Is it just me, or do your blogs consistently get hits from people looking for love poems? And when your friends get married, are you as the resident poet obliged to find sappy poems for them? I’d like to make a big list of good but less clichéd love poems. No Bible. No Khalil Gabran.
My initial thoughts are: e.e. cummings; Andre Breton; Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB gets excerpted and overplayed but it is still really fine love poetry. This also applies to Shakespeare– the populace gets stuck on one or two sonnets and they’re not necessarily even the best ones.
Anyway, suggestions?
Jessica Smith
I’ve thought about this before, and I think it is very difficult to find love poems suitable for most weddings.
It’s not entirely laziness that the friggin’ passage from Corinthians gets trotted out so often. It’s hard to find anything else any good that even comes close to working for a wedding.
Consider Andre Breton, for instance. “Free Union” is a heck of a love poem, of its kind. It is about a man’s feelings for a woman, and as such is not really a poem about a couple’s feelings towards each other. And the lines about the woman’s breasts, buttocks, and “sex” are probably a bit too carnal for most wedding crowds.
There is a whole book of poems for weddings, edited by Robert Hass, but most everything in there strikes me as pretty unexciting.
It is much easier to find love poems that are suitable for, shall we say, seduction.
Rodney Koeneke and Lesley Poirier had a lovely Ashbery poem read at their wedding. I can’t remember which one offhand. Which poem, I mean, not which wedding. There was only one wedding.
My wife and I had a friend read part of the eponymous poem from Mark McMorris’ The Blaze of the Poui at our wedding. It seemed to fit in ways I still can’t explain. I found it in that anthology of new love/romantic poems by younger writers. I can’t remember the name of it.
C’mon guys… all this half-hearted information?
i’ve always likes Stevens’ ‘The Restatement of Romance’, tho perhaps not such a good wedding poem
have a good one
i think that bpNichol’s “two words: a wedding” is pretty damn good…
– derek
Sorry my response was taken as half-hearted. I’ve tried time and again at this task, and repeatedly failed.
I’m intrigued to check out the specific poems that some have suggested here. Especially the suggestion by derek b of “two words: a wedding” since he was so spot-on right with his suggestions a few weeks back when I aksed about Canadian prose poetry.
I’m hoping derek might know — and post here — which book that poem can be found in, as I can’t identify that information via Google.
I imagine you could find a beautiful, non-cynical love poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Pablo Neruda is probably also a good choice. Specific examples, suitable for framing, here.
Jessica said: “C’mon guys… all this half-hearted information?”
Mine wasn’t half-hearted; I meant it. Incomplete and half-assed, maybe…
Not sure this would work at a wedding–the raccoons in muck might be too distracting. But here is one I read and reread. I’m putting hard returns between each line, since the comments box can make line breaks hard to see, but the original is written as one enjambed stanza:
Tear It Down
by Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
#
Also,
Jeffrey McDaniel has a poem called “The Archipelago of Kisses” that you can find here:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-archipelago-of-kisses/
I think it would work well as a toast for a wedding because of the humor, but probably not as part of the formal ceremony.
My friends don’t get married. They get divorced.
Neruda, yes. But what about some of Bernadette Mayer and Lee Ann Brown. How about Stein’s Lifting Belly? And Frank O Hara to, some of it. I’ve always loved “Morning,” which I wrote a rip off of/homage to once. It is a very good poem for pining:
MORNING
I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes
I miss you always
when I got to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you’d be proud of
the parking lot is
crowded and I stand
rattling my keys the car
is empty as a bicycle
what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies it
is difficult to think
of you without me in
the sentence you depress
me when you are alone
Last night the stars
were numerous and today
snow is their calling
card I’ll not be cordial
there is nothing that
distracts me music is
only a crossword puzzle
you know how it is
when you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
I don’t think the O’Hara works. It’s a great poem, but the gestalt brought on by its images wouldn’t seem to fit in a wedding attended by a variety of family and friends: death in the mouth, cigarettes, an empty car, lots of anchovies in the lunch, even the begging at the end seems too much, for a wedding.
It is a tremendous pining poem — that’s for sure.
Well I don’t think it necessarily has to be a love poem to be delivered publicly at a wedding.
- not all loves are codified/legitimized/written by marriage,
- not all marriages are public
- not all love poems need to be shared b/t more than two– or even more than one– person.
i think we can stick with “really good love poems,” not necessarily “poems you’d read to your friends at a wedding.” i see the latter as a subset.
thanks gillian, sandra and lorraine for typing out your suggestions so we can all read them. klg, the stanza (strophe?) with anchovies breaks my heart.
(i still can’t get stanza and strophe straight.)
as i was telling gillian on her blog, i like zukofsky’s valentines to celia, and would certainly give them as valentines, though not deliver them publicly or aloud.
“two words: a wedding” is in bpNichol’s _As Elected: Selected Writing_ Nichol & David, eds. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980.
– derek
Thanks derek, for the info on the bpNichol book.
The only ethical choice for a hetero wedding is one of John Wieners’ or Gerrit Lansing’s love poems.
Yes yes. O Hara is for pining.
“Love is no comforter, rather a nail in the
skull”
In all seriousness, Dryden did a fantastic translation of the opening of De Rerum Naturae by Lucretius, an invocation to Venus.
The great, and mostly forgotten, French poet Yvan Goll has an untitled poem which begins with the line…
“Your hair is like the last burning light of the century”
and goes on from there, with lines more poetic than my meagre memory can reproduce.
-c
I wouldn’t say Yvan Goll is forgotten. He was on my orals list for my French baccalauréat.
yeah, ee cummings has been requested reading from me twice –
i carry your heart
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~thier/ee/#yourheart
Oh! Yeah– this is one of the first poems given to me by one of my first boyfriends. e.e.cummings can be very tender.
I always liked this and consider it a love poem:
The Ivy Crown
William Carlos Williams
The whole process is a lie,
unless,
crowned by excess,
It break forcefully,
one way or another,
from its confinement—
or find a deeper well.
Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.
Daffodil time
is past. This is
summer, summer!
the heart says,
and not even the full of it.
No doubts
are permitted—
though they will come
and may
before our time
overwhelm us.
We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win! We do not
look to see
jonquils and violets
come again
but there are,
still,
the roses!
Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has its seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.
Children pick flowers.
Let them.
Though having them
in hand
they have no further use for them
but leave them crumpled
at the curb’s edge.
At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns.
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse—
at least, blinded by the light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
we have,
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.
oops. the indents were lost in williams’ poem above. Probably for most poets these days the poem is considered trite & ooky. But I still like it. It was read at my first wedding and read at my first husband’s funeral.
Somehow that reminds me of this:
It’s no use
Mother dear, I
can’t finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite
soft as she is
she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy
(sappho)
and here’s something nice from Psalms:
I am poured out like water.
All my bones are out of joint.
My heart is like wax;
it is melted within me. (22:14)
it’s from the bible, but not hackneyed.
here’s a good wedding one, again from sappho (#90, “Lucky” in my book, “The Love Songs of Sappho”)
Bridegroom
There never was
Another girl like this
Sharon Harris sent me this one by Robert Priest:
Go, Gather Up the Love
Go, gather up the love
I know now what we must do
It is in your eyes and my eyes
Go, and gather it up, look by look,
gaze by gaze,
one flame in a hand, one holy flame–
two flames gathered up–
Gather up the love in our children
Gather it through slum and hovel
through mansion and factory
with great gentleness, go
taking a spark here a glow there
turning down none of it
Gather it up and free it
if even just in your own lips
through your own heart
by being strong
by going always beyond your limits
Gather it to saturation
long past your centre
deeper than the full depth of you
Gather it up in beads
in blue flames, in fierce bonfires
Let there be a leap of love
in the centre of the earth–
a flame higher than the heavens
a leap of our commitment
of our will
a leap of fire
straight into the stars