{"id":3191,"date":"2011-02-11T16:06:40","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T21:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3191"},"modified":"2011-02-11T16:07:26","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T21:07:26","slug":"weekly-prompt-unromantic-love-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/11\/weekly-prompt-unromantic-love-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Prompt: Unromantic Love Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Portrait of Old Friends.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Valentine’s Day, with its often-saccharine greeting card verses and glossy commercial sentiments (not to mention its frequent misquotations of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson), is at hand once again, and what better time of year than to give that tricky (and oft-abused) specimen\u2014the love poem\u2014a subversive spin?\u00a0 I’m not talking about writing penny dreadfuls or anguished emo laments (we are not Death Cab for Cutie here).\u00a0 I’m talking about defying expectation completely with regards to what a “love poem” is and\/or should be.\u00a0 In a sense, the love poem (as it is known in contemporary popular culture) is very much akin to the ode, in that the tone and subject matter of its address tends to elevate the “you” with the use of high language and often ornate imagery.\u00a0 \u00a0 The purpose of the exercises that follow are to invite you to write against this sense of elevation while still retaining, in some way, at least a loose engagement with the intimacy, tenderness, or intensity of the close gaze in which the speaker of a love poem might hold the object of his or her affection.\u00a0 To, in short, write against and across clich\u00e9 and into something that is bold, surprising, and new.<\/p>\n

Prompt: Write an “unromantic” love poem.\u00a0 Some ideas:<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>1. Write a love poem that specifically avoids the use of any words or gestures which might traditionally be associated with the genre\u00a0 (For example,\u00a0 a sonnet that avoids words like “love,” “lips,” “kiss,” “flowers,” “soul,” “heart,” “tongue,” “forever,” “time,” “youth,” “beauty,” “heat”, “soft,” “blood,” “sun,” “flame,” “darkness,” “arms”).\u00a0 If you’re stuck, try writing an inversion of a famous love poem to start you out.
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2. Write a love poem that focuses the speaker’s gaze on a mundane, miniscule, technical, inanimate, messy, awkward, or even grotesque task, process, or object, rather than on a subject of conventional beauty. (Think: the very famous WCW poem,\u00a0 “This Is Just to Say<\/a>,” which focuses on plums; or even the spirit of John Donne’s “The Flea<\/a>,” which uses a parasite as its primary metaphor) <\/strong><\/p>\n

3. Write a love poem that engages with an aesthetic of sparseness, remoteness, or sterility (both sonically and imagistically), rather than with one of superfluousness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

4. Write a love poem that takes the aesthetic of elevated excess to its extreme, such that it becomes wildly surrealistic, or grotesquely decadent, or even campy (\u00e0 la gurlesque<\/a>).<\/strong><\/p>\n

5. Write a love poem that limits its exploration of its subject to only one, non-visual sense (i.e. smell, touch, taste, or sound).
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6. Write a love poem that\u00a0 does not take the form of a direct address (e.g. “I” to “you”).\u00a0 Or try eliminating the first and second person completely.<\/strong><\/p>\n

7. Write a love poem addressed to an object of ambiguously romantic or non-romantic love (for example, a stranger, a child, a public figure who is known for something other than their beauty or glamour) and which engages with that subject in terms of the everyday or mundane. (Think Oliver de la Paz’s “Aubade\u00a0 with a Book and the Rattle from a String of Pearls<\/a>” or Marc Vincenz’s “Taishan Mountain<\/a>”\u00a0 from LR<\/em>, Issue 2).
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valentine’s Day, with its often-saccharine greeting card verses and glossy commercial sentiments (not to mention its frequent misquotations of everyone from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson), is at hand once again, and what better time of year than to give that tricky (and oft-abused) specimen\u2014the love poem\u2014a subversive spin?\u00a0 I’m not talking about writing penny dreadfuls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[13],"tags":[537,225,536,59,242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3191"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3198,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191\/revisions\/3198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}