Writing Love Poems is Anti-Fascist

What kind of a love poem? I know that question is immediately on my mind in response. But love itself, as a practice and a concept, is inherently anti-fascist because love is concerned with reality and seeing past the anxious self to the reality of the other person. (Iris Murdoch)

I think of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Looking at Each Other,” and how the deep attention present between the two people in the poem constitutes the haven from the (un)rest of the world, the place of solace and reprieve, of comfort and consolation and survival:

I’ve also been deep in Donald Hall in Jane Kenyon lately, thanks to this gorgeous archive of Eating the Pig at the Ann Arbor District Library, an event where a pig dinner was consumed with great revelry, and Donald Hall later wrote a poem about it which, for seven (7) minutes of your time, you can listen to here.

Anyway, I was so taken with these young images of Don and Jane in 1974 in Ann Arbor, photographs by Stephen Blos:

And I’ve been deep in Hall and Kenyon’s poems for the last week or so, their love poems with and to each other, and Don’s essay of “The Third Thing,” which I find so moving and essential, sometimes losing track of who wrote which lines of love or lust for the other one, and how tenderly they wrote about each other’s hair, each other’s writing, living with each other in rural New Hampshire at Don’s family’s farmhouse, in a living writing retreat together.

Hall and Kenyon’s love story also involves their cancer stories—Don’s colon cancer first, which Kenyon wrote about so movingly, and Kenyon’s briefer experience with Leukemia.

What happens after death, when absence becomes the receiver of the love? The lines that really set me into silence, that struck me so profoundly, as someone who has been deep in writing love poems themselves, are these from Hall—because you think the “you” in the poem will always be with you—you take the lyric “you” for granted, don’t you? So flexible, so capacious. Surely that someone will always be there. But no. No, that is a specific you, as specific as the I we won’t admit is the speaker of the poem:

And now for the poems that are the reason for this post in the first place, ha. In bed last night, turning between editions, as one does, nerdily and in a sort of voraciously demanding way as we can only really be with poets and be satisfied, I saw a poem in Hall’s thick White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Selected Poems 1946-2006, which encompasses poems after Kenyon’s death, and includes poems from The Painted Bed, although interestingly under the different title heading of Throwing Away (such an interesting revision). So here is the version of the poem in “Love Poem” in the 2006 Selected,

And here is the version that appears in the 2011 collection The Painted Bed: 

I think you could do far, far worse than take these two poems and plop them in front of a class of beginner poets, and have them discuss the significant revision—the complete replacement of the pronouns from “you” to “I”—and what it moves so strikingly towards. Because isn’t the best revision always towards vulnerability of some kind—be that music or meaning—and aren’t we always peeling back the words we have put in front of ourselves? Aren’t we chasing ourselves through a dark wood—like Emily, out with a lantern looking for ourselves? I just loved the accident of seeing this last night, the stark reminder that Hall wrestled with this honesty in a poem the same as I wrestle with honesty in a love poem, and that truthfulness is another way we fight fascism in our lives, and that love is about ultimately about telling the truth, about seeing another person as real.

I hope your winter solstice is filled with love and love poems.

Han

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