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If you’re looking for real, wild and resonant romance, poetry is where it’s at.
There are too many love stories and not enough imagination. UK publishing is full of normative sagas, dusted with vanilla. Love is universal, sure, so shouldn’t publishers work hard to find the stories that stand out? This is where the poets come in, with love experiences you wouldn’t share with your mother. With so many tame and predictable romance sagas being repeated in fiction and in biographies, it’s time for publishers to set the bar high by learning from the excess and distillation of great poets.
Let’s start with Dante (1265-1321). After the Italian poet experienced a chance encounter with a woman called Beatrice, who was walking along the same street in Florence, he returned home and had the following dream: a "lord of terrible aspect" visited him, holding a tiny version of Beatrice in its arms, feeding her Dante’s heart. So far, so weird. But what happens next is key. Dante was convinced that his dream held a hidden truth, so he resolved to write a sonnet about it: "musing on what I had seen, I proposed to relate the same to many poets who were famous in that day... I should write unto them those things which I had seen in my sleep." For many people, and sadly many writers, a dream as odd as Dante’s would be buried under the pillow and never retold. Yet the near millennia-long fascination with Dante’s poem shows us that readers are drawn to the strange and memorable – more so if there’s a hidden truth buried in the twisted narrative. Poets like Dante are not just expressing the archetypal unconscious of love, they are inventing it.
Poets can make us ‘unsee’ the norm, wiping the lens to give us a fresh perspective – something that publishing desperately needs.
I like to think there’s a novelist somewhere writing the story of poet Louise Labé (circa 1516/22–66), a wildly compelling and enigmatic woman, who was at turns a cross-dresser, a role-player, a challenger of male hierarchy and a cipher of the literary zeitgeist in Early Modern France. Labé was reputedly a gifted archer and horsewoman; there is one account of her dressing as a man to fight a knight on horseback. Labé had various alter egos including "Captain Loys", "Belle Cordière" and "femme sçavante". She dedicated poems to an unnamed "Ami". She is so hard to see through the fog of history, she’s even been argued into non-existence as a literary hoax. Labé’s life and poems provide us with one of the most enigmatic lovers and poets of her era, a figure that still confounds critics and keeps us guessing. Her poems are performative, excelling in the artistry of imagery, using clashes of scale to magnify detail, zooming out for panorama: "Whenever the pain grows beyond belief, / to my surprise, I feel nothing inside."
When it comes to the excessive emotion of love, writers need to raise their words, not their blurbs. Sometimes poets meet this excessive emotion with linguistic exuberance, sometimes distillation is key. There is a present-tenseness to many great love poems that can make retro-prosaic loves stories appear dull and plodding. Great love poems ask us to meet them on their own terms, not simply as accounts of things that have happened, but constructions stretched in language – allowing fact, desire and expression to interplay – creating a world that listeners and readers often find deeply meaningful (even useful) for their own experience of the emotion.
Love is universal, yes, but not all cultures in the world view love in the exact same way, which means this universal emotion can be viewed kaleidoscopically, disrupting the flight of the West’s eros-arrow. When I was editing No, Love is Not Dead: An Anthology of Love Poetry from Around the World, (Chambers, 2021) I spoke about this to Laura Tohe, Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, who said: "How is it babies can go to war and shoot arrows? How did the arrows not kill people? And why shoot arrows to make people fall in love?" It was another example of how poets can make us "unsee" the norm, wiping the lens to give us a fresh perspective – something that publishing desperately needs.
Every writer should learn from the great Psychedelic Furs’ song, "Love My Way", aiming to do just that – make the lord of emotions yield to the individual’s perspective. The history of poetry is one of individualists who’ve done just that, their fresh takes on love having lasted longer than most churches. Publishers should push their writers to be bold with their love arrows or to dispense with arrows altogether. "Love is mute," the German Romantic poet Novalis wrote, "only poetry makes it speak." The good news is that all writers can learn from the techniques of poets and the space between poetry and fiction is narrow. "Desire moves," Anne Carson writes. "Eros is a verb."