02/14/99

By Tom Mayo

POETRY

Love poems. We first encounter them as tots on the penny valentines that everyone is instructed to send to everyone else in class:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Come on, baby,
Light my fire.

(What can I say? I went to a Montessori school.)

Those prefab prepubescent sentiments weren't about love, and they met only a minimalist's criteria for poetry, but we remember the blunt force of the rhyme and the single-minded message: What they lacked in style, they made up in brevity. And once we learned the trick of turning the last two lines into an insult ("... Who needs enemies/With friends like you?"), those penny poems also gave many of us our first lesson in irony.

Years later, after a little more experience (no matter how bright or dismal) with romantic love, the subject of love poetry becomes at once more immediate and more important. In his 1998 collection On Love (Knopf, $22), Houston poet Edward Hirsch suggests what love poems have to offer us:

The strange, enlightening subject of love
creates its own universe of discourse,
which is the least susceptible to reason.

How well we know and how reassuring it can be when we find other beings and other voices working the same universe of discourse, skating along the shared edge of unreason.

I don't know who is buying Jewel's book of poems, a night without armor (HarperCollins, $18). It's aimed at the singer's fans, and enough of them are buying it to have kept it on the best-seller lists. Let's not waste time debating whether Jewel is really a poet or whether anything here qualifies as "real poetry." There is, however, some authentic-sounding stuff in here that teenage readers (as well as those who remember being teenage readers) will recognize. It's mostly unprocessed diary material, but she has the tone of teen angst worked out to a T.

What is it that adults expect to find in a love poem? A good starting place for the answer is Robert Hass and Stephen Mitchell's Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology (Harper Perennial, $13.50 paperback). As Mr. Hass observes, a wedding "is a kind of poem, or at least, like a poem, it is a human invention to hold a kind of magic in place." It's a lovely thought, one that he illustrates with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who never married but who sure knew how to hold magic in place:

Wild Nights --- Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

For Mr. Hass, the mystery and beauty of Dickinson's poem come from the interplay between two opposing desires - for wildness and safety - and the themes of love poetry are mostly further elaborations of the tension between these two desires. You can test this thesis for free by visiting the "Love Poems" page of the "Poems From the Planet Earth" Web site (you can find the page by starting here: redfrog.norconnect.no/). This is a diverse anthology of works that spans five centuries, and it's a good place to read poems about trust and betrayal, pulse-quickening danger and beauty and all the other variations on Dickinson's twins: wildness and safety.

The love poems that interest us enough to draw us back to them over the years seem always to have a hint of danger or of loss, a shadow and a taste of salt even as the words on the page speak only (in Anne Bradstreet's ancient phrase) of a "love ... that rivers cannot quench." That is why Robert Pinsky's 1998 collection, The Handbook of Heartbreak (Weisbach/Morrow, $18), may be the perfect Valentine's Day gift. As Mr. Pinsky asks in his preface, "Why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?" There may not be a single, satisfactory answer to the question, but as a statement of fact, it seems unassailable. Mr. Pinsky's book offers many pleasures: an acerbic love note by Dorothy Parker, Robert Frost's dark and disturbing "Out, Out - " and Langston Hughes' "Weary Blues."

This month's recommended book about reading and writing poetry is a bit more ambitious than the past few months' selections: Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days (Scribner, $27.50). Mr. Koch's "lessons" make up the first 130 pages or so and are followed by a 170-page anthology annotated with his comments about each poem. Think of this as the adult version of Mr. Koch's wonderful 1990 text, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? - Teaching Great Poetry to Children.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

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