In the bathroom (relatively clean; thank you, Jenny) of this week's house-sit: a recent anthology of love poems "from the sixteenth century to the present day."
The book contains my third-favorite Keats poem, "Bright Star," clearly a love poem because its speaker longs to be "pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast / to feel for ever its soft swell and fall." The book also contains "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," in which death comes for the speaker by his having loved a beautiful but merciless lady—and that's it for Keats.
So where's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Isn't that poem all about the long-dead (yet deathless) lovers depicted on the clay? Or "This Living Hand," the most flesh-insistent of any of Keats's poems, in the last line of which the poet (yes, I assume it is Keats) actually holds his hand toward you?
The book's intent, per its front-flap copy, was to collect "the classics and favorites" as well as other things: "blues lyrics, Broadway songs and a full range of poetic styles from the aristocratic to the popular." (NB: Yes, it is a British edition; if an American edition of this book ever appears, which is unlikely, the word aristocratic will be replaced with academic).
I appreciate the editorial goal of including a full range of poetic styles. But may we imagine, for a moment, a fuller range of poetic subjects? What about poems less explicitly about love?
Shakespeare sonnets are great—and the two Cole Porter songs may have seemed exceptionally daring to someone—but I can't help thinking there’s been much more to love poetry over the last four hundred years than the regular capital-L love stuff.
The BAEP takes the risk of including comparatively clean poems in an anthology of the erotic. My own contribution has nothing to do with explicit sex, yet I admit the poem turned out a little filthy.
Thank you, dear editor, for noticing.
—Sarah Manguso
Yes, the happy accident of filth. You're absolutely right, think, to cast a suspicious eye to the "capital-L love stuff." Likewise, I would suggest, the capital-S spiritual stuff, the capital-P political stuff, the capital-M _meaningful_ stuff. The least interesting of all poetries is the didactic. Just as the least interesting sort of kiss is the front-on lip-lock (tho, I suppose, it all really does depend on the lips in question).
--jill
Posted by: | February 15, 2008 at 02:40 AM