Lesson 1 | The sexy history of love in poetry & how to develop your personal style.

Crushing Hard: Defining what makes a love poem "good", cliche mistakes to avoid, and poets gone wild.

Ahhhhh Mariam Chagelishvili this is so cute

This is class 1 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”

Chances are, if you’ve come to this workshop, you like love. You think about love, fall in love, fall out of love, roll it up into a little ball like a piece of paper and then throw it in the garbage before running to unroll it back out to see if there was in fact some spark in there. But like, you also like writing about it. And maybe you’ve written a bunch of love poems already. Maybe you’ve even published a bunch of them. Who knows, perhaps some of them are full of steamy moments. And yeah, maybe many of them haven’t really been given that editorial seal of approval yet. 

Let me first tell you what’s not going to be in this workshop: A Magic Potion that will 100% get each and every love/sex poem you write published, winning you much acclaim and money, thereby solidifying your name as THE best love poet in all of history, ever, forever. 

But you knew that, right?

Okay, cool, now that we’re on the same page, here is what this workshop will give you: A Magic Potion that will help you better understand love/sex poems as they fit into poetic history and also as they survive and thrive today. Here’s the secret: a lot of the “magic” in this potion comes from you! Not to play the whole wellness guru card, but like…yeah, I’m just here to help you discover your own inner “THE best love poet in all of history, ever, forever.”

Here’s how I’ll go about trying to do it:

Ingredients for the Magic Potion that is this Hot & Heavy Workshop (As in, this is what you get in every class…)

• The Actual Lesson 

• Recommended Reading 

• 1-2 Generative Exercises

Now for an OVERVIEW of all upcoming classes!

1) Crushing Hard

I noted above what we’ll cover today!

2) First Love

• Comparative Romance

• Recommended Reading: Five in Five 

• Generative Exercise: “Back to the Future”

3) Blind Date

• Poetry of the Body, Mind, Heart and Soul

• Recommended Reading in each section

• Generative Exercise: “The Meet-Cute”

4) Going Steady

• Focalization and the Many Forms of Love Poems

• Recommended Reading: 6 Poems in 6 Forms

• Generative Exercise: “The Makeover Sessions”

5) An Affair to Remember

• How to Use Jealousy and Anger to Write Better Love Poems

• Recommended Reading: “Hardcore” Love Poems

• Generative Exercise: “Pick Your Poison”

6) Honeymoon Phase

• Fall in Love with your Bad Poems and Make Them Perfect

• Recommended Reading: Poems that resemble “bad poems” but are actually secretly pretty much the fucking best

• Generative Exercise: “The Machine”

7)  After the Happily Ever After

• Love and Sex Poetry in Publishing Today

• Developing your full length poetry collection

• Recommended Reading: Hot off the press poems full of orgasmic wonder & gooey lovey-dovey oohlalalas. 

• Recommended Reading: Best love/sex poetry collections from every decade in the last 100 years

• Generative Exercise: “Litmag/Indie Press Tinder”

Okay, now let’s get started with today’s class: Crushing Hard!

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The brief and sexy history of love in poetry

The Very Beginning

Not God, not politics, not pain – love & sex are the reason poetry exists. Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians celebrated fertility and sacred rituals through “love songs.” In Sanskrit, many poet-devotee-scholars like the Six Gosvamis wrote extensive prayers in the form of intricately metered poetry about the (very colorful) love lives of gods (in particular Radha and Krishna).

Greece, Rome, Europe

In classical Greece and Rome, poets like Sappho and Ovid are famous for writing openly erotic verses (they are the OG thirsty poets). Then, the medieval period saw the rise of courtly love in Europe, where troubadours expressed chivalric adoration. A lot of this stuff was accompanied with music and meant to be sung and chanted in communion with a crowd. So, poets were the original popstars, okay. (Well, well, well…we’ve come full circle with Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department, haven’t we?)

Persia

Over in Persia, the ever famous Rumi blended the physical and spiritual. Other Persian poets like Hafez followed suit. Before both of them, there was Nizami Ganjavi who penned the OG Romeo and Juliet, that is the Arabic epic tragic love story of Layla and Majnun.

Shakespeare

And now that we’ve referenced Shakespeare, we can acknowledge the elephant in the room. The elephant is Shakespeare. He’s kind of the poster-dude of love poetry isn’t he? This started before him, though. During the Renaissance, Italian poet Petrarch popularized the sonnet form and then Elizabethan poets like William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser continued the tradition.

Romantics

After this came waltzing in the Romantics, who, contrary to the name, didn’t just write about love. Actually, they mostly wrote about getting high out of their minds and feeling really existentially fucked, which I love. Poets like Byron and Keats though also wrote some great love poems, some more on the suggestive side.

Victorian

And now comes the Victorian era full of flowery and formal “pure love” poetry, a la Elizabeth Barrett Browning. While all this dramatic-coy-sonnet business is going on in the West, love and sex poetry is thriving globally…

Global

Persian and Urdu poets such as Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz popularized the ghazal, imbuing romance with revolutionary layers, speaking up to power, challenging sexual norms and being all around cooler than the Victorians.

Yosano Akiko, a Japanese poet, experimented with lyricism through tanka and Xu Zhimo, a Chinese poet, played on Western romanticism through free verse love poems.

Swahili poets like Shaaban Robert reflected in their poetry the region's unique poetic traditions, emphasizing platonic love.

20th Century

Fast-forward to the 20th century, when modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings experimented with form and language, feeling freer to discuss sexuality and challenging those norms.

Over in India, Rabindranath Tagore blended love and spirituality while Kamala Das was a bold and candid female poet who introduced the confessional poem into the Indian literary landscape.

Pablo Neruda, the renowned Chilean poet, is a powerful name in love poetry. Despite his problematic legacy, he remains one of the most famous modern love poets. A lot of people outside of indie lit credit him as being their gateway drug to poetry, which is saying something. Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a contemporary of Neruda’s, is, I think, the greater poet in terms of sheer talent and ingenuity.

Modern

So, the modern love poem has a pretty diverse and cool history. Today, most poets don’t refer to themselves as love (or dear god, “sex”) poets. But almost all poets write love poems. Love poetry however is increasingly becoming a niche as opposed to the norm. And maybe that’s a good thing.

We can go to actual pop stars if we want to croon or hum along to a sad love song, right. But what does this say about the future of love poetry? Well, hopefully the rest of this workshop will elucidate that.

For now, I’ll just say that there are some amazing poets out there who have written and are writing some of the best love poems ever written. Here are some of my favorites (in no particular order): Mikko Harvey, Bob Hicok, Natalie Diaz, Anne Carson, Agha Shahid Ali, Leonard Cohen, Natasha Rao, Rebecca Goss, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Li-Young Lee.

In a nutshell: What makes a good love poem

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Subject

• Love poems are often about someone. Sometimes, they’re self-love poems. Whoever the speaker is speaking to, whether a second person or one’s own self, is the “subject”.

• Some poems are obsessive about the subject, while in others, the subject is almost an afterthought externally (internally, they might be the through-line or foundation). 

• It doesn’t matter who the subject is in making a good love poem. It matters how the subject is treated. No, this doesn’t mean that you can’t write a good angry anti-love poem about your ex. It means that while you are writing about a particular subject, you also remain conscious that this is a poem meant for the world. No matter how obsessive or distant you are from the subject, it’s important to remember that if we’re writing more than just a journal entry, this poem will be read by others who really don’t give half a fuck about who you’re writing about, mostly how you make them feel. More on that soon.

Narrative

• It’s easy to get lost in the “love” part of love poems. The heart of a good poem, though, is the story it tells. 

• Stories are what engage readers. So while the narrative can involve a lot of different elements and diversions, usually a simple story at the core of the piece is vital. This story needs to make sense, above all. Otherwise, why will readers care?

Imagery

• Though imagery is an important ingredient of a good poem, I find that sometimes poets can lean way too heavily on it as a crutch. They’ll pack a poem with metaphors, symbols, similes, words that need to be looked up, etc. 

• Other times, a poem will just be information and read like a news piece. No imagery, no life.

• For me, the best poems strike a great balance between Narrative and Imagery.  Narrative remains the core and imagery is sprinkled in a calculated way at precise points of the poem, acting like a refreshing swig of lemonade for the reader’s journey through the poem’s story.

Emotion

• Though you might instinctively think that weepy or gushy emotions make for a bad poem, I have repeatedly found that poets, in trying to avoid this, end up with just the shell of a good poem without any heart.

• Vulnerability, rawness, and a bit of wild emotion can create unexpected moments in a piece, adding depth, humor and the human element. People don’t want poetry that speaks down to them. They want poetry to make them feel shit and also to capture in words shit they feel but cannot articulate.

Sexy poem sins (i.e., what makes a bad sex poem)

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Unreal

What makes a bad sex poem (or a poem featuring sex) is also, in my personal opinion, what makes a bad sex scene. This is not to say that you can’t write about crazy shit, but the more real it is, the more engaging and alluring it will be. When I say “real”, again, I don’t mean you can’t write an amazing surreal sex poem. I mean that, there needs to be honesty in the emotions, and the sex has purpose. I find that reading bad sex scenes can actually help with knowing most what not to do. The Literary Review actually has an award for bad sex in fiction. Though this is for fiction, I think it’s super relevant.

Humorless

• Sex is fun, so it checks out that a good love poem with sex in it should also be a little funny perhaps? Humor has the power to unite all of us. It is the ultimate universal flag flapping away its clarion call to come together and just take it easy and laugh at the chaos of it all.

• When I see sex in poetry just written straight (pun mostly unintended), I always yawn. Like, yeah, yeah, this goes there, that goes there, ugh I’m riveted. A poet who does humor in love & sex poetry most brilliantly is Bob Hicok.

Clean & Cliched

• For fuck’s sakes, no more “soulmates, star-crossed lovers, you are my sunshine, you  broke my heart, love is a red rose.” Seriously, avoid cliches. If you can’t spot one, then google your poem. Yes, google your unpublished poem. If it’s littered with cliches, most of the google search results returned will be in bold. Delete those bold phrases.

Hotties & Heroes: Building your personal canon of favorite poets

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Identifying Personal Taste

• The only way to know what you like is to read a lot. This is precisely also what’ll help you develop your unique poetic voice. 

• There is this idea that there’s one mysterious literary canon with all the usual suspects. But the literary canon isn’t some obsidian obdurate monolith that exists in singular seclusion from individual taste. 

• Especially as writers looking to exist and grow in a diverse and inclusive world, it’s important to create your own personal literary canon. Have a reading strategy. You’ll get tons of reading recommendations and name drops in this workshop. Click on those links, read up on those poets, spend some time with their poems. See what works for you, what confuses you, what excites you.

• Because one cannot possibly read everything in the world, I like to divide up my reading roughly like this: 15% old but gold stuff (walk through history to find lost gems, not just the famous fab superhit poets), 25% favorites (stuff I’ll read and re-read again and again and it’ll still feel new to me), 60% contemporary poets (this breaks down to half and half between lit mags and new poetry collections). 

Poets Gone Wild

• One thing that’s important to keep in mind when building your personal canon of favorite poets is to always leave room for the wildcards

• These are poets whose work you may not like at first or even second read, but there’s still something weird and magical and mystical about their writing that you can’t help being attracted to. Note their names down. Bookmark their websites. Follow their publishing journey. 

• Usually, these are the poets that end up influencing me the most because they challenge how I already think about writing and poetry and make me see the page and what can go on it from totally different perspectives. 

  A little insider scoop here: Over on ONLY POEMS, many times it’s these poets I end up saying a big loud YES to. I can’t get their poems out of my head and it’s annoying sometimes but also, at the root of it, their poetry is delicious as heck and unlike anything being written in the poetry world today.

Homework

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Curate your canon! Create a list of 10-20 poets that you would immortalize with angel-and-unicorn magic if you could! Now look over this list and see if you can come with up one solid reason how this poet’s work is relevant or influences or is in conversation with your own.

For example: Bob Hicok writes some of the most unusual and beautiful love poems across any span of time. I am directly influenced by how he takes inconsequential moments and charges them with significance through his way of creating universal perspective even in a deeply personal piece. 

Comment at least 3-5 poets + short connections to your work in the comments below. This will set us up for the rest of the workshop to follow and also give me a good overview of the kind of poets and poetry we are all already invested in and wish to create. 

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Onto Class #2

First Love: Finding your poetry "era" and how to write timeless love poems

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