Yet how does this help us write about love? 

Years ago, I had the incredible fortune of taking my first-ev­er undergraduate poetry workshop with Jack Gilbert at Smith College, who responded to one of my desperate love poems with what amounted to, Nice try, kid, but people shouldn’t be allowed to use the word “love” in a poem until they’re thirty. I was 20 at the time, and this was the last thing I wanted to hear. I mean, I knew what love was—here were my big feelings so shiny and new they may as well have had the price tags still on them. How could they not be the stuff of great poetry? Look at Keats! He died at twenty-five! 

But now that I’ve managed to make it all the way into my forties, with a few Keats-like exceptions, I have a sneaking sus­picion Jack was right.

When we are young, each new experience, each new feel­ing, is still vacuum-packed and factory-fresh, its boundaries clearly delineated: “Ahh, so this is happiness; and that, oh, that way over there, that is heartbreak.”

Yet as people age, as many of us have likely observed, we’re far more likely to experience mixed emotions—a tear in the eye while looking at something beautiful, a tightness in the chest when greeting a good friend. 

And this range of emotions, clearly evident in Ross Gay’s “Thank You,” is what I believe to be the key to writing poems about love. Though we have this idea of love poems as sweet and light, filled with grand philosophical pronouncements, such one-note works seem false, or at least facile, and leave all but the intended recipient cold. Instead, powerful, effective love poems invite in Lorca’s duende, acknowledging the light and the dark of the world, and all the shades in between. 

For our lives are never just one thing or the other. This in-between is where we live. Even in moments of deep sorrow, hints of joy lurk like Gay’s “dormant splendor”—just as in even the most joyful of moments, the aches of the past and potential sorrows of the future are always present. Hence the phenomenon of tears of happiness, of poignancy, of the pleasant pain of nostalgia—of having had a home, even if it’s now gone. 

And this, for all you youthful people out there under thirty, muttering under your breath just like I did, if you can put this into your poems, it might well be the hack you need to lower Jack’s estimate. 

With all this in mind, let’s look at four poems that build on this foundation of complicated truths while taking four very different approaches to writing about love. The first is by Matthew Olzmann:

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem

So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage

might work: Because you wear pink but write poems

about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell

at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,

loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,

gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials

from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.

You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents

of what you packed were written inside the boxes.

Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid.

Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me

to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.

Because you underline everything you read, and circle

the things you think are important, and put stars next

to the things you think I should think are important,

and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.

Because you make that pork recipe you found

in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read

that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing

except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self

and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights

are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed

over the windows, you still believe someone outside

can see you. And one day five summers ago,

when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge

was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—

there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,

which you paid for with your last damn dime

because you once overheard me say that I liked it. 2

(“Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem,” (poem) from Mezzanines by Matthew Olzmann, Alice James Books, 2013.)

In the tradition of Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” Olzmann has written a list poem, which is a form particularly suited to this subject: attention, after all, is one of the most basic forms of love. When we love someone, especially in those first heady weeks and months together, love makes explorers of us all. We imagine ourselves the first to discover a particular personality trait (“You think swans are overrated,”) or an aesthetic characteristic (“You wear pink”). And through this accumulation of details, we hope to demonstrate to the beloved that we truly know them, while also creating a portrait for others of the one we love. 

Yet despite the specificity of its details, this is not just a pri­vate gift poem. Though it might seem counterintuitive, the more specific, the more authentic, we can make the concrete sensory details of our love poems, the more a poem can feel universal and resonant to a wide sweep of readers. Each image here of another’s beloved triggers in me memories of the specific qualities of the one I love, making me inadvertently begin a list of my own, as you might if you were to try using this poem as a model.

And despite its deceptively simple form, from the first, this poem allows in that mandatory shiver of darkness: “Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage / might work.” The crucial fulcrum here is the word might, which allows in the ghost of might not and gives the sense this speaker is not just setting out to make a sweet grocery list of love but is struggling to convince his wife—or even perhaps himself—that they’ve got a good thing going. Opening this way gives the poem an inherent urgency, which is then reinforced by the anaphora of because, whose repetition creates a rhythmic pace that pulls you through to the end.

To keep this repetition from growing monotonous, though, Olzmann varies his list throughout in terms of the lengths of his sentences, the complexity of their syntax, and their tone (humor despite the gravity of what’s at stake), a more emotionally distant multi-clause sentence like, “Because you memorize songs, even commercials / from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming” placed beside a sentence that breaks the pattern, so simple it’s even stripped of its “because,” “You have soft hands,” making the latter feel all the more poignant in comparison.

Note, too, that this is not just a list of traits that would be seen as automatically positive. One can imagine a friend com­ing home from a bad first date, saying, “God, not only did she yell at the keys she lost, she even laughed at her own jokes!” Instead, these are traits and quirks made endearing through the lens of love. 

The items listed also show signs of change, increasing in intricacy and intimacy: quotes from Rilke arrive only after the list of places his wife drove him. And they build toward that final item, which steps so far outside the pattern it expands into a scene. While the pace of the preceding list might feel like being whisked briskly down a hallway while being shown snapshots of the beloved hung the length of the wall, the poem’s closure allows a reader to step from that corridor into an open room. 

There, for six lines, we’re able to slow and bear witness to a single act of attention and devotion—an act which might have seemed small if it were the first thing we learned about her but, as a result of the rich portrayal created by all the details that have come before, has great significance. Instead of brandishing amorphous abstractions like “self-sacri­fice,” Olzmann writes, you spent “your last damn dime [on Mountain Dew] because you once overheard me say that I liked it.” If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. 

Next, let’s step back from long devotion to the moments of first desire with a look at Dorianne Laux’s “Fast Gas:”

Fast Gas 

for Richard

Before the days of self service, 

when you never had to pump your own gas,

I was the one who did it for you, the girl

who stepped out at the sound of a bell

with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back

in a straight, unlovely ponytail.

This was before automatic shut-offs

and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,

I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas

backed up, came arcing out of the hole

in a bright gold wave and soaked me—face, breasts,

belly and legs. And I had to hurry

back to the booth, the small employee bathroom

with the broken lock, to change my uniform,

peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin

and wash myself in the sink.

Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt

pure and amazed—the way the amber gas

glazed my flesh, the searing,

subterranean pain of it, how my skin

shimmered and ached, glowed

like rainbowed oil on the pavement

I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,

for the first time, in love, that man waiting

patiently in my future like a red leaf

on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty

that asks to be noticed. How was I to know

it would begin this way: every cell of my body

burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me

a nimbus of light that would carry me

through the days, how when he found me,

weeks later, he would find me like that,

an ordinary woman who could rise

in flame, all he would have to do

is come close and touch me. 3

(Reprinted with permission from Dorianne Laux. This poem was first published in What We Carry, 1994, BOA, Editions.)

This poem begins with a little narrative: “Way back in the day, I was the girl who pumped your gas, and there was this one time …” But line twenty-three begins the volta, the turn, the moment of change where the poem transforms the anecdote into story, into something with inherent tension and a reso­nance beyond just the facts of what happened—“I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall, / for the first time, in love,”—which reverberates back up, making us re-envision those first twen­ty-two lines as one half of an unexpected, extended simile: fall­ing in love is just like getting doused in gasoline. 

And upon rereading it, you can see how carefully Laux planted the seeds of this simile: there’s the surprising beau­ty of the gasoline as a “bright gold wave,” the sensuality of how it soaked not just any random part of her but her “face, breasts, / belly and legs.” And how her feelings of being “light-headed, scrubbed raw,” with skin that “shimmered and ached,” could all be applied to someone in the first throes of love.

What makes this comparison especially pleasing is that, at first glance, getting soaked in gas is about as far from romance as you can get. If you were to use this poem as a model, you might try finding some dirty, concrete action or experience, something with rough edges, that will make the comparison to love all the more surprising and enjoyable for your reader. (Or, if you’re over the whole romance thing at the moment, as an anti-love poem strategy, find some pleasant and wonderful experience and describe it in such a way that it subtly trans­forms into a metaphor for heartbreak or disgust.)

Note, too, that Laux does not simply place these two things side-by-side, x equals y; she uses the final nine lines to knit them together, teasing out particular similarities between the two experiences: with both love and gasoline, “every cell of [her] body / [burned] with a dangerous beauty,” in both she was suddenly an “ordinary woman” ready to “rise / in flame” at the touch of either a match or a man’s hand. 

When we read, we’re not just looking for an echo cham­ber to confirm what we already know. The true pleasure of reading is in finding language that shocks us into seeing something we thought we knew in an entirely new way. For me, this poem does just that: not only does it offer a little jolt every time we pass a gas station, it demonstrates how any act, if coupled with true curiosity and attention, has great figura­tive potential on the page. 

Halfway through now, let’s pause for a moment before the final two poems to address some concerns you might be having as you read. Whatever your politics, I think we can all agree we live in a time of widespread political, cultural, envi­ronmental, and, well, everything upheaval, a time that can often make art and literature feel inconsequential.

I was in the middle of writing my marriage poems during the 2016 presidential campaign and after that election—I don’t know how you were feeling—but my wife and I were distraught, struggling with the sense that in the face of this new regime, what good is a thing like poetry? And what could be more useless than love poems when it feels like the whole world is on fire?

Fortunately, we had a dinner scheduled with the miracu­lous, oracular poet Eleanor Wilner. When we presented these concerns to her, she listened politely but was having none of it. Instead, she leaned in and gave us the truth we most need­ed to hear—a truth you might need right now, too: 

Poets are the record keepers, she said, we are the ones who write the evidence of what’s worth saving, of not just what to fight against but what is worth fighting for.

Like the feminist adage, The personal is political, love poems record what stitches us to this life and makes it worthwhile to continue in the face of cruelty and sorrow.

So, with Eleanor’s imperatives in mind, with that generous permission to document the light that lifts us along with the darkness, let’s look at a poignant example of a love poem by Laure-Anne Bosselaar: 

At Dawn 

Crows—their constant

beak-clicking, triple-beat squawks. 

My love as he sighs, stirs, 

weighs a wrist or knee on me, 

then sinks back, coiled 

into the thick flesh of sleep. 

The coffeemaker›s chokes, 

the garbage truck’s brake-squeaks. 

Last night›s sweet crumbs

of dried-out apricot pie. 

Then—light: how it creeps

down night’s taut rope, lands, 

aslant, on the kitchen counter 

to shellac two clementines 

shrinking in a chipped bowl. 

I take note, write it down: crows’ scorn, 

love›s weight, street sounds—

tastes, colors, death, charms 

crammed into a fraction of dawn: 

all of this—already gone. 4

(From Small Gods of Grief. Copyright © 2001 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.)

This poem is a classic of the genre: an aubade, which is a love poem at dawn (versus a serenade, which is a love poem for the evening). Traditionally, an aubade either celebrates or laments the arrival of dawn—laments specifically, in Bosselaar’s poem, the parting of two lovers no longer under the cover of night, in danger of disappearing under the onslaught of the average day, or ultimately, in the “death” mentioned in that penultimate couplet. 

In a way, “At Dawn” is also a list poem, but instead of Olzmann’s striving to win over or win back his beloved, this is a poem in which the speaker struggles to get down on paper as much as possible before her memory of what was shared in the night inevitably fades.

Like Gay, Bosselaar does this through acutely observed images grounded in each of the senses—the sight of first light creeping in, the sound of “squawks” and “sighs,” the weight of her love’s “wrist or knee,” what we can imagine are the competing smells of coffee and garbage trucks, and perhaps the taste of a fingertip dipped into the crumbs of that apri­cot pie. And it’s not just the details of these images that are compelling, but the rich language in which they are written, chockful of onomatopoeia, words that sound like what they describe—she doesn’t just write about the cawing of crows, but their “constant / beak-clicking, triple-beat squawks,” the coffee’s “chokes,” the truck’s “brake-squeaks.” Throughout is the dense sonic texture, the music of a poem in which every word was selected so that its sound mirrors its meaning. All of which elevates each of these objects from the domestic quo­tidian to art, made meaningful not because of some inherent quality but because the speaker took the time to notice them, to write about them, and because of the memories they now represent. All of which speaks to the abundance of embodied joy shared between two people.

There is also a masterful use of enjambment—the breaking of a line mid-phrase, where the continued line often changes or comments on the meaning of the line that came before it. Note how in line nine, “Last night’s sweet crumbs,” hints at luscious bits of memory, evoking an evening of shared inti­macy. But those ambrosial indications are undercut when you go on to read it was not “crumbs” of memory, but “crumbs / of dried-out apricot pie.” 

Similarly, in line fourteen, we get the lovely image of two clementines shellacked in new light, then immediately deflated by the next line, which informs us they are “shrink­ing in a chipped bowl.” Both of these enjambed images beau­tifully mimic great happiness and the sorrow that follows it—the joy of pleasure followed by the knowledge that such pleasure cannot possibly last.

This truth is brought home in the poem’s final lines, start­ing on line sixteen, which begins, “I take note, write it down.” Here the speaker is overtly stating what has been happening all along: she is recording a shorthand list of love—all while acknowledging that the entirety of such shared moments can never be fully captured or revisited, and that, even as she writes, “all of this [is] already gone.”

If you were to write in the mode of this poem, you could try and remember one very specific moment of intimacy from your own life and, using all of your senses, try to write down remembered images from that moment as quickly as you can, not worrying about whether they’re “poetic” or in the right mood for love—remember, Bosselaar teaches us that a love poem can be expansive enough to contain not just the sleeping beloved but garbage trucks and chipped bowls and eventual, inevitable loss. Then when you revise, push on the language, trying to find words that contain the texture and music of your memory, making it both a successful poem and a new favorite love song.

Finally, we’ll turn our attention to a nonce sonnet from Frank Paino. It might seem at first like a poem that doesn’t fit with the others, but stay with me:

Halfway 

for my father

Suddenly, you are no longer here. Nothing else

has changed. The machines still hiss

and thrum like wings of impossible insects.

Air is forced into your chest so it rises,

falls—a good, dependable ocean. But your

heart, that intricate, bloody fist, refuses

to clench. Beside the bed, your leather slippers

rest like rudderless, diminutive ships. Black

scars. Crypts. If they could let me follow,

I’d put the slippers on. But as I cannot go 

where you are, I will meet you halfway. Tonight,

I will hold my love beneath me, grip her hair

like dark and supple reins. That good fire growing

in my groin. That swift black hearse in my veins.5

(Reprinted with permission from Frank Paino.)

“Halfway” begins as an elegy for the speaker’s father, the first word “suddenly” thrusting us into the shock of death, especially when it’s set against the relentless dailiness that continues. But this is not just anyone suddenly alone at a deathbed; this is a poet. His father’s artificially rising chest is “a good, dependable ocean” and his father’s heart, that most Hallmark of symbols, is not beautiful but here is “an intricate, bloody fist, refus[ing] / to clench.” Paino then picks up that earlier ocean metaphor and transforms his father’s empty slippers into “rudderless, diminutive ships”—rudderless now that his father will never again fill them. But then he reconsiders; ships are not enough to convey his grief. So, he transforms them into “black / scars” and finally into “crypts,” each image darker and deeper than the last. He then wishes that they could bring him to his father, knowing they cannot, after which he promises, “I will meet you halfway.” 

What does he mean by this? Well, here, too, there is a volta, the poem pivoting from one of grief into one of eroti­cism and love. Just as there was a sudden absence that began the poem, here there is a sudden leap from hospital room to bedroom, from the speaker and his father to the speaker and his love. But how does this scene connect to what came before? Where, just as before he was wishing those shoes would carry him to his father, now he will grip his love’s hair “like dark and supple reins” transforming her into a horse, carrying him where those shoes could not. Arousal becomes “a good fire,” not unlike a funeral pyre, further marrying car­nality and grief.

Here is a poem that refuses simple categorization, neither elegy nor love poem but both, which feels like an exceedingly honest way to write about both love and death. If you were to use this as a model, try beginning with an experience as far from love as you can find and then be open to the strange ways love might force its way into that moment. 

“Halfway” is a testament to the messy, boundary-lessness of our lives, encouraging us to take an expansive enough view that we let in all the strange, sometimes taboo juxtapositions of our day-to-day, acknowledging that even during grief, we experience desire; even during the heights of love and sex, we have “that swift black hearse” racing through our veins.

For in the end, if we look closely enough at anything, we can find the nuance, the shading, present there. Writing pow­erful love poems calls for the same work that love itself does, it is a matter of deep, embodied awareness, of risking vulner­ability by bringing your full self to bear—even those parts that shame you, all of which is what transforms even that delicious picnic on a beautiful day from anecdote to story. Everything has its share of darkness, its share of depth. It’s a matter of paying attention—and having the courage to write the full truth of what you find.

Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, Pelvis with Distance, and Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, coauthored Nickole Brown. In March 2024, Four Way Books will publish unalone, a collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis. She is the founder of Yetzirah, a new nonprofit literary organiza­tion for Jewish poets. https://jessicalgjacobs.com/

Notes

1. Ross Gay, “Thank You,” in Against Which (Fort Lee: CavanKerry Press, 2004), p. 71.

2. Matthew Olzmann, “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem,” in Mezzanines (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2013), p. 59.

3. Dorianne Laux, “Fast Gas,” in What We Carry (Rochester: BOA, Editions, 1994), p. 52.

4. Laure-Anne Bosselaar, “At Dawn,” in Small Gods of Grief (Rochester: BOA, 2001), p. 70.

5. Frank Paino, “Halfway,” in Out of Eden (Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997), p. 25.