why love poems don't work ...

bwahaha heaney... i'm not sure about nick cave's qualifications to lecture on poems or much of anything else, being the author of such epic love ballads as "unleash the bats". mind you, "murder ballads" was good.

RELEASE the bats. kind of a fair point, though

YES!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry - will attempt to be more erudite on the forums when I have slept and drank tea..... Just wanted to add my heartfelt agreement with Ivory Fish Wise I get SOOOO sick o people asking me why I dont rite "happier" poems of love. I can't. When I'm happy and in love, I'm busy behaving like it. I don't need to exorcise everything....just exist in it. *skips away happily*

Bittersweet always works for me. However, I think our tendency to want more 'realistic' love poems may have something to do with living in a more cynical era. We all pride ourselves in being sassy, sophisticated and worldly...reading about couples floating on clouds, sipping honey (ummm...maybe not) from each other's shoes just makes us say 'pah'. We want to hear about the pain, the fragility of it all and then relate it back to our own experiences. (as a non poet I risk being booed/ignored/macheted but hey, that's showbiz....).

Just wondering if you have ever actually done the sipping honey out of shoes thing?? - sounds rather cheesy in more ways than one!!

I agree with you IFB, I don't think people enjoy love poetry.....they prefer a bit more angst with their coffee, I tried to write one, it got panned....ons star from about 10 separate, obviously deeply unhappy in love people, who probably highly rate the angsty stuff....

What's love got to do with it?

but a second hand emotion........

I'm not sure what the measure of success for a love poem might be but if it is to do with publication and sales then I suggest that the most successful ones are to be found in greeting cards of the 'Happy Birthday Sweetheart' and 'My Valentine' variety. Now you may scoff but how many of you ladies (and I notice that the participants in this discussion are almost entirely female) having received one or other of these cards haven't bothered to read the inscribed poem and felt a little stirring somewhere? I dispute that we all want pain and suffering in our love poetry and Bill Shakespeare wrote both happy and sad stuff! Personally I've had enough experience of threatening nuances to last a lifetime and don't need to aggravate my memories with others pain. I wish I had a shoe, smelly or not to sip honey from, if you are really in love that must be a pleasure. Love has everything to do with it and I always thought that Tina Tuner song was crap!

............and a black eye or two, or three, or...............

Suppose um, Ewan MacGregor fancied you and gave you a soppy card, and Auden fancied you and wrote you a poem. Who'd you go for?

hmmm I do know that nick cave lecture…i think his thrust is that the love song [love song and love poem are interchangeable i’d say, for this discussion] cannot be a wholly joyful thing, but must embrace love’s potential to cause us pain. i think that this is why songs and poems which do not acknowledge this, which have no hint of how vulnerable we are when in love, can make us think "yuk!" i’m interested though by the arguments put forward by Secondhand Rose – maybe the reality of it is that it is just so much more difficult to write a “happy” love poem. can anyone put on this thread an example of a happy love poem that for them doesn’t cause the “yuk!” response? shakespeare was mentioned – do people think that his “shall i compare thee to a summer’s day” sonnet is such an example?

Yuk

put you down as a no, liana?

Right. this one dosn't even have teasing. LOVES GROWTH I scarce believe my love to be so pure As I had thought it was, Because it does endure Vicissitude, and season, as the grasse; Me thinkes I lyed all winter, when I swore, My love was infinite, if spring make it more. But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only bee no quintessence, But mixt all stuffes, paining soule, or sense, And of the Sunne his working vigour borrow, Love's not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. and yet no greater, but more eminent, Love by the Spring is growne; as, in the firmament, Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg'd, but showne. Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough, From loves awakened root do bud out now. If, as in water stir'd more circles bee produc'd by one, love such additions take, Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make, For they are all concentrque unto thee. and though each spring doe add to love new heate, As princes doe in times of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the springs increase John Donne. Ivory, I remember you saying you liked his poetry from somewhere else. I might not have understood this properly, but this one didn't SEEM to have sadness in it. And anyway, just because everyone else is writing miserable stuff doesn't mean you have to, does it? Gap in the market springs to mind

Or lots of stuff by Herrick, or Althea in Prison, by Colonel Lovelace. I wonder if it's that poetry is written after the event, because in the event you are too busy. So love poetry is only written if lovers are separated by circumstance (but still in love) so what the poet writes in this instance will be full of longing. But AFTER the event, the poet has LOADS of time, but probably no inclination or maybe ability to write about how wonderful it was before

God, what am I doing in this thread ? Is this the lecture where Nick Cave goes on to deconstruct Kylie's Better the Devil you know and turns it from pleasant pop-nonsense into a song of an oppressed woman who has lost all hope and tolerates what is thrown at her ? I think you have to accept that Nick Cave is quite a dark person. Someone once wrote that good news is always written in white ink, which is part of the reason. We want to read someone's pain because to read of someone's unbridled happiness just makes us either nauseated or jealous. For me, my favourite piece of beautiful yet tragic poetry is by Khayyam - one thing is certain, that time flies, one thing is certain and the rest is lies, the flower that's blown forever always dies.

gimme auden every time ... nothing worse than those rhyming saccharine loads of twaddle in cards ... i feel sick just thinking about them ... nothing makes me QUITE so uncomfortable as someone writing something soppy for me ... aaaaaaaaaaargh ... god save us ... i really think writing a bad soppy love poem is a chuckable offence ... there are some others (wearing slippers for instance ...) ... i have written some love poems which i THOUGHT were happy at the time ... only to discover later that the seeds of trouble were there all the time ... or is it that hindsight allows us to read something differently? fey no time this min to inspect donne for gloom ... will attempt to do so later ...

I appear to be in a minority of next to nothing but do I care? Not one bit, there's nothing wrong with being a romantic of the simplest kind. All you scoffers are sadly missing something. I notice the use of the royal 'we' in discussions is becoming more prevalent, can I please be excluded from 'we', I'm a 'me' not part of a collective. So Andrew, 'I' don't want to read of others pain, I hurt enough already. To know that unbridled happiness exists is very reassuring, it means there's hope for me yet.

Definitely a no from me Robert.... Don't get me wrong secondhand rose (?) I am not a miserable depressed git. Love is fabby, I adore being in love, but I cant write about it....as I said before, Im too busy DOING it (no double entendre intended) Fay sums it up perfectly, above. Where is the royal we being used, Rose? I dont see it.....Also, I am also no doubt that unbridled love exists. So?

I think Donne was much too busy happily 'getting his end away' (excuse the unpoetic description) to be very introspective or tortured. He was a truly wolfish man; all delightfully clever verse that tangled up his victims so fast that they were in his bedchamber before they could say 'ode to...' However, he was never ever a sweetie...and IFB, I bet he would never have been seen dead in a pair of slippers....

Love is all you need...

So whilst you're in the throes of 'doing it' Liana have you never written an ode to the object of your doing, if so I'm surprised, especially as you're a writer. I would have thought the heat of unbridled love and affection fomenting in your breast would have burst into verse like a shower of shooting stars on a hot summers night. I find it hard to believe that lovers don't put down on paper what they feel for each other, to be read in the moments when apart. I have never been too busy to tell my love how I feel, both verbally and in writing so i tend to disagree with Fey on that point. Royal 'we' on this thread so far, Wolfgirl....'We all pride....' Andrew .....'We want to...' and on several others, I can't be bothered to list. Ewan McGregor v W.H.Auden? I think it highly unlikely but in the event, neither. You see I am the most hetero of sexuals on the planet so their advances would be highly discouraged. So? ?

......????

I thought you looking for an answer in your previous post and I didn't understand. Now I am looking for an answer!

Oh sorry, I just ended a bit confused I guess. I guess I thought you were inferring that I was unfamiliar with unbridled passion etc. And no, I'm not a writer, I'm a teacher. Must admit, its a bit hazy, but yeah, it exists, and l am as happy as the next when in it. Thats all.

I didn't mean literally DOING IT, I meant during the course of being in love, and yes I have and she wasn't. C'est la vie! I don't believe happy sentiment is confined to cards and have never believed love could be bought (in my case as a youngster I couldn't give it away let alone sell it!). I think it has more to do with dreaming than being materialistic though I agree there does seem to be a shortage of 'Hello you bastard, I hope you hurt too!' cards. Maybe there's an opening there for an entrepreneur.

maybe we don't like happy love poems because the happy vibe isn't as easy to capture as the woe is me kinda vibe? I find that anyway, I try to write happy love poems and they just don't sound right :-(

I agree with ivory, No intensity of emotion possible without the threat (or fear) of loss. Cannot convey the bliss of the high without knowing the emptiness of losing it. A scientific truism, can't have matter without antimattr, action without reaction, attraction without repulsion and so on....... Skriv ut fishbone, kämpa på. Jag ska sakna dig........

A pox on my 'we'! (oops, that does sound a mite painful). I do apologise for a crass generalisation though. I was speaking for myself and therefore should not have embraced the population en masse. Still, great topic but I do still maintain that the twentyfirst century is a cynical one and that pure love poetry does not satisfy enough of the brain. Also, I used to write (appalling) verse that was very niave and so sweet it was auctioned by Tate and Lyle. I need it with teeth now, a growl in its' step. I am moved more by the fear, pain and loss than plain old contented love. Does that mean I've grown up or that I am changing, alien-style into an ugly, cynical old hack?

I am thick, don't know any of the above poets etc!! I write, (good or bad) doesn't matter to anyone except me. I write from the heart, life etc. Isn't that what any decent writer does. And if you can touch just one person by the words on that page, well, wow, that does it for me everytime. So reading the above I am not only thick, but I must be naive and also a pretty rubbishy writer. But hey, that's life folks. Just for the record, I love love, being loved but most of all giving love. If that's sicky and yuk, that's tough. AJ

No probs, Fey. I really wanted to call the book 'Where's My Bleedin' Cherry, Then?' but people might have thought i was jealous of Anton Chekov's 'The Cherry Orchard.' Russian Git. Warmest regards, Shame.

I love it too :o))))

Of course there's a place for real romance, real love, real feelings. I would never decry the intense feelings that someone has when they are in love, it is just that I as a reader (smack on wrist for daring to use word 'we') don't particularly enjoy reading about it - if you're in love the real thing is better and if you're not, reading about it stirs up all sorts of other emotions. (Is it acceptable for me to use 'you're' ??? If not, please replace with 'I'm' ) I suppose the key to it is tension - in fiction at least, if you have a story of incandescent love then it only works if at some point the relationship has been put in jeopardy. I suppose in poetry one can get closer to the real core emotion and just deal with that. The capacity to love and to make adjustments in life because of love is one of the highest human functions, so of course it is a subject for writing. But, to touch on Karl's thread about changing endings, would Romeo and Juliet's love have been so enthralling and enduring if it hadn't been blended with tragedy ? Looking at the facts alone, they hardly talk except of their love and physical attraction and only days earlier Romeo was saying exactly the same things of Rosalind. Tension and drama makes love worth reading about.

'Cos it would take that old subject 'love' to instigate such a long and vibrant thread, wouldn't it. Call me an old cynic but I reckon love poems don't work because 'love' of the type poets write about does not actually exist. I reckon that in our more honest, private moments we all know this and therefore ultimately see love poems for the phoney and shallow utterings they are. Yeah, we all know that weird sick-but-nice, pain-but-pleasure, blow-hot, blow-cold feeling, even me and I'm well old enough to know better. But that ain't love. In fact, psychologists have a rather ugly word for it - cathexis - and it's just a biological urge used to get more permanent relationships off the ground. Or, more likely, to keep us all interested until they crash and burn. Sometimes (rarely) fake-love, lust, cathexis (call it what you will) turns into real love. But real love is not what poets write about, is it. No, being the pretentious and sentimental fools they are, they prefer the phoney version. This is like choosing virtual reality when you could have real reality. When a poet comes up with one about a couple who've been together (both happily and unhappily) for twenty-odd years and raised four kids on the dole whilst simultaneously treating other with care, kindness and respect, I'll admit to having read a love poem. I'm not holding my breath. Romeo and Juliet are a good example of the difference between love and lust. I mean, how old were they? Twelve and fourteen or something. What do you reckon would have happened if they hadn't screwed up so badly with that sleeping pill trick they tried to pull? I reckon, within a few months, Romeo would have dumped Juliet and been snogging his deceased 'friend', Mercutio's little sister Ophelia following which he'd have qucikly moved on to Tibalt's cousin Veronica then Benvolio's mom Petunia, by now having gained enough experience to 'try' the older woman. What else would you expect from an adoloscent Italian? After all, it didn't take him long to dump that first one, did it. What was her name again. Rosalind? I've quite forgotten her already. Just like Romeo did. For 'love' poems that (almost) work I refer you to Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath. Both anguished women, which should tell you something.

'I' don't give a @!#$ what all you lovers of pain,doom and gloom think! 'I' love lovely love poems, thank you.

Fey, Not sure if you are addressing me or John L. If it is me, you're preaching to the converted. Love & peace, John Winston

Maybe it's simply natural to prefer cynical poetry, as opposed to romantic poetry, as you mature? (Nice word, that.) I'm not saying that experience automatically leads to disillusion, but consider this: no-one out there can say "I've had a life-long love affair". You can say "so far.." if you're lucky, but there's no guaranteed conclusion until someone presses the button and those curtains close. Even then, posthumous opinions may differ. On the other hand, virtually everyone has suffered some great loss of love - if not in reality, in our heads. (Some more than others!) As writers it's a more than familiar situation to all of us, right? R and J probably works because they ARE so young, and we've all been there. This thread made me look back over my own feeble stuff and, yes, there have been no-holds-barred, full blooded love poems. These were all private and personal, and the letters are still stacked somewhere in the wardrobe. The ones I've posted, unsurprisingly, are mostly cynical and/or humorous.. oh, maybe one ("Katy takes the plunge") is vaguely optimistic, but, generally speaking, I don't think that's what people want to read: misery's something we can all relate to. As many above have said - who has time to write when they're happy? It's after the big shock that we sit down and pour out our feelings of loss. Natural, really.

Fey - I didn't mean to imply that writers of cynical and/or humorous poems are all miserable gits! I simply meant that disillusion is virtually universally understood, whereas really intense, happy poetry is often too personal to share. It is for me, anyway. That doesn't stop me having a well-honed sense of humour!

"... You've gotta have experienced the blues to play them..."

another piece of homespun profound rubbish

Pretentious dogtwat you suck big time. Your replies are deliberately foul. It is almost always unpleasant to read them. You cast a pall over these forums with your opinionated nonsense. I have it on good authority that you have put some intelligent and thoughtful people off posting due to your consistent negativity and obstinate anti intellectualism. Perhaps that is what you want. You left before only to return seemingly without learning one single thing. It is sad. Poor you. Isn't there something better you could find to do with your time? Write something worth reading for instance?

Yes, exactly right, Fey - hey, I agree with someone! Sorry if this is beginning to sound like a conversation rather than a thread, but I reckon you've hit the nail straight on the head. A happy relationship is almost certainly ongoing - that's the key word, right? Therefore it's private and personal. But.. the failed/ doomed one? It's over and we CAN separate ourselves from it, twist it, shape it, cast ourselves in the role of tragic loser. What's more, we can use it as catharsis (where are you, Mississippi? That was your cue!) or, more frequently than we might admit, use writing as a weapon of revenge. Many famous authors have, so why not? Who hasn't written one last blistering letter to the person we believe let us down badly? A poem is simply a disguised way of broadcasting our resentment - or can be. Okay, I'm off to let someone else have a go - but at least this thread has attracted some worthwhile contributions. PS.. there are one or two exceptions..

Fey, I'm John L(ewis) not John L(ennon). All the same thanks v. much for the Seamus Heaney poem which I admit I liked a lot and goes at least some way toward being a love poem. It kind of proves my point though that when real love replaces that heart in the mouth stuff, it all gets pretty bland and prosaic. I mean scaffolding, planks etc. Still it will do for now unless you've got one that's both real and exciting - or am I jusy a big kid at heart wishing for the moon? John

I agree with Fey, writing is a beautiful way of expressing desire, love, etc. Between two people it is a private way....on this site, I have seen such emotions desctibed in beautiful and evocative ways, and in the wider world, reading such poetry as Shakespeare's "shall I compare thee..... and I could read that sort of stuff 'til the cows come home.......ermmmm unfortunate tuen of phrase...they might never come home!! But some stuff is way to personal and that can be a chore to read if you are not the receipient of such feelings..... .......shuffles off looking for cows to come home so that he can stop reading love poetry.......

That's the one Fey. A love poem that starts (almost) with a red rose and ends with a knife is real enough for me. Who said I was a hard bloke to please?

Of course, to do this thread properly we first need to define 'LOVE.' I should warn anyone tempted to try this that the eskimo's (apparently) have forty-odd words for SNOW. Also, think of the many and various ways LOVE is described in song lyrics. I wonder how many of these can we think of between us? Any takers Here's three for starters; Love's a silver bullet (that blows your World apart) Love is a minestrone And - one of my favourites Love is a villain that attacks you in the night though I haven't got a clue where this one comes from. Any ideas, Liana seeing as you were so damn good at the Misheard Lyrics thing?

We've just had all manner of problems trying to define art in another thread, and now you want us to define love ? It is difficult, because one of my key criteria would be that it is something that lasts past the first flush of lust and infatuation, but I can clearly see that it is possible for someone to have a love affair that is very short-lived, but contains far more love in it than the average long relationship. We had a bit of a crack at it in the 'perfection' thread. A lot of what I would describe as my 'poetic' type feelings of love, the nausea, doubt, racing pulse, stomach lurching love has turned out not to last at all when exposed to reality. Often the ones you chase hardest are the ones least worth catching. "Bingo Little little realised that, mistaking it for a peach, he had picked a lemon in the garden of love"... "And I've been in love before / and I found that love was more / than just / holding hands "

We've just had all manner of problems trying to define art in another thread, and now you want us to define love ? It is difficult, because one of my key criteria would be that it is something that lasts past the first flush of lust and infatuation, but I can clearly see that it is possible for someone to have a love affair that is very short-lived, but contains far more love in it than the average long relationship. We had a bit of a crack at it in the 'perfection' thread. A lot of what I would describe as my 'poetic' type feelings of love, the nausea, doubt, racing pulse, stomach lurching love has turned out not to last at all when exposed to reality. Often the ones you chase hardest are the ones least worth catching. "Bingo Little realised that, mistaking it for a peach, he had picked a lemon in the garden of love"... "And I've been in love before / and I found that love was more / than just / holding hands "