THE FINE LINE BETWEEN PLEASURE AND PAIN

W hen people fall in love, the narrative of their lives is suddenly interrupted. Falling in love is a threshold experience; a dramatic change occurs even if the love is short-lived. Over the centuries people everywhere have written poems about this moment of dynamic change. The experience is often painful because there is a sense of rupture and separation from routine and daily life, and if the love is unrequited, the despair can be unbearable. People rarely write a paragraph of prose to express their feelings of love; instead they turn to poetry. It is through poetry that we are best able to dramatise intense emotional states, it is through poetry that we are best able to sing. When we are in love our feelings seem as if they have been raised to the highest power, and we instinctively reach for a mode of expression to match the ardour of love’s dazzling, yet often cruel, grip and sting.

The love poem has always been popular with readers because it articulates powerfully and clearly common experience. Readers find community and kinship with others who have been through love’s sweetness and love’s pain. A good love poem has the potential to help shape and clarify feelings of confusion and it provides deep solace. More than any other language art, it is poetry that tries to speak to the ineffable, to life’s mysteries, and thus it has much in common with prayer.

Thousands of love poems are written every day, yet very few will survive. Love is possibly the most written- about subject on the planet, so how is it possible to still write about love in a fresh and convincing way? As impossible as this task may seem, poets are still finding ways of approaching this topic in memorable and inventive ways.

To a large extent what makes a good love poem is what makes a good poem in general. It’s all about the language. Poetry is not so much about saying memorable things, but about saying things memorably. As Robert Frost said, ‘All the fun’s in how you say a thing.’ A love poem to be successful needs to clearly communicate. The emotions themselves may be quite complex but the words need not necessarily be complex; some of the best poems are made up of very simple words.

Some of the finest love poems published in Australia in recent times feature in David Brooks’ The Balcony, MTC Cronin’s My Lover’s Back, Luke Davies’ Totem, Stephen Edgar’s sequence ‘Consume My Heart Away’ from his book Other Summers, and Dorothy Porter’s Love Poems. A book also well worth mentioning is Rapture by the UK’s poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. All these works employ stunning metaphors, precision of language, musicality, form and structure to give their poems resonance and vitality.

Whether you are writing about love’s success or love’s loss, your poem is only going to make an impact
if you can find ways of embodying the experience through scene, time and place, image, rhythm, form and sound. Particularise, never generalise. Try to find images and words as powerful and as mesmerising as the love experience itself.

Dorothy Porter’s Love Poems covers the full gamut: passion, lust, sex, devotion, heartbreak, fragility. Porter was a master at finding unique metaphors and words to express the white heat of feelings, whether her own or her characters’, and Porter’s poetry is remarkable for its directness and simplicity. Her poems have a tremendous capacity to swoon verbally and to portray how desire affects the body. Porter’s method is often to find objects that can stand in for feelings (Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’) — among these, she employs a night parrot as a symbol for intrusive passion, and a leopard to express love’s danger and risk. In her verse novel Wild Surmise it is the various planets and moons of Jupiter which best register Alex’s feelings. Porter’s poems show how important it is for the love experience to be transformed imaginatively. It is not enough simply to report, the emotions need to be dramatised through scene, imagery, music. Porter was well aware of the lyric’s kinship to song and her poems often use a light, stepping line and much repetition. Her repetitions are hypnotic and her forms and lineation work deftly to communicate intoxication, reverie, obsession:

Love still scuttling about
in my heart
like a greedy crab, claws akimbo.

Love that’s hanging on.

Love that doesn’t hoard
its stalling miseries and betrayals…

Love, like Pushkin,
that gets shot horribly in the guts and still takes forever to die.

(‘Love’, Wild Surmise)

Porter understood poetry’s link to magic and enchantment and she always chose her words with meticulous care. Diction, or word choice, is one of the poet’s greatest tools. By choosing the exact word, not merely something close, the poet convinces and draws the reader into the poem.

One danger of writing the love poem is simply to allow the feelings to gush forth. Instead, it’s more powerful to imply the feelings. Some emotions can easily become traps for our sentimental tendencies, and the question for the poet is how to write about these feelings without falling into mawkishness or melodrama. Inexperienced poets will often simply tell of their feelings in vague, generic terms. The more a poet conveys emotions through event, scene and image, the more the reader will be engaged.

David Brooks’ The Balcony demonstrates the importance of grounding feelings in time and place. These poems are set in Central Europe and in Australia; they often occur in the evening, at night, or in the morning. Brooks knows that details are the means of persuasion. He knows that an image in a poem should never be merely decorative, nor simply scenery, that an image, when it is working properly, can direct us towards some insight — emotional or intellectual.

Like Porter’s, Brooks’ language is direct and uncomplicated, yet his poems
are packed with feeling. In the poem ‘Grace’, he magically evokes intimacy and mood through simple, but well- chosen, details. The line breaks enact the moment-by-moment pleasure, and the final synaesthetic image resonates and expands the intimacy into the world again, so that we see the couple’s connection in broader, enlarging terms:

A door opens,
the room is flooded with light.
A man
spills his seed on his lover’s belly, wipes it away,
kisses the place where it fell. The tips of her fingers
brush his shoulder-blade.
A door opens,
the room is
flooded with light.
Her mouth tastes
of wood-smoke
and snow.

Notice how the feelings are implied solely through the images, and how restraint rather than excess, is what gives the poem power.

Stephen Edgar’s sequence of ten poems ‘Consume My Heart Away’ is a searing and moving account of the end of a love affair. Anyone who believes that rhyme and metre are outdated, fusty forms that constrict rather than release emotions, should look at these poems. Form and metre are plastic devices that will accommodate themselves to any subjects. Edgar’s sequence shows that defined boundaries can aid the poet in

handling difficult emotional material. Here are the first two stanzas from the poem ‘The Kiss’:

How can she do this now that it’s all changed,
Present her lips to kiss
As though that known face were the same as this

From which you’ve been estranged?
Of course it is. Here, now? Or then and there?
How can she sit down in her cloud of hair

And watch you as though you were someone else?
You are, of course, to her.
You were this rendezvous’s commissioner And nobody compels

Your self-distressed attendance here but you.
So watch her do as only she can do.

The restrictions of form push Edgar to become resourceful with language, the elegance of style gives dignity to the poet’s feelings, and the strict metre and stanza shape provide just the right amount of distance and breakage so that the emotions, while intensified

by sound and repetition, are also kept authentic and clear.

Whether you are writing about love’s success or love’s loss, your poem is only going to make an impact if you can find ways of embodying the experience through scene, time and place, image, rhythm, form and sound. Particularise, never generalise. Try to find images and

words as powerful and as mesmerising as the love experience itself. Go to
the body and the senses, start from something small. The 11th-century Chinese poet, Wei T’ai, had this very good advice: ‘… be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind of the reader responds and connects with the thing, the feeling shows in the words.’

Love poems: further reading

— David Brooks: The Balcony, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2008

— MTC Cronin: My Lover’s Back, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2002

— Luke Davies: Totem, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2004

— Carol Ann Duffy: Rapture, Picador, London, 2005

— Stephen Edgar: Other Summers, Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2006

— James Fenton: The New Faber Book of Love Poems, Faber and Faber, 2006

— Jamie Grant: 100 Australian Poems of Love and Loss, Hardie Grant, 2011

— Dorothy Porter: Love Poems, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2010

— Jennifer Strauss: The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, OUP, 1993

Judith Beveridge is the author of four award- winning books of poetry. Her most recent collection is Storm and Honey, published in 2009 and awarded the Grace Levin Prize in 2010. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor of Meanjin.