Ways of Writing Love

My Patreon is open and I'm so delighted by the uptake thus far! Thank you all so much.

The Bonus Content tier members have received their first goodie today, my short story "Where We Walk, We Walk On Bones", originally commissioned by Victoria University of Wellington (TWH) Press for the awesome Monsters in the Garden anthology.

(In that anthology, my story is sandwiched between Octavia Cade and Tamsyn Muir, not that I was intimidated or anything.)

A few years ago, my brother asked what I'd done on Saturday night, and I told him, with sincere enthusiasm, that I'd had a great night at home by myself, getting drunk and reading poetry.

He paused for a few seconds and said, "Every now and then, I remember you and I are very different people."

And he was right! We do have some things in common–we both love board games and his children and talking shit about the New Zealand Ministry of Education–and we love each other, despite our many differences. But he's never going to persuade me to care about sports¹, and I'm never going to persuade him to like poetry.

Yesterday was my birthday. I am not a birthday diva by inclination (though I support birthday divas, absolutely do make the whole month your birthday month if that is what your heart desires). Occasionally I say things like "I'm going to spend my 50th in Italy²" but mostly I will forget my birthday right up to and sometimes on the day of the event. Thus, it's a pleasant surprise whenever anyone else remembers. They say "Happy birthday!" and I say, "Oh, right, yes! Thank you!"

However, yesterday being my 44th, I managed to book a restaurant and ate dessert for dinner in the company of one of my oldest friends, Dr Erin Harrington. Erin and I have much more in common than my brother and I, but there's still an inevitable disconnect. Erin is a brilliant scholar of horror cinema, and I will always read the synopsis of horror movies and never go to them. We can never enter entirely into the feelings of another.

For me, poetry is a good way to approximate entering into the feelings of another, and romance is another. This is why I think more romance readers might enjoy poetry if they gave it a shot. It's a tough sell, since poetry has that unenviable association with the pretentious or the privileged or the torment of being taken apart" at school. I understand that for many, poetry appears to be a deliberately opaque and confusing world where apparently words don't mean what they mean and you have to understand the history of literary criticism and deconstructionism to enjoy Robert Haas's "Meditation at Lagunitas".

But on the other hand, you don't! That is one of my favourite poems, because as well as raising its eyebrows at Derrida et al without ever explicitly mentioning them, "Meditation at Lagunitas" also captures the very human, very common practice of repeating a word over and over until it loses all meaning, and then having a little existential crisis about language^3, and then being like, you know what, maybe it is all meaningless - let's love each other anyway.

There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Hera Lindsay Bird, who currently writes an excellent advice column called Help Me, Hera [not sic, but I insist upon that comma] once wrote a poem called "Keats is Dead so Fuck Me From Behind". It's funny and shocking and sexy and full of grief and defiance and joy. What is poetry worth when life is short and your lover could be peeling off your stockings with their teeth, she asks, and then answers with lines like this:

Life is real/And the days burn off like leopard print/Nobody, not even the dead can tell me what to do

Frank O'Hara, who loved art, has some thoughts on art in "Having a Coke with You", ie, why does anyone bother:

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

I am not a poet, but I adore these kind of poems, the puzzled, rushing ecstasy of people trying to work out why love and sex and longing can be so all-involving, why they make you want to chuck out every artful approximation of love in favour of the thing itself. But it's a trick, because they're all art about love! It's like a musical with a stirring number about how much someone hates musicals.

And that's what romantic fiction is for. We can't ever enter entirely into the feelings of another, but we can reach for them through this kind of honest deception.

See you next week. I think I've talked myself into doing some reading of poetry about sport.

¹ Other than cheerleading or gymnastics, which hit the performance-appreciation part of my brain instead of any vestigial sports-appreciation.

² I have this whole-ass Classics degree, and I have never been to Italy or Greece, or, in fact, mainland Europe. The closest I've been to classical antiquity in person is the Roman baths at Bath, which were awesome and smelly.

³ aka deconstructionism.