love poems: part 2

So I've been thinking about love poems, and my transition over the years from hardline to curious and flexible.

First, I noticed my own inconsistency. Some of the collections I turn to most frequently, especially in times of political and personal challenge, are love poems. Adrienne Rich's Twenty One Love Poems continue to teach me what a true love poem looks like - and how inseparable it is from a true political poem.

Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and The Changing of Seasons, was a talisman book in my 20s. It got me to seriously consider trying formal Western verse structures - but only if I could start a villanelle as she does, like slipping into a conversation:

Lie down beside me if it's good for you
I need to know my need is no disgrace;
I won't stay if you don't want me to.

and wind it with her skill and dexterity through the lovely 3-line rhyme schemes to its ironic triumphantly-anticlimatic finish:

But we avoided that scenario.
A sense of humor is a state of grace.
And I am here and I am going to
Lie down beside you, and be good for you.

I'm figuring out, through this multi-part blog posting, my own politics of love poems. Thinking aloud on the blog - with favorite lines of favorite poems in my head.