Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Also: KAAAANNNNNNNSASSS CITTTYYYY! SUPERBOWL CHAMPIONS YET AGAIN!!!!! GO CHIEFS! OK you don’t have to hear me say that again for a few months.
The first time I got paid to write poetry, I was nine years old and ghost-writing a Valentine. One of the couples in my fourth-grade class, Jake and Savannah, had finally gotten together after weeks of will-they won’t-they, which felt like two full network sitcom seasons to our wee brains.
At an early age, I’d already established myself as the resident literary dork. As such, Jake asked me to help him write a romantic poem for Savannah to mark the momentous occasion of their first Valentine’s Day1 together.
Here’s what I remember about that poem.
It rhymed.
I instructed Jake to sign it “Your Skateboarding Romeo,” which is still the coolest idea I’ve ever had. More people should learn to skateboard so they can do this.
Now, the moral of this story is: love poems can be simple and should definitely be cheesy! When you love somebody, it’s totally fine if your poem is on par with Missouri public schools’ fourth-grade curriculum. You also don’t need to show anyone the poems you write, especially the super, super cheesy ones. Sign it “Your Skateboarding Romeo” or “Mercutio, Who Boogie-Boards” or whatever, then burn it. Or put it in a folder of cringey writing, and look at it whenever you’re feeling brave. The best advice I can give is: when you have a feeling, it is better to Write The Poem than it is to not write the poem. The idea will leave, and the feeling will change. Writing is the best way to capture how you felt about someone or something at some point in your life.
And if not, you can always hire me to write it for you. Adjusting for inflation, my fourth-grade rate for a bespoke poem is now $7.85 – a pretty stellar deal.
Exercise: Writing Love Poems
I’m gonna leave this exercise a little unstructured, and provide ideas/inspiration more than anything. It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow, which is up there with April Fool’s and Christmas, as far as polarizing holidays go. You might not be in the spirit. Maybe this holiday reminds you of big bummers and major disappointments. That’s okay!
So, for that reason, I want to give you room to be flexible.
Who or what do you love? What makes you feel loved? Make a list. Maybe for the past few weeks, you’ve reeeeeally felt a connection to the bodega cashier who charges you a little bit less with each consecutive iced coffee. Or, there’s a stray cat in the neighborhood who likes you best. Maybe all your friends texted you congratulatory messages when your team (ahem) won the Super Bowl. Maybe you’re in love and making out constantly! Or hey, maybe you just want to write a love poem to yourself, because nobody’s ever written you one before. That’s a good idea, too.
Think a little bit beyond love. What do you actually feel when you’re around the object of your affection, whether it’s a particularly good sandwich or the person you’ve had a crush on since college? Translate the sensations into images.
Maybe like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you love this person from dawn to dusk – or, “I love thee to the level of every day's/Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” It’s easy to read this poem as equating the subject with sunshine and candle flames, invoking a sense of literally lighting up the poet’s life.
Or maybe your longing leaves “body bags beneath [your] eyes,” or writing “really, really creepy” allegories, like this Andrea Gibson poem I heard at a summer camp in high school and can, embarrassingly2, still recite mostly from memory.One of the best parts of writing love poems is you get to do whatever you want with format, and that includes leaning hard into neatly-structured, rhyme-heavy writing. For example, “Roses are red/violets are violet/Your love lifts me up/Because you’re a pilot.” Or, this very goofy poem from an episode of Star Trek, where Data (nice robot) wrote a poem about his cat3 Spot:
Star Trek gets points for accuracy because every single person listening to Data’s poem looks like they want to be anywhere else. But too bad! In space, EVERYONE can hear your cat poem!
Draft your poem on scratch paper or on the computer. But write it out, longhand, with a nice pen and fancy paper you always think is “too special” to use. It isn’t. Whether your send your poem out or keep it tucked in your diary forever, lavish it with love, because the object of your attention deserves it.
And remember, love poems don’t have to be long. This is one of my all-time favorites.
I am pretty sure it was also their last Valentine’s Day together, because we were children and our relationships rarely outlived recess
That is a Tumblr link. I know.
Yes, I did write a tribute to this featuring my own cat, and called it Ode to Dott