Thursday, 23 June 2011

• Writing About Love Without Saying "Love"

  

  For a year or so, I attended an arts school for poetry. Our instructor was a celebrated Vietnam War veteran who spent most of his down time writing poetry about the war and commemorated fellow soldiers who died in action through his poetry. He walked with a limp after getting shot in the leg, was sent back to his hometown, and settled down with his wife. He was a journalist for thirty years before becoming a poetry instructor.

  One of the first things he told us was, "for now, don't write love poems. Sometime this semester I'll give you a similar love-poem assignment."

  We didn't question him. He had such an aura of wisdom around him that we just followed his course syllabus, and each week he reminded us to avoid writing about love.

  When we questioned why we couldn't, he gave us a simple answer:
  "How much do you really know about love, so young? You haven't fully experienced all facets of it yet, but I am sure there are a lot of other things you know a lot about. That's why I wrote so much about Vietnam, having been through it from beginning to end. I didn't know enough about love until my wife and I settled down now. Write about what you know. About the ordinary things in life that you see all the time. Make the simple into something memorable."

  He proceeded to read a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

  Don’t write love poems; … rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember.

  And though I was a fan of writing poems about the love-I-knew-at-that-point, I heeded his words and began to write about things I saw every day, like the garden I kept in my backyard and the music I heard from practice rooms at the institution. Things that never had any real significance to me I began to write about, like the hour long bus ride to my program or watching my classmates sharpen their pencils. Not writing about love was an exercise in being more concrete in my writing, since love is such an abstract concept to pen down.
  

  About halfway through the program, he said, "finally, this is the week you can do it. You may write a love poem this week, with one restriction."

  What could it possibly be?

  "You cannot use the word love."

  Easy enough, or so I thought.

  I went home that night trying to work on a first draft of my love-without-love poem, and I realized I didn't know how to start. Perhaps my instructor was right--I didn't know enough at that point to write a true love poem. What images could best convey what love is to me? Is it passion? Is it physical intimacy? Is it adoration? Maternal and paternal love? There were too many possibilities and too many ways for poetry to be interpreted that I didn't know where to start. I procrasinated that assignment until two nights before it was due, scared my poem would be misinterpreted.

  I ended up writing a poem about a pas de deux ballet performance on opening night, after the couple had rehearsed for a year, their hard work culminating in a five minute piece danced for thousands of people. I tried to describe their movements and precision in a way that conveyed intimacy because they were always holding hands or the male was holding the female by the hips for lifts and leaps. That the ballerina trusted the danseur to catch her each time she leaped into his arms, and that they danced the story so well that the audience could not tell if they were actually lovers or just really great performers.

  

  How would you describe "love" without using the word "love"?

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