On Emotion/Love in Poetry
I also wrote of the Lisa Robertson book in connection with love poetry: Lisa Robertson brings us the Beloved, the love poem, the “you” by saying, “yours are name’s I’d like to wear in / my lungs.” She suggests a connection between the poet and the readers, something incomprehensibly inherent to each entity, a call to us knowing each other in words. A poem is completely intimate, and we must treat it as such. Why should we shy away from the emotion of a poem? I’m suggesting a step forward from aesthetics, a sense of going deeper into the body of the poem and looking at sentimentality/emotionality/Love with all knowledge that this could fail, the poem could be too nostalgic, selfish or indulgent in the poet’s own idea of where the poem is going. Yet, we must try, because if we can’t attach the reader to the poem using the emotions/ideas that we know collectively, why write a poem at all? What does a poem give us without a sense of carrying an emotion or feeling back with the reader? After the song of a poem dispels, we need to be left with something other than diction. We must etch You in the reader’s ribs, connect the reader inherently to tenderness, symbiotic relationship, synthesized meaning, codependence, an unhealthy joining. A “good” poem brings us into its words, a “good” love poem leaves something with us, in us, a comfort, unease, something alien that resembles us entirely, something more understood than that which is a part of us, something we could not live without hearing.
ETC. ETC. 