced outlet for their emotions.
"Part of wooing a girl is telling her how you feel in a unique and honest kind of way," Hennessy said, "and poetry is the perfect mode for that."
So what separates good love poetry from bad love poetry? What is it that compels us to express our love in the language of poetry, regardless of our experience or knowledge of the genre? What should be embraced or avoided when penning a lyrical ode to the one you love? These are the questions I put to my interviewees.
Hennessy said that most of his experiments with love poetry were done in adolescence and that he stopped writing love poetry altogether when he realized how "cheesy" he was being.
Mickey Arumedo, Lawrence sophomore and veteran of the local poetry jam circuit, said that he had both written and received bad love poetry.
both written.
love poetry.
"Most love poetry is really bad," Argumedo said. "Love involves ignoring flaws in the beloved or in the self, but unfortunately most love poetry is horribly unrealistic and horribly flawed."
Argumedo said it was hard to ignore the flaws in love poetry.
"Most bad love poetry is stunted in form or in length."
Argumedo said.
"It's clichéd — talk of roses, perfection, singing, stars in your eyes— all
I never dreamed a dream so sweet,
As the one lay sleeping on your lips.
The mares of night never rode so
hard,
As they did on that night, that
darkest of nights,
That they trampled on
me as you whispered,
"goodbye."
Love poetry on the Web:
Sporting the mantra, "When the emotion is love, everyone is a poet," this site features classic love poems as well as a place for you to submit your own rhymes d'amour.
- www.lovepoetry.com
- www.hopelessromantic.com
Click on the "poetry" link to view love poems from the likes of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats and Robert Burns.
- Go to the love library to read love poems,
- www.lovingyou.com
classic and submitted, view the Love Poem of the Day, and register to win a romantic getaway for two to the Poconos.
these things should be avoided."
- www.findpoetry.com
Type in the name of a poet or poem to view the full text of the poem you're looking for, or browse the extensive library of poems by author or subject.
these things should be avoided.
Brian Daldorph, assistant professor of English and editor of the Coal City Review,
agreed with Argumedo.
*www.trygve.com/loveguppy.html
A strange page to say the least, but the home of quite possibly the world's best bad love poem, "Love Guppy" by Sam Jones.
“It’s so easy to fall into the trap of repeating the old oliches about love or trying to rewrite Shakespeare’s sonnets, or producing Hallmark platitudes about how much you love that special someone,” Daldorp said.
Daldorph pointed to the work of Kansas City poet Thomas Zwil Wilson as exemplary of what he considered good contemporary love poetry. Daldorph said Wilson's work was very real and specific in contrast to Hallmark's sing-songiness and cliched superficiality.
So what compels us to put pen to paper at the first feeling of love? Argumed, who counts A.E. Housman's "Tell me not here, it needs not saying" amongst his favorite love poems, said he started writing poetry because of his love for a particular girl 20 years ago, but now he writes poetry for her sake.
"You don't know all the answers to what you're feeling. Love is something you're constantly trying to figure out, and poetry is something you can use, if you're honest in terms of what you put on the page, to help you figure it out."
Megan McHenry
Lawrence resident
and poetry jam
veteran
Megan McHenry, Lawrence resident and also a veteran of local poetry jams, said that her first forays into love poetry were trivially inspired.
"They were inspired by the little poetry blurs in the back of Seventeen magazine," McHenry said. "Things like 'love sucks, yeah that's right, to me love really bites.' They were really awful."
McHenry said she had since learned to control her art, and in the process of writing love poems, discovered the key to success.
"The truth is always best," McHenry said. "You don't know all the answers to what you're feeling. Love is something you're constantly trying to figure out, and poetry is something you can use, if you're honest in terms of what you put on the page, to help you figure it out."
McHenry said that she admired Pablo Neruda's "20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair" for their honesty and sensuality.
Ryan Burns, Kansas City, Mo., senior, who writes under the pen name R&B, has a different take on what constitutes good love poetry.
"Bad love poetry is either poetic masturbation or tries too hard to appeal to the multitudes," he said. "Good love poetry, in contrast, finds an intermediary between trying to speak for the masses and mere self-indulgence."
Burns added, "Good love poetry has a center of gravity, and floating around that center of gravity is a
you and an I."
Hennessy said that he wasn't sure what separated good love poetry from bad love poetry but that he knew the difference immediately upon hearing it. He said that he had recently met a woman while on vacation in Atlanta who shared with him some poems she had written to an ex-boyfriend.
"I could barely stand to listen to them," Hennessy said. "They were awful. I wanted to tell her the truth about them, but I couldn't hurt her feelings. She takes her poetry very seriously."
Indeed, one of the risks of sharing a love poem is the risk of the person it is written for finding it awful. Fear of rejection is one of the reasons that most love poetry is never shared, but is instead stashed in notebooks or folders and buried amongst private collections of memorabilia. McHenry said she thought it was important to share what you write with the one you love.
"It's definitely a risk worth taking," she said.
McHenry said she recently read a poem she wrote to a man she met in Oregon, and that the reading was a huge success. "It was scary at first, but after I读它 to him and I saw his response, all my fears just melted into oblivion," McHenry said. Hennessy agreed with McHenry that love poetry, good or bad, should be shared with the person it is written for. "There's a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction to it. You hope that they keep it and that it means something to them," Hennessy said. "There's this one poem that I wrote to this girl when I was sixteen. If I found out that she still had it, man that would really make me feel good."
Devlin is a senior staff writer for
the Kansan. He first attempted poetry at age 15. The poem he wrote for the girl who left him for his best friend was "horrible." He can be contacted at features@kansan.com.
— Edited by Jennifer Valadez
untitled by Mickey Argumedo
To believe in the dream;
to believe in the predestined existence of
soulmates
is to fly in the face of
all that is wicked and real...
That screaming reality which shakes
your soul
and slaps every moment out of
your face
and disjointed time;
A dream, a dream, good for
a spinster's small books
and Hallmark greet-
ings, but something
which makes you
awake
alone and
unloved.
1
---