Anti-Love Poems for Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is upon us again. It’s a day that exalts and celebrates romantic love. However, that which idealizes by its very nature is bound to have corresponding depths of darkness. Love, like all concepts, contains multiple hues.
Poetically, sublime renderings of love are traditionally common, yet, anti-love poems are almost as old as love itself. Poets have long recognized that emotions like pain, despair, loss, ecstasy, and obsession are all part of the multifaceted nature of love.
If flowers and candy are falling flat this year, here are some links to and excerpts from anti-love poems that explore love in all its complex forms:
“Schehzerazade” by Richard Siken
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
~~~
“Semi-Splendid” by Tracy K. Smith
I watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage
That trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise
At what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair,
Who flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And
If you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing
Not her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?
~~~
“Wild is the Wind” by Carl Phillips
I’ve been told quite
a lot of things. They hover — some more unbidden than
others — in that part of the mind where mistakes and torn
wishes echo as in a room that’s been newly cathedraled,
so that the echo surprises, though lately it’s less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about memory —
it’s more the time it takes, going away: a mouth opening
to say I love sex with you too it doesn’t mean I wanna stop
my life for it, for example; or just a voice, mouthless,
asking Since when does the indifference of the body’s
stance when we’re alone, unwatched, in late light, amount
to cruelty?
~~~
“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson
My mother has a way of summing things up.
She never liked Law much
but she liked the idea of me having a man and getting on with life.
Well he’s a taker and you’re a giver I hope it works out,
was all she said after she met him.
Give and take were just words to me
at the time. I had not been in love before.
It was like a wheel rolling downhill.
~~~
“In Golden Gate Park That Day” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
But then finally
she too lay down flat
and just lay there looking up
at nothing
yet fingering the old flute
which nobody played
and finally looking over
at him
without any particular expression
except a certain awful look
of terrible depression
~~~
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’ Hara
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names
keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which
to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.