It’s February, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. I know the perfect gift for someone you love, especially someone you love to kiss: A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward and published by Terrapin Books. It’s a beautiful collection from start to finish. As Lee Upton writes in the foreword:
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A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You'll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union . . .
May there be no end to the most genuine kisses, the right kisses, the ones that are good and meant for us to savor. And while we're at it, let's wish for no end to poems about kissing.
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I thought I’d ask Diane Lockward to say a few words about the anthology.
What inspired you to put together an anthology of kisses?
I don’t remember when the idea first hit me, but it churned in my brain for quite a while. Then I saw that the poet Brian Turner had just put out an anthology about kissing and my great idea hit the floor. I figured he’d just beat me to it, but ordered his book from the library. To my great delight, it turned out that his book is all prose. So my idea was resuscitated. I then put my plan together and put out the call for submissions.
How long did it take to collect 100 great kiss poems?
The call was open for six weeks. From the day it opened, I was bombarded with submissions. The idea seemed to be very appealing to lots of poets. After all, who isn’t interested in kissing? And there are so many different ways to approach the topic. I’ve done three anthologies; this one received by far the most submissions. Making selections was very difficult. I had to consider not only the quality of the poems but also the variety of approaches, tone, form, length. I had to say no to many worthy poems. And I am haunted by the fear that I said no to some poems I should have said yes to. But I did not want an enormous collection. So about 100 poems seemed a good limit.
I’d love to have you post a few kiss poems below, and say a few words about them.
Last Kiss
First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who
count such things say an average person kisses for a total
of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks
was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere
you look. And you learn that cows kiss and squirrels. Puffins,
snails and meerkats! And you are overcome with sorrow and
an overwhelming desire to kiss—to be kissed. And you learn
that’s called basorexia and you have it. You watch the lips
of strangers in the supermarket—wonder if one would want
to kiss you. You know now that a minute of kissing burns
twenty-six calories and that a man lives up to five years
longer if he kisses his lover before he goes to work. You want
to tell someone that. And what’s worse, unlike the first kiss,
the last slipped by unnoticed—unnoted. It might have been
a spring day when daffodils answered the sun’s invitation or
an autumn day when everything else was burning. Or simply
a day you took out the garbage, did a load of wash. Then, someone
comes and takes your hand and you remember words
to a song you thought you’d never hear again and you remember
all those sunsets you forgot to watch and the smell of woods in rain.
And you remember the river, the river—how it presses
its mouth again and again to the swollen sea.
—Jane Ebihara
Nightmare Kiss
The middle of a kiss, and though he opened
up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave
a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:
as if she’d fallen in an open grave,
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,
a simple kiss that rained and filled her head
with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;
why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,
with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead
of kissing someone who would let her out,
kissing someone nicer, who ate less.
—Tony Barnstone
How could I not love Jane Ebihara’s “Last Kiss”? There’s so much to be learned here about kissing. The poem is full of facts. Who knew about the kissing of meerkats and puffins? Who knew the word basorexia? The poem is also full of whimsy and longing. It breaks my heart that the speaker’s last kiss is one she does not remember. The longing is contained and controlled within the two-line stanzas, yet spills out so tenderly in the closing images of the poem—that river kissing the swollen sea! What a perfect ending.
With the Barnstone poem you get a sense of the variety in the anthology. This poem is, of course, also about kissing, but it takes a very different approach to the subject. It’s grotesque with its monstrous kiss, the poor woman literally consumed by the wrong man’s kiss. There’s nothing tender here. But what a smart poem! It’s a beautifully executed, two-sentence sonnet, though the reader is so pulled in by the subject matter that form might easily be missed. As in Ebihara’s poem, the imagery is wonderful. There’s the landscape of the man’s mouth where the woman now dwells and the stunning final image of the nicer man she might have kissed, one “who ate less.”
I’d also love a poem from you—maybe a romantic poem, or that wonderful poem, “My Husband Discovers Poetry”?
My Husband Discovers Poetry
Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.
Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband’s coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.
In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.
You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.
But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.
Diane Lockward is the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind, 2016). She is also the editor of The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics and two previous craft books, The Crafty Poet and The Crafty Poet II. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books.
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