The Instinct for Desire: Maggie Millner’s “Couplets: A Love Story”
By Stella Hayes
I came across one of Maggie Millner’s poems from her debut poetry collection, Couplets: A Love Story, on Twitter. A fan had posted the poem from an advance copy. The poem was about a woman in the act of love for a woman, and it felt immediately serendipitous that it found me.
The prose poem, which commences with the line “You hadn’t intended to see her a second time,” stopped me in my tracks: I loved its visceral engagement with the vagina, its outline of ecstasy—a rush; sensual freedom; the use of the semicolon, the penetrative power of female love, unabashed lust, terror; the absence of the penis, the absence of Adam, the impassioned yes.
Millner’s poem helped me get unstuck as I was writing “One Faithful Night,” a poem about an experience of bar hopping with a close friend, a lesbian, at two lesbian bars in NYC. I was writing the poem for a poetry workshop in the graduate creative writing program at NYU taught by poet Terrance Hayes. The poem is central to Desire is a Dirty Word, a poetry manuscript I am completing.
(The poem is a discourse on despair in the absence of desire, a consequence of my long struggle with menopause. I’ve come to see my struggle—a taboo subject women don’t talk about publicly, let alone in letters—as a struggle with what I am to myself: the self in flux, in metamorphosis; an illness to live through, to treat, to one day cure; the struggle to rehabilitate the instinct for desire.
The conceit of my poem was voyeuristic—watching two women make out at one of the bars, the pull of desire, with its old, familiar moves. Unfiltered, provocative, exciting, undefined, intact, albeit momentarily, not processed through menopause.)
I couldn’t stop thinking about Millner’s poem: its forceful music, its anxiety, its elegy, and the fragility of its lyric narrative.
I knew right away that I found the poem to present for the same poetry workshop.
A Return to Desire
I was seduced by the ambition of Couplets: A Love Story to (re)construct a love story-in-poems, like a novel with some of its devices: an antihero protagonist, plotline, climax, intimate scenes, and picturesque exuberant emotional and sexual experiences.
Much like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which investigates the creation myth, Homer’s Odyssey & The Iliad, which depict the transformative journeys of the protagonists, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also encompasses a moral inquiry, Couplets: A Love Story is divided into books and a coda.
The collection is restless in its confrontation with love, polyamory, queerness, and the self. I was struck by Poem 1.6, the one I first encountered on Twitter, which appears as a prose block that could be a page in a novel:
You hadn’t intended to see her a second time. But when she
invited you out for a drink one Friday night, you decided to
go and find out if perhaps your desire had waned, had taken
care of itself, as strong feelings born of fantasy and instinct
sometimes do when brought into the harsh light of lived cau-
sality. But it was the same thing all over again—immediately
on seeing her, you felt flushed and exposed, as if you’d been
caught crying. Your stomach considered for a moment revis-
ing the course of its metabolism. You sat at right angles on
a banquette in the corner of the room, brushing knees, then
hips, then shoulders. At last call, you were the only people
there. Then she asked you to share a cab with her; you did;
she asked you to walk her in; you did; she asked you to come
upstairs; you did; to get into her bed; you did; to press yourself
lengthwise against her; you did; to fall asleep like that; you did;
to drink coffee with her when you woke; you did; to kiss her
on the mouth; you did; to kiss her with your tongue; you did;
to let her touch you once, just to see if you were really as wet
as you said you were; you did; to unclasp your bra; you did; to
rub yourself against her till you came; you did; to read her the
erotic poem you loved; you did; to remove your pants; you did;
to let her taste you; you did; to come again, inside her mouth;
you did; to penetrate her gingerly; you did; to get out of bed at
last; you did; to go get pizza down the street; you did; to eat it
on the sidewalk in the snow; you did; to go back home with her;
you did; to sleep there one more night; you did;
to stay until the sun came up; you did.
The poem begins with a conceit in second person in an intimate, hyper-sensual, emotional, body-to-body description of the second night with a one-night stand. “You hadn’t intended to see her a second night”: The word “intended” is peculiar when paired with desire because it’s a given, a drive the body carries. And it is a test for the speaker to find out if the desire “had waned.”
This love story-in-verse then turns to address the tension/danger for the speaker that’s building and is being laid out for us. The speaker’s pursuit of her desire, a stand-alone quality, to call up desire, no matter the person/object,—the woman—to spend it, after it was sated for its own sake is “brought into the harsh light of lived causality.”
If desire is a resource, then the speaker has it in abundance at her fingertips.
The first turn is in the speaker’s existential attraction and connection: “you felt flushed and exposed, as if you’d been caught crying.” The speaker feels sick to her stomach but it’s not just that she’s being pulled by desire, but that she lets herself feel the initiation, a return to desire.
The couple falls asleep, wakes up to morning light and has sex. Desire is met: “You come again, inside her mouth. To penetrate her gingerly.” Here, “gingerly” is used as an adverb, which means moving with extreme care and caution concerning the result of a movement or action. “To go back home with her…to stay until the sun came up.”
The Turning Away
Couplets: A Love Story begins with a “Proem,” which is traditionally a preamble to a piece of writing or a music score.
The poem sets the tone of a speaker in a spiritual crisis, looking at herself in the mirror with urgent frenzy: “There’s no such person as myself.” The poem teaches the reader how to listen to its music and navigate through the book: “And he was nowhere in the mirror / And she was everywhere.”
If a mirror is a figurative representation of one’s life, what follows is a reevaluation, a turning away from the reflection.
She lovingly asks him for permission, an allowance, for her to act on her attraction for women:
So I asked to sleep with women. At first, he agreed.
If that’s what you think you need,
he said, I wouldn’t want to stop you.
But shortly after that he asked me not to.
It is an entreaty that arises out of the speaker’s sex drive, a compulsion that must be met. “Maybe I was too far gone already— /floodgates, barn door, whatever.”
Kink, Love
The speaker’s sexual journey turns into a desire to belong to her girlfriend: “You longed to be her property. // One morning, as we said goodbye, I told her that she owned me.” For the speaker, sex with her girlfriend becomes exciting when it incorporates elements of kink:
I had let me life become a story.
Degradation was a theme, and rivalry.
ecstasy, submission, happenstance.
The only moral was the pressure of her hands,
the grip of leather tugging at my wrist
where the cuffs that were her birthday gift
[…]
mother, always rounding up. Maybe that’s why
I felt most free when I was choked and tied
with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged;
when told that I was very, very bad.
The speaker acts out of her freedom and her instinct for desire. She’s adding something essential to her sex life, to her identity, something she was not getting out of her relationship with her boyfriend or something that she felt uncomfortable broaching with her boyfriend.
Millner expresses sexual desire with explicit frankness. Love is not subject to restrictions: You can get off on bondage, on fantasies acted or not acted on, or whatever moves you.
But when she’d pull out of me and toss her harness in
a duffel bag with lubrications
and toiletries to carry to the other girlfriend’s
house, I felt rush through my blood
a surge of insecurity and dread.
and I would retch and clutch myself and weep.
This was why I liked to keep
two of her fingers in my body
while we slept. I longed to be her property.
I wanted her to smell me in her mail-beds
all day long.
The poet is aware of her obsession, submissiveness, compulsion to her new-found lust, passion, and insatiability for women, this particular woman. These lines evoke plaintive feelings in the reader and poet alike.
Form: The Couple in Couplets
The root of couplets is couple(s); the movement investigated is the double, a transfer from the physical body of the people center stage to the body of the book in a traditional poetic form of the heroic couplet that has been subject to many interpretations.
The poems in the book don’t follow a naming practice, there are no titles, just numeric entries that correspond to book numbering; as if they are dispatches from the future, or a log-diary in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, that start with books One, 1.1-1.12, Two, 2.1-2.12, Three, 3.1-3.12, and end with Four, 4.1-.4.12.
In a way, the book defies categorization. Poem 1.8 borrows from essayistic, rhetorical writing:
The trouble is you were also embodied, which meant
that you could never quite transcend yourself, or evacuate the
frame or shirk the myth of the grammatical singular. Still,
there were mirrors and there were books. You took great com-
fort in those days, in writing that seemed to relate to its author
as both the object and the subject of the work—an idea that
had acquired a certain cachet in recent years despite its being
approximately as old as literature itself. A lot of events in the
book, said Jamaica Kincaid of her novel See Now Then, would
seem to parallel my own life. But . . . my own everyday life, is
sort of very untidy and smelly and kind of revolting on close
inspection. Natalia Ginzburg took a symmetrical position, in
Natalia Ginzburg took a symmetrical position, in
a memoir whose preface asks us to approach it as a fiction:
Even though the story is real, I think one should read it as if it
were a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less
than a novel can offer.”
The Novel
In couplet 4.11, the speaker discusses the formal differences between novels and poetry, again using a rhetorical device of the literary essay:
Then I was the only person in my bed,
though other people’s words ran through my head
and kept me company. One was Vivian Gornick,
who demanded: Put romantic
love at the center of a novel today,
and who could be persuaded
that in its pursuit the characters are
going to get to something large?
She argued that in modern life
we buy neither the plotline of the happy wife
nor the one where women self-discover,
so to speak, by dint of some new lover—
we’re too atomized, our institutions too
clearly corrupt. Everything we do
we think we have to do ourselves. But she
was speaking about prose, and the theory
that characters should actualize,
rather than transform as many times
as time allows, as is the case in verse,
where there are barely any characters
at all. In poetry then, let me say that love
has been, above all things, the engine of
self-knowledge in my life—and even after everything
is still what makes the rest worth suffering.
The book’s subject and object represent a frenetic electric reenactment of a second adolescence: “My eye loved / everything it fell upon,” indicating a propulsion and drive doesn’t let up.
Millner explores and embraces her coming-out as a woman who loves women, as a protagonist-speaker in both first and second person, finding desire and pleasure in various sexual and emotional encounters, expressed through poems in mock-heroic couplets, in various rhyme schemes, in prose blocks, that move in a narrative of a novel.
In fact, this collection moves more like a book-in-poems, not unlike a novel-in-verse by the great 19th Century poet Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin created a new, rare genre, the novel-in-verse, which today is referred to as book-in-poems.
(Couplets: A Love Story was briefly marketed as a novel-in-poems; I wished that Farrar, Straus and Giroux would have categorized this as something along the lines of “narrative-in-poems,” though calling the book a “love story” is a somewhat satisfying compromise).
Metamorphosis and Negative Capability
Keatsian negative capability refers to the holding of two oppositional claims, beliefs, feelings, thoughts; the tragic and the comic in half a line, a complete line, a couplet, or a poem that quiets a poet in metamorphosis, in suffering by offering no clear solution.
OK, so nothing lasts. The proof of life is in the aching.
It was long and torturous, our breaking,
like our beginning, torturous and long,
I hope someday an archivist
will pull our texts out of the nuclear detritus
to display. This is the sentimental stuff,
they’ll say, of homo Homo sapiens in love.
In bed together one winter, the speaker’s girlfriend recites a Louise Gluck poem, “it occurs to [her] that what is crucial is to believe in the effort…”
The poet doesn’t pretend to know the meaning of life or its uncertainties; she yearns for its fitful ups & downs: “No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.”
And in the last poem of Maggie Millner’s exquisite debut poetry collection, Couplets: A Love Story, Millner writes,
Love found me twice, at once. If it never
happens again I’ll still be luckier
than the moon. Breathing, typing these lines,
texting a friend, checking the time,
thinking it wouldn’t always be like this,
but still, sometimes, it was. It is.
In looking closely at Millner’s Couplets, I am reminded of Francesco Petrarch, a Florentine poet from the Renaissance; his lifelong fixation, obsession and love, albeit unrequited, for Laura, his idealized love object. In Songbook, his poetry collection, he went on to write 366 sonnets for her.
In sonnet 361, he writes: “My faithful mirror tells me very often…[I]n my heart there sounds a word of her, the one who’s loosened from her lovely knot, who in her day was such a rarity that no one else will ever touch her fame.”
Stella Hayes is the author of the poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at the University of Southern California and is a graduate student at NYU studying for an M.F.A in poetry. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Four Way Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Project’s The Recluse, Stanford’s Mantis, Prelude and Spillway among others. She served as Assistant Fiction editor at Washington Square Review (2021-2022.) She’s Poetry editor at Washington Square Review.