It’s the time of year when my students write love poems. This arrival always surprises me—as spring’s green shocks after months of winter gray—but it shouldn’t. It’s as predictable as the city’s daffodils pushing through the trash to shiver in the wind.
Forget the saccharine of greeting cards and the singsong of Roses are red, violets are blue. Love poems can be moving, beautiful, romantic. Yes, they can express affection for a beloved person, but the poems we need most have skin in the game, and something more profound at stake.
It felt easier to write poems about longing and desire as a young woman, but as the years have passed, I’ve found that, just as sustaining a relationship isn’t always easy, writing love poems about a long marriage can be a challenge. How do you see the person you’ve lived with for decades as if for the first time? How do you make the 10,000th kiss romantic and new?
As much as we may want—or need—to write a love poem, it’s often difficult to find a language that adequately expresses the way we feel. For one thing, it’s hard to strike the right tone. When a poem is flooded with too much emotion, it becomes sentimental, even cheesy; but when a poem risks nothing, it leaves a reader cold.
The best love poems enact the hyperaware state of being alive we feel when we’re in love. Everything is suddenly technicolor: “There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background; from joy/to joy to joy, /from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom” Li-Young Lee writes, capturing love’s fleeting jubilance.
Rita Dove’s “Flirtation” works a similar magic, reminding us that “My heart/is humming a tune/I haven’t heard in years!” The poem encourages us not to miss the world’s deliciousness: “Quiet’s cool flesh—/let’s sniff and eat it./There are ways/to make of the moment/a topiary/so the pleasure’s in/walking through.”
The most powerful love poems, I think, address the fact that we are here now and one day won’t be. Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” is an exquisite example. Keats knew immense suffering in his day—he lived through his generation’s pandemic and lost his mother and his brother to tuberculosis before succumbing himself at 25. Yet he admonishes the reader not to retreat from life but rather, “when the melancholy fit shall fall…then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.” His advice? Move through the world embracing its pleasures, hearts open, despite knowing full well we will lose our beloveds, will indeed lose everything, on this whole spinning beautiful earth.
Love poems help us celebrate the gift of being alive even—perhaps especially—during challenging times. The past few years may have left us bruised—but are we done with life? I am still so into it. The buzz of meeting a friend for a drink now that we can once again meet friends for drinks, the student who wants to come by my (in-person!) office hours to “hang out and read poems,” my husband beside me as he sleeps. As I type, he is still here on earth breathing. And I am. “One day, I know, it will be otherwise,” notes the poet Jane Kenyon. But for now.
One afternoon, just when the city seemed to be emerging from the first crush of the pandemic, I was cutting through Central Park after an appointment. The meadow was mostly empty—folks still working from home, tourists hadn’t come back—but giant speakers streamed Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” that iconic love poem to New York City. The few of us out walking that morning were in luck—we could dance a little, maybe, or at least step with a bounce; no one’s looking. Life rebounding in New York City, the full force of it, joy! “People do know they’re alive,” says Alex Dimitrov in Love and Other Poems. The best love poems offer respite and revivify; they remind me that I, too, love being alive.
Soon the lilacs will bloom, but so briefly. Even more reason to seek them out and breathe in deep. And this is what I most want out of love poems: I want to embrace the powerful life force that surges up again and again despite the years passing, despite the heartache and disappointments, the losses and griefs, despite it all.
Ecstasies
By Deborah Landau
In the xyzs of nights and days we stayed
as if the conversation would go on forever,
you, you, you—ample days of you,
your beard accumulating a bit of snow,
the gradual showing of bone, a grizzled diminishment.
The stacked-up winters, each in its place.
In this manner the years.
Spooled out the other side as if in plain view—
a field without you.
Meanwhile we took good care, the greens were organic,
honey sweetened the pot, the membrane between us stayed transparent
and we took seriously our allegiance to dream.
Flesh
By Deborah Landau
It must give pleasure but rarely it rarely does.
But pleasure is so useful when it comes.
Pleasure says this is your sort of place, your year, you live here.
Pleasure’s the perfect swerve. It wins you back.
Pain won’t take you nowhere.
Chocolate on the tongue. Vodka. Velvet. Voila.
A zipper slinking in its silver, its long slide down.
Deborah Landau is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Skeletons (April 2023). Her other books include Soft Targets, The Uses of the Body, The Last Usable Hour, and Orchidelirium, which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among others. She is a professor at NYU, where she directs the creative writing program.
