As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
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As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
Sean Hughes made such a great point in our occasional poetry episode, that we did a spin off episode to address his ideas about anecdotal poetry: which isn't a thing, but we might convince you that it is by the end of the episode!
If you missed that episode, Sean says that an occasional poem responds to an event in the public consciousness--like an inauguration or a war. But, occasional poems will often swerve into more personal commentary about an individual's experience of that event so they seem less about the occasion
and more about individual experience. Furthermore, there are many poems that are more engaged with an individual's reflection or memory that describe an event and effect storytelling, but aren't about an event in the public consciousness. To interrogate this phenomenon we discuss "Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas; "Celestial Music" by Louise Glück; and "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens.
Black Box Poetry
As Sean said, we did curse poems in the last episode, so we're doing love poems next to get the bitter taste out of our mouths." In this episode, we talk about how love poems are always starting with the threat of sentimentality, always have an implied narrativity, and are always in defiance of Rilke's directive to his young poet addressee, "Don't write love poetry." In this episode, with attention to the fact that we all hate-to-love and love-to-hate love poems, and extra attention to some canonical love poems that are talking about LGBT relationships before the poets could openly talk about them, we talk about Walt Whitman's lesser-known "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers"; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous Sonnet 44 about married love; and Frank O'Hara's sweet "Having a Coke with You." (WW: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/30) (EBB: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50538/sonnets-from-the-portuguese-44-beloved-thou-has-brought-me-many-flowers) (FOH: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you)
