love poems: part 1

I used to be pretty hardline about love poems. I took the position that a love poem is really a private gift poem, written specifically for one person. It shouldn't be inflicted on the world at large, because it wasn't written with any intention to communicate with the world at large.

The genre of love poetry, I sneered, generates more banal dreck than any other. Being in love makes people who can't write, think they can; and people who can write, suspend their critical faculties. Attention to craft flies out the window, as does awareness of a larger world beyond their own romantic passion.

So I didn't read love poems in public. Didn't consider them a part of my poetic output, or body of work. I wrote them for people, to people, gave them as gifts, and forgot about them. Poems I wrote about loving someone, that challenged sexism and homophobia; poems that engaged with the politics of who's allowed to love whom, and how, and why, were OK to put out.

Photo: Matt Fitt