How to Write a Love Poem
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This is a tongue-in-cheek step-by-step way to produce a poem for your loved one, based on an experiment I did in the Bluecoat for the opening of their latest exhibition. I expect the same method, with tweaking, would work for your worst enemy.
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The most important thing about a love poem is that you have bothered to do it at all. This isn’t about mastery of form. It’s about creating something new, quirky and original to express the new, quirky and original feeling you get when you say hello to a pretty girl/boy. I’m sure you can improve on my example, I did that in five minutes and didn’t feel the tingly feeling for the person I wrote it for.
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INSTRUCTIONS (DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS PRECISELY)
- Complete this sentence with a phrase: Our Love is Like…. (eg. “a big fat balloon about to pop”)
Maybe pick something that relates to your own relationship specifically, or a shared anecdote perhaps.
- Search the phrase you have written in Google, without ‘Our Love is Like’.e.g. Search “a big fat balloon about to pop”
- Click the links for the first few pages and copy and paste any interesting phrases or paragraphs into a Word document.LikeJust imagine their surprise as they open a large stripy gift box and this romantic “Will You Marry Me?” balloon jumps out. A fun marriage proposal idea they are sure to remember. A romantic balloon with the words “Will You Marry Me?” in its centre. I was elated a few months later to see the print magazine at least one recipe search and rescue operation and media frenzy after it was reported he was inside a homemade helium balloon that broke loose and drifted for hours thousands of feet above …
Etc.
- Have a go at putting together these phrases into a new and interesting order.- Add the word Love here and there.- Add the words You and Me here and there.
- Put on the end a line to hammer the point home about your brand new metaphor.
Result
OUR LOVE IS LIKE A BIG FAT BALLOON JUST ABOUT TO POP
Just imagine your surprise as you
open my large stripy pyjamas and
I jump out “Will You Marry Me?”
We set off a massive search and rescue operation
inside Love and drift thousands of feet above
our family for much of the day.
“I have a question for you!
You know when are in Love
it goes down a little after half a day –
and then more etc… well
why was I elated for a few months?”
I just don’t know where to start.
I am still about to pop.
Hi.
Well the experiment at the Like Love PV was successful, in a way.
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Firstly I like the effect of doing something that people have to take away with them, and am actually starting to get quite fetishistic about the products themselves. This time, these ugly, seedy brown envelopes giving a kind of ‘Lives of Others’ East German-chique.
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A love note smuggled in amongst the paperwork.
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Then there is the content, which as I expected was on the whole of no value other than as a personal artefact – a little extension on a thought. If only we had a little man to spend five minutes extending all of our thoughts like this, we would have a whole room full of nonsense.
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Of course, the whole thing was a rush. I wrote 12 poems in two hours. One every five minutes. Five minutes is a long time when you are stood waiting for a poem, but not so long when you are trying to come up with something original. I think I have actually peed for longer. I probably should do these things when there aren’t so many people around at the Bluecoat.
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Actually, I am also going to write instruction on how to do this yourselves.
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The poems that worked best tended to approach the simile from an odd angle. that is, one that isn’t usually thought about love. This way Google doesn’t throw up cliched stuff that has already been written about Love.
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Like this one,
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OUR LOVE IS LIKE A CONTENTED SEALION BASKING ON A ROCK
There are no specific areas designed
where impact with Love is minimized -
We are resting on each other’s rock.
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There is no minimum distance anymore
on the island we have established,
nor any code of conduct.
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We saw a few on Genovesa -
they generally sleep during the day
but people like us are nearly extinct.
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The unusual metaphor or largest leap of the imagination is the satisfying one to make, if you can make it.
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My favorite line tone came up in “LOVE IS LIKE A WARM BREEZE ACROSS MY CHEEKS”,
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Dont you love the sound of wind chimes in Love?
Lampposts sprouted like bad weeds
along the sidewalks in front of Brooks Hall.
Cutting through the carpet of grass,
I looked eastward. A hollow spread before me,
and beneath my tongue.
For the first time in my life I passed
through a swirling vortex.
I’d read ‘A Brief History of Time”
by Stephen Hawking, I’d even imagined myself
as one of those time traveling electrons
I’d read about in Popular Science.
None of it had prepared me.
Not properly, at least.
The one thing those things had done
was supply me with the knowledge
which allowed me to hypothesize what,
exactly, the giant swirling thing
that appeared in my bedroom that night was.
Love, twisting through my hair.
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The best reaction I got was to this poem. The lady cried and gave me a big hug.
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LOVE IS LIKE CATCHING THE RAIN ON THE TONGUE
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The sound of wet leaves reminds me of you.
The average droplet of rain.
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The terminal velocity of our collision.
It was rather intense…
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Does this mean we should be arrested?
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Take a look at this: the first few pellets of snow
on the ground kind rustle before settling down.
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The snow accumulates on the ground.
It seems like something I never did.
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Nab yourself one of these sleazey personalised items this evening at the Bluecoat 6-7.30pm
There is a new exhibition opening at the Bluecoat today. It looks pretty nifty. There are some emerging artists in there who I have never heard of. They are thoroughly good people, the ones I’ve met anyway, I expect I we will learn more about them on this blog over the coming weeks.
Anyway, the central attraction is a couple of pieces called ‘Like Love Pts 1 & 2″, which is an enticing enough title for a poet in residence who spends every waking hour in a wan state of love-lorn floundering over romantic simile. The artist, Sonia Boyce is returning in glory after an exhibition in the 1985 called “Blackskin/Bluecoat” (I know! Amazing how much the world has changed for this to have been an acceptable title).
Sonia’s practice has also changed since then, and now she states that she tends towards removing herself from the centre of the work. In this case she has been working with an artists group called Blueroom to create a film.
For the opening of the exhibition, I will be removing myself from the central role of composition for a poem. Visitors to the exhibition will be asked to complete this sentence, Our Love is Like.. I will then Google their chosen phrase/word and create a poem with the first page of results. You can see examples of the kind of thing below and below and below…
I like these throwaway little poems. Of course, they say more about the nature of simile than Love particularly, but all the same…
Please come along and take part, if you like that sort of thing. Maybe you will go away with a nifty little gift for a loved one? The poems will be printed onto a special template designed by Bobby and Sophie’s ‘Bobby’, and I presented in a special limited edition envelope. Smaaaat lad.
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LOVE IS LIKE A WARM BUN
I may be a sonofabitch, but i’m your sonofabitch!!
And you are my crabcake, calamari, french onion dip,
tenderloin, best skirt steak in town.
You makesa me happy.
Take a taste of what goes on in my brain:
Like the raising agent in
My large batch bun after baking.
The moon and the moon’s quarters.
I announce the release of our love.
The only one in the world!
You are fast, clean, and delicious.
LOVE IS LIKE A HUGE LIZARD BITING MY FACE
Beneath love is an uncompleted face,
bearded and pale, with one glaring eye
and a sketched-in eyebrow – the space
where the second eye should be
is occupied by my pounding heart.
My hand touches the breast or the bottle –
reaches for things which are brought to the mouth.
Gasping and sucking I bite at your nipple and claw
at your breast. The oral sadistic impulse is shared by both of us.
You are my passion – or one of them!
I release the snake, wipe the blood from my arm,
chest and knee, and jump into the taxi.
The women are lunatic and beg me
to desist from such activities lest I die.
But, of course, I don’t!
OUR LOVE IS LIKE… A SEMI-AUTOMATIC POETRY GENERATOR
This is Love. The original sleep experiment
which is provided for us in preparation for “Dormouse Day”
When we lie in bed squeeking.
The generation of formal Love involves both
complex creativity – and strict algorithmic restrictions
regarding our lives and determined
by tradition. Angel-faced Paula Guitierrez was 15
when she met 14 year old Nestor (Chino) DeJesus
on a subway platform in New York City.
She was a young dragon. Her breath a cloud of gas
that puts most beings to sleep. Cunning,
she lived in a deep and mysterious forest.
He had short, thick limbs and a bladelike extension.
He had a small mouth and a pronounced underbite.
He had giant slitted nostrils. He had slitted eyes that were red.
Almost immediately they began
a torrid affair fueled by sex
and marijuana. The generation of their Love
from input data, was nothing compared to that experienced by us
I think I have got something…
One very disappointing public participation project, several tens of terrible poems, and a month of existential angst later. The message I was grasping for within Janek’s methodology, and the progression to my residency with relation to ‘reprocessing’ – a relatively simple, and unproven technique for composition.
I think the problem is that I considered the corollary of the task of remodeling content to create new soundscapes, to be that of rearranging other people’s words. The music of words, remixed. Now I think that the corollary is better found considering the music of narrative, or that of flow within narrative, and imposing new meaning and lyrical tonalities and context for it.
This has been done in random ways, such as by the rule of N+7 invented by the Oulipo writers, and recently utilised by Ross Sutherland. But I would like to explore the potential of exploring narrative structure and theme, by replacing a like-for-like metaphorical connection.
My first working example is the first line of The Trial by Franz Kafka. This story has come up during a collaboration with John O’Shea around poetic justice, which has featured here and there in this blog. What if we were to consider the role of Law in this book as a metaphor for the role of Love in our lives, that of the Case to be a metaphor for Fatherhood, and the Court who administer this Law, be the newly inherited Family?
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Once I had admitted love, I was absorbed into the machinery of a system of families I had no hope of understanding or manipulating. Nothing was certain, and all behaviour the result of legendary happenings within unknown ancestries. My decision to contribute to this family tree with a branch of my own is the second mistake of my fruitless life.
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This is the starting point for my poems that will explore this
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning” (from The Trial)
becomes:
Someone must have been convinced by my fraudery. For without having done anything out of the ordinary, I woke up to find myself twined up within a woman’s legs and hair.
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Hm…
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Fatherhood ended with my confusing, sad demise. My willingness to attend my own deathbed is disconcerting, since we do not know what has happened between the Baptism, when I appear to be willing to fight for my individuality, and this final night. Have I given up, or is this my final act of free will? Do I make the ultimate submission to nature, or a deliberate choice to completely escape the family?
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In themselves, these are not revelatory discoveries. I think rather that it is another way to consider the technique of reworking and remixing, which Janek presented in such a moving and eye-opening way during his exhibition.
The start of a another year. The end of another exhibition. The half-way point of my residency. A whole new set of anxieties.
The emphasis now has to be on production, I think. Of course I will be writing more poems and coming upon the discoveries that come with that exploration of new mental territory – but it certainly feels that there has to be a flatplan/storyboard drawn up soon, so I can begin to understand a little more about how to make the residency as a whole ‘work’.
I have so far struggled to make a cohesive piece of work reflecting my impressions and inspirations from the Janek Schaffer exhibition. It’s frustrating really, because my mind is going mental.
The technique used by Janek in his work that has most interested me has been that used to create ’soundscapes’. This is because, I think that its collorlary in poetry, ‘found poetry’, ‘cut-up’, and, more recently ‘flarf’, have been at the centre or periphery of my work in this residency since the start.
In fact, the very first piece of interaction I completed for the Bluecoat’s was based on the old ‘magnetic poetry’ game, using cut-up words from the exhibition brochure teamed with words about profound religious experiences, driving the participants in the game to a certain style or voice in their poems. The result was pretty nice, I thought, although there wasn’t a masterpiece in there! All the same, it is a good lesson to learn that with cut-up and exercises like this, the source text has to have a relevance to the final work. There are also similarities in the reprocessing methods in my mistranslation poems, and in some of the work I have been making during conversation with visitors to the Bluecoat galleries.
In Janek’s Triptych, he ‘cuts-up’ an old folk song that has a special relevance to the subject of his piece – in fact, splitting it’s component instrumentation apart – and then spends time considering how the pieces can come back together in a way that embellishes on the feeling of the work, rather than simply distorting the original emotion of the song. Something of Janek’s feeling about the original song is transmitted to us through his treatment of it. In National Survey, the issue of fragmentation is central. The component pieces are played back in random orders, giving the impression of several televisions being frantically flicked through – one last frantic grasp to catch everything that is on tele before it is switched off!
In my poems during this period, I have been playing with the source material for my poems in a way I would more correlate to the Triptych method – feeling that it would not become any of us if I produced a piece of poetry that was words picked at random from the radio. However…!
The central work I have been trying to complete has been The Things We Say To Each Other And The Things You Say To Me, which is a poem project for many people to take part in, and relies on individuals getting round to sending me their reported speech, which I would then rearrange into a cohesive whole. With reference to the sense of gratitude in Triptych, I asked people to tell me some of the things they say to each other during ‘intimate moments’, classed simply as early in the morning or late at night. As I might have guessed, despite some fantastic support from the local press, there weren’t really enough submissions to make this project worthwhile. Staff at the Bluecoat were forthcoming, however, and I did get the poem for their Christmas cards from this method. Was an okay poem.
Anyway. With Slow Magic, and to an extent with Under the Volcano, the way that I approached the final poem was in the most part an emotional response to the work rather than a rational one. I think my emotional response to Janek’s work is more muted, because I think his perspectives do not jar on me in the way of some artworks – I think the overwhelming ’sense’ about how his best works hang together – the simple idea that produces a presentation perfect in all its aspects – is something that maybe doesn’t necessarily translate best to a poem, or that I haven’t yet found that idea, that poem.
poem made using words harvested from the Things We Say... pilot with Bluecoat staff.
All the best everyone!
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