Oriana Ivy is the winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011 from Finishing Line Press, which published her winning chapbook manuscript, April Snow, last year.
Oriana, born in Poland and who came to the U. S. when she was 17, is a well-known poet and frequent reader in the San Diego, California area (where I recently heard her read poems from April Snow and other poems). In addition to being published in The Best American Poetry 1992 (her poem chosen by Charles Simic, guest editor, with David Lehman, series editor), her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod and many other journals and anthologies. Oriana leads the San Diego Poetry Salon, teaches poetry workshops and writes an outstanding poetry-and-culture blog (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com).
Oriana writes deeply absorbing poems, rich in images that startle with their steely exactness. In her new chapbook, April Snow, poems mainly inhabit the Central Europe of her memory, the post-war Poland of her girlhood. Here are keenly observed moments rendered with abiding warmth (toward family, loves and nature) and honesty (about history and her own past). Her language, at once elegant and nimble, amplifies the craftsmanship of these poems.
Here are my two favorite poems from April Snow:
GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGHTER
One day in the street my grandmother
stops before another grandmother.
Both stammer: "It’s you –
you – in Auschwitz – "
Turning to me: "She and I shared
the same blanket. Every night she said,
'You’ve got more than I'
and pulled, and I pulled back,
and so we’d tug across the bunk – "
And the two grandmothers laugh.
In the middle of a crowded
sidewalk, in old women’s dusk,
widows’ browns and grays,
they are laughing like two schoolgirls –
tears rain down the cracked
winter of their cheeks.
On Piotrkowska Avenue,
on the busiest street,
they are tugging that thin blanket.
They are pulling back.
CATERPILLAR OF SMOKE
Sudety Mountains, Silesia
Mornings glittered like panes of ice.
Near a villa that legend whispered
Hitler gave to Eva Braun,
I found, abandoned in the dormitory,
a book of poems that didn’t rhyme.
Sun flamed the long candelabras
of icicles about to crash. I copied
phrases: a caterpillar of smoke.
My cousin Ewa astonished everyone,
solving math problems for fun.
Arms locked, slipping on the ice-glazed road,
we walked past the villa of Eva Braun,
high-school virgins secretly wondering
what it was like to be Hitler’s mistress.
I had another secret:
alone in the white forest I knew
the poem of winter had no words
unless they were crows,
stitching the mountains with crooked seams.
I was fourteen. The future flashed
as though a careless angel
opened the wrong door in time.
Later, thousands of miles of clouds
away from Warsaw, I found it
again – poetry after Auschwitz.
With a murderer’s hands
I caressed a woman’s breasts –
One could say anything, then:
beauty didn’t have to be beautiful –
news to me who grew up with
rhyme of silence and meter of lies.
When does the future begin –
a caterpillar of smoke
slanting white winter sky –
the spruce lost in stars of frost,
snow deeper and deeper snow.
previously published in Quarterly West
Click to see book on Amazon.
April is National Poetry Month. This celebration of poetry began in 1996. (In Great Britain, since 2000, National Poetry Month is observed in October.)
It’s a month-long celebration of poetry readings, podcasts and just plain reading poems on your own each day.
One of our past feature readers, Gail Dendy from South Africa, shares two of her poems online, as an audio recording.
Click to hear Gail Dendy's poems
Also of note is Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, 2013. The Academy of American Poets suggests that, on Poem in Your Pocket Day, you select a poem you love, carry it with you and share it with others throughout the day.
Here are some easy ways to celebrate:
— Hand out poems in your school or workplace.
— Start a street team to pass out poems in your community.
— Add a poem to your email footer.
— Mail a poem to a friend.
— Post a poem on your blog or social networking page.
Here is one of the poems I love and one of the candidates for the poem in my pocket this year:
THE SUITOR
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
Jane Kenyon
I normally don't do rah-rah posts for my books but I received such a wonderful review for The ABCs of Memory that I want to share it with readers. Scott Whitaker, a poet himself, nailed what I was trying to do in the book. I am very pleased with this review.
Lenny Lianne’s newest volume of poetry, The ABCs of Memory, from ScriptWorks Press, mashes two books of poetry, with opposing ideals, together, a tradition that harkens back to Blake: An Alphabet from An Ample Nation and An Alphabet of Modest Means. Memory strikes a contemporary chord, cherishing the past while tightening the belt on the future, a theme most Americans could identify with in these recent years of economic recovery.
Lianne’s ABCs are broad in depth and range, and touch on cultural milestones such as Elvis, Nancy Drew, Wonder Bread, 9 – 11, and Ty Cobb, as well as personal memories of her family. These poems are celebrations, elegies, and like the titles of the books, or parts, suggest, hint at a plethora of riches, or a plethora of troubles, big and small.
Lianne speaks with authority about young men drafted into war in “Basic Training” and young boys peeking at their Centerfold cousin in “Finding the Playmate of the Month. Lianne doesn’t just recount these memories, invented or real, but often questions them, mourns for them without evoking false pride or anger.
The ABCs of Memory could easily fall into sentimentality: we are talking about memories. We are talking about cultural heroes. Lost wonders of the good old days, but Lianne does not allow the poems to do so. She steers them towards a unified bridge, another great American tradition — unifying the country through poetic voice, where all emotional landscapes butt up against each other, like so many state lines running parallel and perpendicular. One of the finer poems, “Velocity and Other Variables”, begins as a memory of boys throwing olives but ends as a meditation on war, as if all the world’s violence is seeded in the youthful volley of spitballs, baseballs, and olives.
This volume manages to be both grand and humble; her form is crafted, though not too formal for non-academics, but her language is direct and frank, allowing images and emotions to breath, puffing up, or shrinking up as they will. Mostly the perspectives are from the white middle class, a shrinking population as America trudges forth in the 21st century. That’s not a criticism, mind you, but rather a reminder that what made the country great in the 20th century was the ordinary people in the middle who built, loved, sang, drank, died, and fought for something we used to call the American Dream. Something that perhaps belongs in America’s euro-white-centric past. And in that sense Lianne’s book is an elegy for the American Dream, as it once was, for that ideal is changing with globalization and a leaner economy. The ABCs of Memory is a reminder that the voice of America has gotten broader and deeper, and more complex.
— Scott Whitaker
for The Broadkill Review
St. Patrick’s Day is almost here. Let’s celebrate with the poetry from Irish women poets.
Crannóg
by Moya Cannon
Where an ash bush grows in the lake
a ring of stones has broken cover
in this summer’s drought.
Not high enough to be an island,
it holds a disc of stiller water
in the riffled lake.
Trees have reclaimed the railway line behind us;
behind that, the road goes east —
as two lines parallel in space and time run away with us
this discovered circle draws us in.
In drowned towns
bells toll only for sailors and for the credulous
but this necklace of wet stones,
remnant of a wattle Atlantis,
catches us all by the throat.
We don’t know what beads or blades
are held in the bog lake’s wet amber
but much of us longs to live in water
and we recognise this surfacing
of old homes of love and hurt.
A troubled bit of us is kin
to people who drew a circle in water,
loaded boats with stone,
and raised a dry island and a fort
with a whole lake for a moat.
[The title is Irish and refers to a prehistoric dwelling, an artificially created island in a lake. These were used for defensive residence during the Iron Age.]
MOYA CANNON, born in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal, now lives in Galway. She studied history and politics at University College, Dublin and international relations at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Her first collection, Oar, won the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and, in 2011, she was the recipient of the Laurence O Shaughnessy Award (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota). Her other books include The Parchment Boat (1998); Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems (2008) and Hands (2011).
A number of her poems have been set to music and she’s worked with traditional Irish musicians, amongst them Kathleen Loughnane and Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, both in the context of performance and of translating Gaelic songs. Moya Cannon has edited Poetry Ireland Review and, in 2004, was elected to Aosdana, the Irish affiliation of creative artists. In 2011 she was the holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, PA.
Viola D’Amore
by Moya Cannon
Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why they find wells.
Click here for an interview with Moya Cannon.
With a different poetic voice from Moya Cannon, our second poet, Leontia Flynn, is also a poet from Northern Ireland. She’s been “celebrated as an original poet — nervy, refreshing, deceptively simple.” Here are two poems.
THE VIBRATOR
by Leontia Flynn
When you had packed up all your books and clothes
and taken the last crap poster down, and walked
like a mournful ghost through the blank, familiar rooms,
a thought struck — clang — loud as a two-pence piece
in a metal bucket: where was the vibrator?
Oh cruel Gods! Oh vulgar implement
that was stowed discreetly on some shelf or cupboard
but has almost certainly not been boxed away …
Oh dirty gift of doubtful provenance.
Oh gift — surprise! — for the next week’s settling tenants.
Oh nice surprise for next week’s settling tenants,
four Polish men paid peanuts by the hour
—for in Belfast too The Market holds its sway —
to find in some nook or niche-hole the vibrator
still beats, in the dark, its battery-powered heart.
© 2011, Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn won an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her first book of poems These Days (2004) won the Forward Poetry Prize for best First Collection. It also was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Drives, her second poetry collection, was published in 2008. That same year she won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a major Individual Artists Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Drives also was shortlisted for the 2009 Poetry Now Award. Her third collection, Profit and Loss,published in 2011, was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn as well as being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Leontia Flynn has written a Ph.D. thesis on the Irish woman poet Medbh McGuckian. She’s been Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast since 2005 and currently edits the journal The Yellow Nib with Frank Ormsby.
CASABLANCA, BACKWARDS
by Leontia Flynn
Rick (to Ilse): Who are you really and what were you before? What did you do, and what did you think?
A plane is taking off in a bank of fog.
It leaves the grainy sky, the mapped Moroccan sand.
It is four months since I’ve seen you. In my hand
the video’s controls point in the air.
“Who were we really and what were we before?”
These things are turning over in my mind
as the plane starts banking down. It comes to land
on a grainy fog bank on a concrete plain.
Casablanca backwards; in this version
Rick Blaine sticks his neck out — really — for no one.
As time does not go by. As history gives way to love —
all the rain of Morocco is raining back to the source!
the rain-soaked note resolving into words.
One tear streams back up Ingrid Bergman’s face.
© 2006, Leontia Flynn
Here are two links to hear (sound only) Leontia Flynn read two more poems:
Click to hear Flynn read Dorothy Parker.
Click to hear Flynn read Drive.
Meet Judy Croome, a South African poet and fiction writer. Although she lives and writes in Johannesburg, South Africa (which she describes as the economic powerhouse of Africa), she was born in a little village called Zvishavane in Zimbabwe and as a child played out in the Zimbabwean bush.
Judy stresses the focal point of her writing: “With the beat of Africa in my blood, my poetry and my novels are set in this continent, which has deep passion as its heart. The driving motivation of my characters is the search for love in all its forms.”
From her book of poems, a Lamp at Midday:
A PRAYER FOR SOUTH AFRICA
Nkosi, you have brought us so far.
Nkosi, you have guided us through
A thousand,
Another thousand,
Years of suffering.
We rose in rainbow queues,
Snaking along the parched dry earth.
We stood under the smiling sun,
Warming us with hope.
We rode in rusted wheelbarrows,
On rickety bicycles and in
Long silver Mercedes-Benz cars.
We signed up for a paradise:
A return to Eden.
Nkosi, your beautiful phoenix falters,
As the new and old colours of hatred wind
Sinuously through our hearts.
We forget to ask our ancestors and you:
Nkosi, yizwa imithandazo yethu
Nkosi, sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo.
[Note: isiZulu, from the first verse of the new South African national anthem, which is a combination of a hymn composed in 1897 by Enoch Sontonga and an Afrikaans poem, written in May 1918 by C.J. Langenhoven. The words mean “Lord, hear our prayers / Lord, bless us, your children.”
and another of Judy’s poems:
THOUGHT ON THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA
Two thirds of my life was white under white
One third is white under black.
Hoping to find unity
I see the same old divisions changing faces
From Eugene to Juju.
Too many of our rainbow people
Wretchedly cling to the myths of a departed age.
Victimhood is the new badge of courage.
All cry about their past pain,
And, in so doing, let their wounds fester and
Infect all that is hoped for.
The violent struggle of evil versus good
Blinds them to the promise of the only lasting freedom:
The liberation of the soul
Which, passing through the convulsed pains of re-birth,
Tames the turbulent savagery of both past and present lives
And, when calm again, wins the unity of the self.
Judy Croome’s book, a Lamp at Midday, is a personal collection of poems. One reviewer describes it as “a hauntingly beautiful volume of poetry that speaks to our deepest emotions.” Another reviewer characterizes the book as “a snapshot of real life, and unfortunately death.” Especially in the first section (about her father’s approaching death), these poems speak with a brave and earnest voice.
Here is a poem from the first section of Judy Croome’s book:
LET ME
The sacred three is certainty and power:
Three fairies, princes, witches.
Thrice-greatest Hermes. The Holy Trinity.
The cock that crowed three times in denial.
Yesterday you had another major stroke:
The third one.
Now the little of you we had left is lost.
Your arms and legs rubbery
And your tongue thick and silent.
Your eyes … oh, your eyes
Continue infinite sorrow.
Your hands reach up to my face
Never still.
I hold them, to find their power vanished.
How can a child protect a father?
I am yet strong and healthy.
Although weak with grief
And helpless.
Let me protect you,
And keep you safe,
As you have done for me.
Only tell me how
I can close your eyes
And let you rest in peace.
Judy Croome’s poetry collection, a Lamp at Midday, is available through Amazon (in paperback and Kindle versions).
Click here to see the book on Amazon.
Judy Croome, on why she writes:
“I write because I believe that words have great power: they can bring comfort, joy and hope. They can reveal secrets and lies. And, while they may not change the world, they can – at their best – change people’s lives, even if for a moment.”
One online reviewer of Christopher Bursk’s books of poetry claims that Bursk’s poems are addictive, and I can attest to that. Recently I grabbed one of his books off my shelf and headed to a medical appointment. In the waiting room, I started reading the poems, in order, from the beginning of the book. I was enjoying them so much that I was disappointed, even miffed, when I was interrupted by the nurse. Later, impatient, I hurried home and read the rest of the book. Yes, Christopher Bursk’s poems are addictive.
My favorite of his books is The Improbable Swervings of Atoms, which won the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Besides his devotion to language, what I appreciate most about the poems is the approach by which he employs history in a personal way to relate how a boy growing up in the 1950s in the US tries to make sense of the world around him. These poems are humorous while often, and at the same time, poignant, even painful.
“One Nation, Indivisible, Under God” begins:
On the day that the St. Lawrence Seaway opened
for saltwater ships to sail deep into the heart of America,
I was being launched into water too,
my head stuck in the toilet
thanks to the good offices of the student council
vice president, the class treasurer, and the captain
of the volleyball team,….
In “E Pluribus Unum”:
…and what is going through your head
is a locker room full of naked presidents,
all the Jamses and Johns showering together.
When you got on the school bus this morning
you didn’t plan to think about Grover Cleveland
scrubbing Chester Arthur’s back….
“Irreconcilable Differences” starts out:
Khrushchev and Eisenhower, that old married couple,
were bickering again, over how often
each could blow up the other,
but I had more pressing matters to deal with:
exactly when and where I’d have a chance to
get Sally Hamilton’s blouse unbuttoned.
And these are just a few of my favorite poems in this book!
Click here to see this book on Amazon.
The Christopher Bursk book I grabbed and took with me to a medical appointment, and with which I became absorbed/addicted, was The First Inhabitants of Arcadia. Here, it’s not history but the English language and literature he uses to anchor his narrative poems about growing up. Early in the book, he explains that in junior high he “invented/ theories about the letters/ of the alphabet/ and the lives they led,…” Throughout the book, he employs this device to tell stories about different letters. One example is “Why a Boy Is Drawn to Lowercase p” which begins:
It even looks dirty, dangling
below the line
like a kid taking a leak
while treading water. For some boys
that’s paradise:
to be able to piss
in public,…
Also included in this book are poems which describe the adolescent male’s encounters with various homework assignments of high-school literature classes. Here the high-school sophomore tasked to memorize “Dover Beach” churlishly characterizes Matthew Arnold as “a fop with porkchop whiskers” — about and from whom the teenager wishes to learn nothing, declaring with typical adolescent high drama:
If I gave in and felt sorry for all the poets
who didn’t know when to shut up,
let myself worry about the entire nineteenth century
and even the poor teachers who made us read
that panic disguised as elegy,
I’d not make it
to my next class, much less survive one more
day on this planet, its confused alarms,
its ignorant armies, its darkling plain.
Or how, in another poem, after:
One lucky classmate got Ginsberg, another Kerouac.
A third, Hemingway. I got a woman
with three names. A whole semester
with the spinster author….
The boy wants to get back at the teacher for this assignment and plans to “dig up dirt, turn bobbins into dildos, a sewing kit/ into a womb” in each essay he writes on this allotted author. At the end of the poem, in dismay, the teen asks:
Why did the very writer I was determined to despise
have to turn out to be not so different
from me?...
What hope was there for me
if I was going to fall in love
with everyone I read?
Click here to see this book on Amazon.
Bursk’s narrative poems capture not only the sometimes absurd imaginative world of the boy — his fictions about the lives of letters and his perceived maltreatment at the hands of English teachers and their homework assignments — but also the angst of a boy growing up against a backdrop of large world events. Bursk has an eye for the revealing illustration that is both penetrating and compassionate. These brilliantly observed moments are truly engrossing because they’re rendered with disciplined musical sense and a true craftsman’s knowledge of his material. With a seemingly easy, conversational music, formed of one exactly right word after another, Bursk’s poems radiate with grace, energy and understanding.
Christopher Bursk, recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew Fellowships, is the author of nine books. In addition to having worked as a volunteer for three decades in the corrections system, with those on probation and parole, he is currently a professor of language and literature at Bucks County Community College. His work has appeared in magazines such as Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Manhattan Review, and The Sun. His poem, “Ovid at Fifteen,” won the Another Chicago Magazine Award, judged by Robert Dana. He has been recognized for his work with prisoners, the homeless, food banks and women’s shelters and has won numerous awards for his humanitarian and literary efforts including Bucks County Citizen of the Year and Poet Laureate of Bucks County. His book, The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns, won the Bright Hill Chapbook competition.
Here are three poems Christopher Bursk sent me to share with our readers:
Why Algebra Ought Not to Be Taught
When I'm 10, you'll be 70,
and when I'm 20, you'll be 80
and when I'm 30, you'll be 90.
By the time we pull into our driveway I'm older
than the trees planted by my home’s original owner.
I'll be 40 and you'll be 100.
You'll be 110 and I'll be 50.
My grandson likes how this will always stay the same
between us. Long before junior high he's fallen in love
with algebra, the equal sign's unrelenting logic.
No matter what the world is like –
what seas shrivel, what cities burn,
plague, conflagration, tidal wave, war –
when I'm 120 and Jake's 60, things will continue
to add up. Jake can't get over the power of zero,
the metric system, that act of faith
that lets us put a 1 next to a 0
and have it mean 10
and add another 0 and it's 100,
the universe infinitely expanding on the paper
before him. If you're 2000, I'll be 1,940.
You'll be 4,000,080 and I'll be 4,000,020.
School's over for the day but Jake's still doing math
at the kitchen table, increasing his life expectancy
and mine till we're as ancient
as Biblical prophets or the ocean or solar system.
As we wait for his mother to come home
time multiplies before our eyes:
You'll be 5,000,090
and I'll be 5,000,030.
The unswerving hubris of the exponential,
the autonomy of zero,
the impenetrable beauty of all these circles in a row.
A Shower on the Bridge between Trenton and Morrisville
The cops left the rain in charge
of crowd control. We are so drenched now
what’s the point of packing up?
It’s too wet to imagine ourselves
anywhere else. The rain won’t let our minds
wander. It prolongs its interrogation,
wanting answers, but nothing we say
could satisfy it. Honk for peace
we shout like a gaggle of geese
who’ve made themselves so obvious
drivers have to steer around them.
The worst place to stand in such a shower
is on a bridge. Everywhere we turn: weather
with no intention of making this day
any easier for us. Soaked,
there’s no comfort to be had
gazing at a river. Look up
and the sky might as well be a lake.
If only the rain were just an old busybody
who can’t help repeating himself,
and, if ignored, might go away,
but this muscle-bound, methodical
downpour, this munitions factory
assembly-line worker, this assistant
district attorney? No one knows better than rain
how to reduce everyone to a common
denominator. What are we doing
five or six miles from where Washington crossed
the ice-cold Delaware, forming a human chain
across a bridge whose huge blinking sign
boasts WHAT TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES?
The rain exiles all,
takes a beat-up city, and beats it senseless.
We hold up placards that began bleeding
as the first drops fell, no match
for the rain, its familiar, relentless,
uncompromising history lesson.
Hulmeville Marine Dies in Car Bomb
- For Cpr. Robert Parnell
The kid I taught the difference between affect and effect
is front page news today, only he didn't get there
by pitching his Babe Ruth team to the playoffs.
At the breakfast tables of 33,500 newspaper readers
he gives up his life for his country.
Soon I'll get paper and pen and write a note
to his mother whom I met at graduation
or maybe type a letter to the editor or my congressman.
Certainly I'll make a donation in Rob's memory.
That's how we humans fool ourselves: we act
as if there's always something we can do.
I turn to the place I look
when things stop making sense,
and out the window is the neighbor's kid
who seems to be growing muscles in the process
of jumpstarting his dad's mower. Often
cutting lawns is a suburban kid's first chance
to feel anything come alive in his hand,
spark plugs igniting, sheer urge bucking under his fingers.
He's not pushing as much as taming the mower,
that id with blades, all that combustion his
to do with as he wishes.
At his age, tired by the day's fourth lawn,
I'd be tempted not to stop the mower from its destiny:
cutting down everything in its path
till nothing fragrant remains
standing, every rose reminded of just how irrelevant
beauty is to a blade.
The boy takes no prisoners,
waging battle against infidels
sprouting back almost as soon as they're cut down.
Like many kids his age this boy seems to have no time
for belts, their outdated strictures,
his pants already slipped past his waist
and riding his hips. Any minute
they may slide all the way down
and he'll step out of them. The small of his back –
wars could be fought over a thing that innocent.
Valentine’s Day will be here before you know it so consider writing a love poem.
You may want to start off by writing a short poem. Certainly, Emily Dickinson’s poems are concise.
It’s All I have to bring today (26)
It’s all I have to bring today –
This, and my heart beside –
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell –
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
— Emily Dickinson
For a subject, consider writing about when you first met, describing how you felt and where you were. Or about one of your first dates. Don’t forget to ground your poem with heartfelt messages.
One way to write a short love poem is to construct it along the lines of a cinquain – but, instead of counting syllables as in the traditional five-line cinquain, use words. Jennifer Goode offers suggestions on how to write this short poem:
In line 1, use a noun (that also can be the poem’s title) – 1 word
line 2: a description – 2 words
line 3: an action – 3 words
line 4: a feeling (use a phrase) – 4 words
line 5: a noun (either repeat line 1 or use a synonym) – 1 word
Here’s what I wrote using Jennifer Goode’s exercise:
YOUR KISSES
Kisses,
tasty cocktails,
intoxicate with touching
tenderness. I treasure each
embrace.
Another mode to use is to write an acrostic poem in which every line starts with a letter of a word that is displayed vertically. Jennifer Goode suggests using “I love you” in an acrostic poem:
I
L
O
V
E
Y
O
U
Or you could use your sweetie’s name or the nickname you call her:
H
O
N
E
Y
Why not try a method used by Pablo Neruda? In “Your Feet” he takes a less-often admired part of his beloved’s body and writes why he loves them:
YOUR FEET
When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the double purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
— Pablo Neruda
Perhaps in your poem you’ll say why you love her neck, her small wrist, earlobe, dimples or freckles.
For the adventurous among my readers, try your hand at composing a love sonnet. To make it easier, here’s an idea that came from Jim Behrle on The Awl:
steal (excuse me: borrow) the end words of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and fill in the lines.
The end words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCVIII (“From you have I been absent in the spring” has easier end words than his sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”:
spring
trim
thing
him
smell
hue
tell
grew
white
rose
delight
those
away
play
With these end words, you have opportunities for comparisons and for sensory images.
And finally for the last-minute love-poem writer, there’s a website that let’s you fill in the blanks (Remember MadLibs?).
For a simple love poem:
Click here to start the fill-in-the-blanks love poem
Or a Neruda poem of your own:
Click here to generate a Neruda poem of your own
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