First Love: Finding your poetry "era" and how to write timeless love poems
Let me compare ME to every living poet who has ever written a decent love poem ever...ouch? --nay...YAY!
This is class 2 of 8 from Shannan Mann’s Forever Workshop “Hot and Heavy: Writing Love & Sex Poems that will Actually Get Published and Have Readers Begging for More”
Comp Lit, ideally, is meant to broaden our understanding of literature by analyzing texts across different cultures and languages. In doing so, as all thorough reading has the power to do, we learn more about ourselves and the world we live in. It’s quite a popular mode of study in fiction. For example, comparing Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children reveals how this style critiques political histories in Latin America and India. Similarly, examining the theme of exile in James Joyce's Ulysses and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being highlights diverse responses to displacement.
Comp Lit fosters cross-cultural dialogue, allowing us to peek into the minds and lives of people all over the world (think of it as an intellectual portal system!) It helps us have some faith that we’re all connected across time and space, with all the histories and struggles and wonderful things we have in common as a species. It also does the very important work of slowly eroding colonial biases and canons by promoting interdisciplinary research. So how does all this effect poetry? Do poetry and academia jive together? Well, let me tell you – they’ve been on several dates and have agreed to be in an open relationship. So, let’s get down to business, folks.
We’ll try out some Comp Lit analysis across five different poets. All five of them write love poems full of sensual and sometimes downright sexual details. But they all originate from different times and cultural backgrounds.
Let’s go read the poems first!
Full disclosure: the first poem I’ve chosen is a piece by Rupa Gosvami (circa 1550) that I’ve translated. My intention in choosing this was not to feel famous and cool but rather to choose a poet not many of you would have heard of, someone from a long time ago that isn’t white and male (Rupa Gosvami identified as non-binary before these particular terms existed) and also a poem that doesn’t originate in English. Also, their poems freakin’ rock.
Alright, below are the poems we’ll comp lit the shit out of. The first step is to read them carefully!
Here’s how we’ll breakdown our comparative process:
Theme/Motif
Tone/Mood
Focalization/Perspective
Language/Imagery
Form/Structure
Context
Okay, a moment of truth. In case you haven’t figured it out yet: I’m a total nerd/geek. A neek, a gerd. Anyway, the point is: I love nerdy shit. Like spreadsheets and tables and pie charts and folders (omg and folder organizing techniques). Anyway, I digress. Here’s a quick and dirty way to easily analyze all five poems together.
→ Here’s a template to download if you want to do this for your own poetry comp lit analysis ←
(Open the doc, then in the left hand corner click file then make a copy)
After you do this for a while, you’ll be able to identify each of these elements without needing the aid of tables and charts (as fun as they can be, I know, I know). The idea is to have poetry concepts and elements at your fingertips. Learn to identify, compare and reflect on them in others’ work and you’ll 100% be able to write a sharper, more original, and conscious poem of your own.
Recommended Reading: Five & Five - By the Decade
Something that helps me a lot in getting inspired to work on my own set of love & other spicy poems is, of course, reading. But I love messing with time. Love dismantling what I think is a good love poem today, placing it in a fun(horror?) house of mirrors that represent all the other times and eras. Which sounds insane. What I mean is, simply put, it’s fun to dive into poems written in culture-defining decades. It can help shake up our creative brains and let the juices flowing smooth and strong.
Okay, I’m doing that thing where I get weird, again. Excuse me. Below are five decades, 80s, 90s, 2000s/Early Aughts, 2010s, 2020s (when do we just start calling them the New 20s?) with five key poems written/published/popular during that era. A lot of these, also, happen to still be popular today. And hey, if you have any that I missed (I mean, I’m just sharing 5 so I obvs. missed a ton), drop your own 5 & 5 recs below!
The Eighties
When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
And I knew when I entered her I was
high wind in her forests hollow
Yes, this is
A noon for wild men, wild thoughts, wild love. To
Be here, far away, is torture.
You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
Fuck you for breaking the mirror and throwing the eyebrow tweezers out the window.
The Nineties
I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.
I like the itch I provoke.
The rustle of rumor
like crinoline.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—
2000s
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
5. “(love song, with two goldfish)” by Grace Chua
But her love's since
gone belly-up. His heart sinks
like a fish. He drinks
like a stone. Drowns those sorrows,
stares emptily through glass.
2010s
Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Please linger
near the
door uncomfortably
instead of
just leaving.
Please forget
your scarf
in my
life and
come back
later for
it.
I move in this house with you, the way I move
in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage
I will give him my body & what he does with it
is none of my business, but I will say look,
I made it a whole day, still, no rain
still, I am without exit wound
I wanted a man
like you to sashay into town and teach me
how to be an aeroplane in water.
2020s
For hours, I sat there, mocked by bees–
silly girls, their golden faces laughed, she still wants
and wants.
My belief that sex on its own is like
carrying around a thigh bone and calling it a leg
doomed me as a cruiser.
It was raining but there was
an abundance of light
coming somehow from a source
outside we couldn’t see
let’s love each other
(so good) on the moon, let’s love
the moon
on the moon
You do not mean this
as slang. Time, literally, stops
by your house, fucks your mom.
Generative Exercise: “Back to the Future”
Write down a list of experiences or moments you want to write a poem about
Now, attach a decade to each of these. Which means that, based on how you’ve seen different poets across the different decades deal with these themes, in which time period’s style do you most see your poem getting published? Where does it thrive?
Poetry is timeless, I firmly believe that. This exercise, however, can help us whittle down our circle of influences and craft poems that explore the unique temperaments of different times.
Post in the comments which decade(s) you’ve chosen and briefly share why.
In Shannan’s next free class on Monday July 8, we’ll learn to exactly which elements create a powerful love poem. If you want in…..
Love poems are no as easy as they may seem to write. Many times they are pure clichés for so much has been said on the subject that to sound fresh or original is quite a task, but we go on writing them and most of the time as more of the same and nothing new or innovative.
It took me a while to figure out the assignment. But after some reading and considering my catalog of experiences, I have come to the conclusion that I rage best in the 80s and 1980s that is in my favorite color besides WH Auden is Philip Larkin, a modern British poet from the previous century.