Knock-Your-Socks-Off Love Poetry
It's Supposed to Be Fun, Man
A little post to breathe some life into Valentine’s Day for one more week.
SONNET (to MK) The way the world is not Astonished at you It doesn't blink a leaf When we step from the house Leads me to think That beauty is natural, unremarkable And not to be spoken of Except in the course of things The course of singing and worksharing The course of squeezes and neighbors The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out And the course of course of me Astonished at you The way the world is not
[The above beauty is by Bill Knott]
In our current world of manic oligarchs playing chess with the Apocalypse, convicted felons reentering the White House, young bros whining like a bunch of wounded hyenas, let’s, for Christ sakes, celebrate love poetry. Not the sappy kind of love poems you inflicted on your high school girlfriend with the usual flower and sun/moon metaphors, but love poetry with some complexity—poems that celebrate love but also realize the silliness of the expectations and conventions we have created around it—expectations that can make some lovelorn seventeen-year-old write the following verse: “Yet we’ll always remember that rainy night/ that phone booth dripping with tears / your rich lips dancing with mine / as apes shrieked in the nearby zoo.” I actually wrote something close to that in 1968 for my rich girlfriend who had just left for boarding school. It should come as no surprise that she dumped me two weeks later, probably thinking my heartfelt poem was a parody, and that I was making fun of her.
My attraction to love poetry came when, in graduate school, I took a course in Medieval literature and was exposed to Arthurian romances and the literature of courtly love. Although I had previously been introduced to comic exaggerated states of bliss in the poetry of Catullus (see my translation and commentary Catullus) and in Ovid’s great book, Amores, nothing equaled the courtly love tradition as laid out in Andreas Capellanus’s masterpiece, often translated as, The Art of Courtly Love, or in Latin, De Amore.
De Amore was written at the end of the twelfth century at the request of Marie de Champagne, the daughter of Elanor of Aquitaine.
John Jay Parry, an authority on De Amore, described it as "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch and explains the secret of a civilization." He is of course speaking of an epoch characterized by court troubadours, an epoch obsessed with the chivalric exploits of knights, often intent on saving damsels in distress. This was the stuff of entertainment in courts around Europe, so, in a way, it made sense for Capellanus to write a self-help manual of sorts. But I often wonder if he had a practical purpose too, because you could probably get kicked out of the “cool” court crowd if you didn’t follow the right love protocols—kind of like being the working-class guy who gets ostracized for using the wrong fork at dinner and talking about beer farts at the local country club.
Literary critics have argued about whether to view De Amore as a description of what was actually going on in the court, or as manual for both the lover and the beloved to follow, or as a parody of how stupefied people in love can become (again, see my translation of Catullus’s poem Catullus). Personally, I don’t see why all these approaches can’t be true at the same time. Certainly, court nobles took the rules of love seriously, and yet it is impossible to overlook the exaggerated tone of Capellanus’s manual. One can only imagine dopey, overdressed aristocrats at the court of Marie de Champagne smiling as parts De Amore were read out loud. Consider the first two paragraphs of the book:
“Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace.
That love is suffering is easy to see, for before love becomes equally balanced on both sides there is no torment greater, since the lover is always in fear that his love may not gain its desire and that he is wasting his efforts . . . . If he is a poor man, he also fears that the woman may scorn his poverty; if he is ugly, he fears that she may despise his lack of beauty or may give her love to a more handsome man; and if he is rich, he fears that his parsimony in the past may stand in his way. To tell the truth, no one can number the fears of one single lover . . . . Indeed he fears so many things that it would be difficult to tell them.”
Some fun, huh? It sounds more like a guarantee of erectile dysfunction or performance anxiety than a celebration of love, which, again, suggests that it is hard to believe Capellanus wasn’t writing with a wink and a nod to the court.
Now all of this became important to me when I began a prose poem sequence of twenty-four love poems, which would begin my second book, titled Miracles & Mortifications. I had decided that I wanted to borrow the obsessive ironic first-person narrator of Ovid’s Amores and Catullus’s love poems, along with the narrative voice of Capellanus’s book—a voice that somehow thinks it can give rules to something that is completely unpredictable. More than anything, I wanted to appropriate the exaggerated posturing of the lovers, the wacky logic of courtship, and the outlandish similes and metaphors that accrue from all of this.
And so I created an extremely self-conscious first person narrator (an alter ego), who follows his lover, Gigi, as she visits the great cities of the world. This Gigi is the classic nymphet of literature, playful yet provocatively dangerous. She’s a woman who, as teenagers (and probably as adults since all grown men still act like teenagers), we called a “ballbuster.” Exciting yes, but, as both men and women know, especially if you’ve dated poets, the price of this manic rush can be excruciatingly high.
From my point of view, in an ideal world, all love poetry should be playful and reading it out loud should become de rigueur as foreplay. I mean, life is tough, so why spend one’s erotic moments laboriously trying to follow sexual manuals that focus on positions, so that sex becomes an intellectual exercise.
The following poems are the last five prose poems of this sequence, which is why the couple ends up “Home,” ready for a little normalcy, but fully prepared to begin the journey again. As I’ve said, these are from my second book, Miracles & Mortifications, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. It is available in my “Collected Poems,” While the Undertaker Sleeps Undertaker Please think of supporting the great work Marc Vincenz does at MadHat Press (my publisher) by purchasing it.
Enjoy!
Cannes
A poached egg without the pocket, embarrassed before the tongue’s eye. Have you ever felt like that? Cagey croissant bars, two baby shrimp cavorting on a bed of artichokes, floating houses, flying fish, and sleek limousines squatting in front of Belle Epoch hotels—a splendid cubist landscape, yet here we are encamped on a beach in moth-eaten sleeping bags. In this take, Gigi’s a nun. Not like a nun, but a real one—at least in her mind. “Nun, the feminine of nonnus—old man.” We’re talking bodily integrity, here! Virginity! What a laugh. I was up early, sucking on my kava kava Think! Bar, drawing a huge smiley face on our hotel ceiling with a piece of lipstick tied to the tip of a bamboo pole. Then I decided to buy a newspaper. Came back to a certain Gigi sitting upright in bed, wearing her plum edible panties and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Sean Penn. She was aglow, people, that’s a fact. Later she explained:
He appeared on the red wallpaper! My flesh fell to the floor. I was stripped by his lightening!... What beauty! What elegance and sweetness! His shoulders, his bearing! Such a peaceful shining face!
Who was I to doubt, though there was something familiar about this ecstasy. And it came to pass… Gigi and I giving alms, warning the infidels to heal themselves, making pilgrimages to the cell of The Man in the Iron Mask—all the time my orchids swelling beneath my cassock, unable to look away from the near-espresso tans of half-naked starlets and hangers-on.
“According to A New Catholic Dictionary,” I warned, “ecstasies as a rule do not last long.” But she’d have none of it. And my last image of these days? Walking on the beach, a morning sea breeze toying with Sister Gigi’s white cotton robe, her Holiness rolling onto her side, and, like a good Christian, turning a pale butt cheek. A miracle? An optical illusion? No, just a tattoo of winged old St. Michael, waving his shiny, righteous sword in my face, his long blond, Nordic locks flaming behind him.
Sydney
The universe expands, we feel its pull, its tug … The day awakens, brimming with brawn. We’re crooked, my Gigi-girl and me, that is, slipped from our moorings. I mean, hungover. Consider last night’s adventure at the Wombat Bar and Grill, our Captain balancing a tinny of beer on his bare belly, farting like a Piper Club. Was this the great shark hunter? The man who rode six-hundred-pound turtles? Who broke a swamp fever by clinging to the body of a dead buffalo? Who kept a collection of exotic monkeys in his cellar? “Bunga, bunga, who’s got the bunga,” Gigi says, showing a bit of thigh through her straw skirt. “For an ordinary couple to have extraordinary sex,” is what she really wanted—thus a tooth extracted from a great white shark captured at dusk, “then pulverized,” she said, “stirred in a glass of tepid kiwi juice.” I wanted a damp terry-cloth towel to wrap around my aching head, but, as it was written, “The day awakens, brimming with brawn….” Three mates on board, all with identical blond moustaches, as if hatched from the same pouch. The Captain’s donning his sharkskin hat, and, at long last, a glimpse of his famous webbed feet. “G’day,” he says, squinting toward the horizon through a pair of leathery eyelids. “G’day, Bonza,” we reply. What can I say, mates? A long day, the ocean turning blood-red for the sake of love. Our return, the Captain’s small craft knocking on the harbor’s dimwitted door. The foghorn weeping like a hero. And let’s not forget that blood-stained shark’s tooth buried deep in a damp pocket of Gigi’s bra—as beautiful and absurd as any glass slipper.
New York
Night, New York all gussied up. So much to do, but we’re afraid to go out. Calf brains, hair from a wolf’s tail, snake bone, even bits of human corpse—ritually laid out on our bed. Love potions, uncooked concoctions to ward off suitors. We’re waiting for a giant ape. “Do I look boxy?” Gigi asks, eyeing her hips in the bedroom mirror. She’s fashioning an apelike man from sugar cubes, setting a pitcher of warm tea next to him. So why are we afraid? Has the young master lost his wits? It was my fault. Sick of puzzling over the lines on my palms, sick of diving into holy lakes, I went to find the tribe who invented zero. I mean, I was searching for The Secret. But we got lost in the jungle, then captured by hard-bellied, coffee-colored virgins, who smeared my body with resin and blew gold dust on me until I glistened from head to toe. Unfortunately, they were hitched to a giant ape, who himself fell hard for Gigi. He tried to hold her gently like a small banana but bruised her egg-white thighs. “Unhand her,” I yelled, reminding him of a basic, irrefutable Rule of Love: “Whatever nature forbids, Love is ashamed to accept.” The last time we saw him he was wearing a giant, silly wreath of orchids around his head, trying to swat rescue helicopters. “He smelled worse than that vampire,” Gigi says, dropping the sugar ape into the pitcher, watching him dissolve. Outside, small aircraft hover, then the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun, and a hairy digit of flesh fingering our hotel window. “Do you think he’s come for my binoculars?” I say, then leap onto the love potions, rolling on my back like a puppy.
Next day, standing near a giant tabernacle of ashes, the ape’s weepy tribal princess speaks to the press. “I would have taken him back with no arms or legs,” she says, “even if he were a stump.”
Home
If there is no Gigi, there is still her name … To be sure, a long winter, but now a spring breeze, like a sigh, carries us to the edge of our sheets. Across the hall, a tow-headed boy moans, tumbling from one clumsy dream to another. Adolescence—rascality, pure rascality! Tempestuated, like the crocuses gazing up in a panic, all too aware of their short-term erections. They know a Big Idea is ajar, our trip tripped. It was all too exhausting, anyway—the hotels, the intrigues. Better to hunker down, mine the backyard mulch for anemic worms, go fishing. Or maybe lie still a moment, contemplate the scars on your feet, the ant-size beauty mark on your bum. The mailman sighs when you open the front door in a silk kimono, but I sigh when you open any door. I swear this before our sharp-beaked lovebirds just now awakening in their golden cage, exchanging necklaces crafted from the legs of a spider; before the sacred shield of Jean de Jean, hanging in our garage next to the bicycle rack; before my yang, growing warm, hard, steadfast. “See?” you laugh. “This is how you get into trouble.” And, of course, you’re right. But I fear our fairy tale is fading—friends coupling and uncoupling in various unseemly ways. So again I plead, “Speak louder to me, mother dear. A bit of pancake, please, I am so hungry,” and you pat me on the head and reply, “Oh, darling, pretty, good, nice, clever, sweet darling. . . .”
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
Great from start to finish, though, er, of course, I am partial to ‘Sydney’
My only successful love poem was written in red ink:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I like peanut butter
Do you skate?
I wrote it for Sandra next door, who, at ten, was older than me but had lots of freckles and a gap-toothed smile that drove me wild. She told me shyly that she liked peanut butter, too.