WAYS TO START WRITING LOVE POEMS

Valentine’s Day will be here before you know it so consider writing a love poem.

You may want to start off by writing a short poem.  Certainly, Emily Dickinson’s poems are concise.

It’s All I have to bring today (26)

It’s all I have to bring today – 
This, and my heart beside – 
This, and my heart, and all the fields –
And all the meadows wide –
Be sure you count – should I forget
Some one the sum could tell – 
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.
— Emily Dickinson

For a subject, consider writing about when you first met, describing how you felt and where you were.  Or about one of your first dates.  Don’t forget to ground your poem with heartfelt messages.

One way to write a short love poem is to construct it along the lines of a cinquain – but, instead of counting syllables as in the traditional five-line cinquain, use words.  Jennifer Goode offers suggestions on how to write this short poem:

In line 1, use a noun (that also can be the poem’s title) – 1 word
line 2: a description – 2 words
line 3: an action – 3 words
line 4: a feeling (use a phrase) – 4 words
line 5: a noun (either repeat line 1 or use a synonym) – 1 word

Here’s what I wrote using Jennifer Goode’s exercise:

YOUR KISSES

Kisses,
tasty cocktails,
intoxicate with touching
tenderness.  I treasure each
embrace. 

Another mode to use is to write an acrostic poem in which every line starts with a letter of a word that is displayed vertically.  Jennifer Goode suggests using “I love you” in an acrostic poem:
I
L
O
V
E 
Y
O
U

Or you could use your sweetie’s name or the nickname you call her:

H
O
N
E
Y

Why not try a method used by Pablo Neruda?  In “Your Feet” he takes a less-often admired part of his beloved’s body and writes why he loves them:

YOUR FEET

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.

Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.

I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,
the double purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
—  Pablo Neruda

Perhaps in your poem you’ll say why you love her neck, her small wrist, earlobe, dimples or freckles.

For the adventurous among my readers, try your hand at composing a love sonnet.  To make it easier, here’s an idea that came from Jim Behrle on The Awl:
steal (excuse me: borrow) the end words of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and fill in the lines.

The end words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XCVIII (“From you have I been absent in the spring” has easier end words than his sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”:
spring
trim
thing
him
smell
hue
tell
grew
white
rose
delight
those
away
play

With these end words, you have opportunities for comparisons and for sensory images.

And finally for the last-minute love-poem writer, there’s a website that let’s you fill in the blanks (Remember MadLibs?).

For a simple love poem:

Click here to start the fill-in-the-blanks love poem

Or a Neruda poem of your own:

Click here to generate a Neruda poem of your own

HOW TO BE A POET -- and how to be a sensitive poet

HOW TO BE A POET

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill ⎯ more of each
than you have ⎯ inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditional air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

⎯ Wendell Berry

Source: Poetry, January, 2011


And on a very different note...

THREE TUBAS

This is the way I’m starting the year — with an oompah-pah not a whimper.  For the first post of the new year, I present the large, the loud and the illustrious tuba.

The word tuba originally was the name of a straight-built Roman trumpet and was the medieval Latin word for trumpet.

The serpent, probably invented in 1590 by Edme Guillaume of Auxerre, a French canon, was made of wood in a serpentine curve with a 7- or 8- foot bore and six finger holes.  Originally, it accompanied plainchant (Gregorian chant) in churches but from the eighteenth century was the standard wind bass in military bands.

The invention of the bass tuba by a German instrument builder named Johann Gottfried Moritz in 1835 provided a more reliable and more even brass bass than its predecessors.  This was the bass tuba in F, with five valves.

Richard Wagner, also in the nineteenth century, had special tubas designed to create special effects for his opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung.  The Wagner tubas formed a tone between a French horn and a tuba (described as a quieter tone color than both instruments).

Modern military and brass band tubas are of two sizes used together.  Orchestral tubas vary in different countries.  Great Britain and Germany use tubas in the original pitch of F while the US and parts of Europe use large instruments in the C pitch.

Enough of the history of the tuba (use the information three times and it’s yours for a lifetime).  Let’s go to the poems now.

INSTRUMENT OF CHOICE
by Robert Phillips

She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,

so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba.  Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,

its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
Its body pressed on hers.

Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.

“Instrument of Choice,” by Robert Phillips, appeared online on The Writer’s Almanac on May 5, 2007.

The second tuba poem is from Scrambled, by Trish Dugger (Garden Oak Press, 2012).  Trish’s book was featured on this blog last year.

RASH OF TUBA THEFTS IN SOUTHLAND HIGH SCHOOLS
LA Times, Dec. 12, 2011

I can’t get those tubas
out of my head.  I imagine
culprits in dark hoods
trying to hide humongous
tubas behind their backs,
bumping into lockers,
knocking over trash cans,
cracking windows.
I’ve never stolen anything
unless you count
Lucy Crane’s boyfriend,
Corky Taylor, and I never
knew a guy who played
the tuba, which I can’t
say I’m sorry about but,
Corky played a wicked
harmonica when we
weren’t making out
behind the bleachers.

    — Trish Dugger

This post’s final tuba poem is from me and appears in my new book, The ABCs of Memory.  (Okay, I’m starting off the new year also with a shameless plug for my book.)

RED SHIFT

A distant train trundles into the night,
    working hard, going somewhere else.
        It reminds her of the time he explained
how the Doppler Effect was confirmed
    by an Austrian mathematician
        who used a Dutch locomotive,
three separate observing stations
    along the track and fifteen musicians
        on the train playing trumpets.

She’d pictured the coming and going
    with its rising and falling to be more
like a herd of tuba players in a German
    oompah-pah band, exuberant men
in lederhosen and green felt hats,
    their cheeks puffing out, puckering in,
out and in, and all for the love of science.

He maintained they’d played trumpets.
    As the train went past the three stations,
the trumpeters all played the same note
    while musicians with absolute pitch,
posted on the platforms, attempted to catch
    changes in frequency.  In his most forceful
and sonorous tone, he tried to impress
    on her the simple seriousness of science.

As she coasts toward sleep, she considers
    the sad, single note testing and retesting
the returning.  Or was it the leaving?
    And an unsteady recollection he’s said
something or other about Edwin Hubble
    using what the trumpeters had proved
to validate the galaxies racing further

apart.  Red Shift, he’d called it,
    where light from distant stars downshifts
        toward the red end of the spectrum,
to lower frequencies and longer wavelengths.
    So much going somewhere else, a nocturne
        for all the worlds and loved ones leaving.

     — Lenny Lianne