The University of the Self #50
Muse as Love
Muse as Love
What better body to bear these circumgyratory emotions that a poem?
No matter how terrible we are (or think we are) at love, love will always be fantastic poem-fodder. Some of the greatest poems in the world are about either finding it or losing it. It’s hard not to give up on writing love poems before you have even begun. Poems like the one about carrying hearts in hearts (by E.E. Cummings) already exist, and you didn’t write it. Could you ever write something that comes even close? If not, what’s the point? The point is, you are probably going to write at least one love poem at some stage in your writing life, so just accept it and plod on. There’s a glittering mine of material and experience bound up in love — its potential. Its excitements, joys, losses, terrors, passions. It’s upsides and downsides, qualities and inequalities, highs and lows. Its quantity or lack. Its truth and lies, value and waste. What better body to bear these circumgyratory emotions that a poem? We have ancient Greece to thank for some great definitions. They invented the nine Muses. They also defined and bestowed names upon eight kinds of love. I decided to add one my own — a kind of love I felt was missing, to round things up to nine* (there’s that magic number nine again). Philia (affection / love between really good friends) Pragma (mature, developed, long-term love) Storge (love between parents and children / childhood friends) Eros (infatuation / romantic love / physical attraction) Ludus (playful, flirty love / love’s beginnings) Mania (obsessive love) Philautia (self-love / loving oneself in a healthy way) Agape (selfless, unconditional love for everyone) *Reluctantia (reluctant love — you don’t want to love someone or something but you sort of have to) I am talking in this essay about love between non-related humans. Relationships with partners (romantic, not business. Unless of course you fall in love with your business partner who then becomes your partner partner). The ones where there is sometimes sex involved. Attraction. First dates, weddings, living together, epic rows, breaking up, secret crushes, asking someone out. The topsy-turvy stuff of countless Jackie magazine photo-strip stories, movies and books. Eros. That.
I have love poems to thank for first making me think that I should give this poetry lark a try. That I should stop just shyly reading bits and bobs of it. Stop telling myself I couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t. I had gone to sixth form college, and, completely out of my depth, did very badly in my A Levels (a). I still felt like I was thirteen years old. I had no confidence, no real understanding of how I was meant to go on. I felt as if I knew nothing at all about the subjects I had chosen. Why did I choose them — art and literature? Because I had this inbuilt sense that I wanted to give myself completely over to them. I was born with the taste of them in my mouth. It was my only path. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just did. They were and are the loves of my life. Love, however, is far from easy. Some people say that if you have to work this hard at it, it’s not love. I disagree. If you love something, really love something, you must brook its endless tribulations, give it all you’ve got. I admit that, after the shock caused by the discovery that what I knew was barely enough to scrape by on academically, and that I was utterly rubbish at everything, I came close to giving up on my loves. I decided I must content myself with reading in secret and learn to do something else. I lost faith with my loves, but they (marvellous things) kept faith with me (b). The only positive to emerge from the fretful miasma of the English Lit. classes was experiencing some poetry through the wonderfully enthusiastic vessel of Mrs M—, the teacher. The following poem commemorates an important teacher who helped bring me to poetry. It appears in my Nine Arches collection The Apothecary of Flight. I hadn’t heard poetry read out loud before, or talked about as if it was a Real & Important Thing until a brilliant teacher made it so IMO Miss Moss, Barnsley 6th Form College, 1987 I remember her so clearly — her smiling moon-shaped face, stringy fawn hair, huge-framed glasses (the kind that sit oddly upside-down upon the nose), damp, earnest eyes, psalmic voice, long skirts, stout shoes. When I say that she reminded me of dust I mean a beautiful kind of dust— the kind that settles gently around you, like love. We read poems by Smith, Heaney and Betjeman (I can still recite almost the whole of A Subaltern’s Love Song by heart)— his words mushroomy, pine-woody are a part of my most beloved echolalia mechanisms. It’s especially good to repeat while walking (I believe the poem laid foundations concerning the mouthfeel and rhythm of poetry inside the future me). Mushroomy, pine-woody mushroomy, pine-woody mushroomy, pine-woody. I did not know then that I would grow up to be a poet. She opened each word like a flower— I sort of understood yet didn’t quite understand what she meant, back then. True appreciation of what she did for me came after. What a shame we can’t travel back in time and thank people like this— show them we did amount to something in the end. What do you think it means, theis teacher asked, to be that far out and drowning? It means somebody like me is sitting in a lesson like this somewhere right now and this new sea has swallowed them up and swilled a shock of salt around their head, I thought but dared not say. They can taste the water’s breath, the lightness of the chrism oil upon its blessed skin. Notes “I was much too far out all my life /And not waving but drowning”, Not Waving but Drowning, by Stevie Smith “The water breathed on. / The water mixed with chrism and with oil”, Clearances, by Seamus Heaney. Because of Mrs M—, I eventually bought my first poetry books. They were anthologies (c) — they felt like the safest sort of book to buy, as I didn’t believe I knew enough then to make a book length commitment to one author or style. I enjoyed their variety and began to glean some notion of which poems I enjoyed more than others (perhaps this is why I have always had a soft spot for them). I was in my twenties — very much a latecomer to the reading of poetry. I wish I could be born again and participate in the wonderful support there is now for young writers. I try not to imagine what might have been. I wish I could write to some of the programmes and say, “but I am a young writer! It’s just this sack of skin wrapped around me that’s getting old!” I get so upset sometimes, that if I ever did write this letter, I suspect the biro would be so vehement it would rip the page. I feel a little better already for admitting this so openly. It is good to get these feelings out in the open, and try to address them by letting them exist. You can’t step past them if you don’t. What I am is thankful for in the end is that I came to poetry at all, no matter what the time of life. But I digress. I loved the first poetry books I bought so much. As I walked out of the shop, books pressed to my chest, I wanted to stop someone so I could tell them, “look! I bought books. About poems!” These first, tentatively accessed poems taught me some valuable lessons. Everything about the poems was an epiphany. My thoughts went something like this: The sing-song music and rhythm of the lines — I love speaking them while patting out the beats with my hand! Rhyme that fits and doesn’t feel old-fashioned or forced! Devices like repetition — not boring. Brilliant! The poets use words that feel familiar! The poets are writing accessibly about how they feel! These are things that make me feel included in the poem! These are things that help a poem stay in your head! I don’t feel afraid to read them! I LOVE love poems! If you love love poems, and love the writing of love poems, then there are some points that are worth reflecting upon. How far would you go for love? This clichéd question is grist to the mill for advertising agencies, diamond dealers, dating shows, thrillers and books with canoodling couples on the cover. We can’t know how far we would go for love until a time might come when love asks us to go there. With this in mind, I ask: how far would you go for a love poem? The answer to this one can involve a lot more honesty than you might be prepared to offer. If you are anything like me, you will find yourself having to Admit To Things. In this section, we have already acknowledged nine Muses and nine kinds of love. What about nine cautionary thoughts, when it comes to love poems? It’s complicated territory. I am uncertain of boundaries; unsure where I and other people fit into the scheme of love. When I am hyper-focused, I may miss surrounding cues and clues. All I want to do, right then, right now, is empty that love poem out of myself, regardless of the consequences. Even if the poem is not a pleasant one, does it still count as a love poem? What would the other person think if they discovered themselves in your poem? Are we using a story of love to demonstrate what great writers we are? Does consideration of the other party cause us to self-censor? Should private always remain private, no matter how juicy the goods? How does our emotion affect the shape and content of the poem? What ‘life’ do we expect our love poem to have after it leaves our pen? Are we vultures, picking at the bones of the past instead of leaving them to rest? Ought anything to be out of bounds? Is all to do with love fair game? The narcotic combination of love, angst and poetry is addictive. What are the ethics of love poetry? Are there any? Does it matter if they are? I saw this meme a few years ago which said: Be careful or you might end up in my next poem. At first, it made me laugh. A little later, I began to worry. The desire to create exciting, interesting poetry (in my case) too often outweighs the potential ethics of the subject matter. I am going to make a confession. I hope you don’t think I am a terrible person for admitting to this…but when it comes to love poetry, I am a bit of a Muse Tourist. Actually, I have confessed to this in one of my previously published poems (in my book Be Feared, Nine Arches Press, 2021), using the line: “They will read of all the muses I made of beautiful faces how I broke my horrible plum of a heart over dreams I built upon relative strangers…” There is an exquisite, agonising, elusive place I like to visit on a fairly regular basis. It’s called the Island ♥f L♥ve P♥ems and can only be reached when conditions are somehow utterly perfect for each particular poem — think of somewhere like St Mary’s Lighthouse near Whitley Bay, Lindisfarne, or the fossilised forest in Curio Bay, New Zealand, for example. You can only reach them at certain times when the sea answers the tide and reveals the way there. A timetable won’t get you to the Island of Love Poems. Your ticket is suffering. The passport you need is a symbol that looks like this:
The submerged causeway will magically reveal itself when a critical mass is reached — one of pure joy, or devastating loss. One of unmitigated bliss, devotion, fury, disappointment, arousal, discovery, or excitement. When these feelings occur, access to the island is granted, and you can pretty much pluck seeds for poems from the trees, so ready are they to be begun. There is some troublesome turf to negotiate on this island, so Be Warned. Some of the paths will lead you to Jealousy Lake, Bitterness Cove, Wailing Wood, Unrequited Mountain or the ruins of Faithless Fort. The past is an occluding fog, sickly-sweet and thick as milk. It’s easy to become lost. Be Warned again — the more you come here, the more addicted to it you become. There’s something in the air — some hypnotic taste in your head. It becomes harder and harder to leave Good Memories Garden, easier to pass The Point of No Return.
The scent from the sheer number of poems flowering here makes it tough to think about anything else but gathering them up as quicky as possible. What if you forget to pluck the poem that solves it all for you in four verses? What if you forget to pluck the poem of a lifetime? What if you forget to pluck the poem that will win the National Poetry Competition? What if you pluck so many you never finish them all? What if you forget why you began these poems in the first place? What if you never find the exact poem you are searching for? What if the poems run out? So. Back to my confession: I am a bit of a Muse Tourist. Will you hate me if I tell you I like to visit the Island of Love Poems on purpose? I do this by developing secret, uncontrollable crushes on people. Crushes that, because of circumstances, will always remain unrequited, unconsummated. For the time that they last, I can exist on the island, rooting up poem after poem until the seam is mined bare. Perhaps I do this because I will never truly understand love, or how to be loved, or what love truly means. Perhaps it is because I am a Bad Person. Perhaps I do it because I am a writer, and writing turns out to be more important to me than anything else. Perhaps you are shouting at the page right now because you think I am a disgusting, immoral (and that’s OK. We can’t all be the same). Perhaps you hate me — how typical of her, to say something as terrible as this! Perhaps we all like to spend time harvesting on the island but simply don’t like admitting to it. Perhaps I do not see love as sacred. Perhaps I do it because love is sacred. Perhaps I am just prepared to be really, properly honest about myself. When I have run out of things to say about that particular ‘love affair’, I quickly find myself moving on, to fertile new turf. I know I can’t be the only one — otherwise why would artists attach their art to muses? Why would we have invented Muses in the first place, if not to shift some of this responsibility from our own shoulders? See? It wasn’t me. It was the muse’s fault! “…it is, in fact, quite common for artists to seek ingenuity, creativity, and inspiration outside of themselves. Often times, we come across an artist whose creative outburst resulted from someone else’s mere presence. However, we repeatedly fail to acknowledge the contributions made by a person who we regard as a muse.” (Razmadze, M, 2020) Oh, those poor muses! Unacknowledged, nameless, shapeless, used and altered to fit our art! We plunder their contributions to our lives. We plunder their hearts and souls. The only way to fully respect the privacy of, or consider the feelings of the other person involved, is not to write about the relationship. The only way to fully respect the art of writing is to admit that we desire the gift that love gives us, as writers. We want to write our best about it — mobilise our best imagery, our smartest sonnets, our most page-astounding verse. We’re getting a writerly kick out of the whole thing, whether we are fully aware of it or not; whether we are prepared to accept it or not. In many cases, if we end up with brilliant verse, we might really want that poem to be published, and that’s only going to happen if we break what might be a sacred bond, a private moment. What is worth more? Our love or our love poems? Perhaps I am too cynical. There is always the honest, heartfelt factor that each love poem we write exists as a memorial to something wonderful. We are gifting immortality. We are saying, you will never be forgotten. Whenever someone reads this, you come back to life. Appendix (a) Four Ds if you must know. D in Art, D in English Lit, D in Theatre Studies and D in General Studies. Why did I choose Theatre Studies? I’ll be f**ked if I know. I was so shy and cumbersome that every session was agony. I think I chose it because I sensed this person inside of me, desperate to express themselves. I thought acting might release her. It didn’t. I had to wait until my forties for poetry to do that. I didn’t have a foggy how to write an essay. And what the actual F is General Studies? I still don’t know. I used to sit in the lesson utterly baffled by the course’s requirements. (b). I almost gave up many times over the years. I meandered from job to job — shoe shop, babysitting, supermarket, bar tender, server, groom. There was the occasional burst of enthusiasm as I attempted a reclamation of creativity — I tried to be a jeweller and silversmith. What to do next? I got married and had a child because someone asked me to marry them. I handcrafted things and failed to sell much at craft fairs. I wrote greetings card verses and posted them off to greetings card companies (with no response). I had a short-lived burst of small success when designs I had made were taken up by a giftware company. The recession in 2008 ended that particular dream. In 2019 I found the courage to leave the supermarket, where I had sat at the checkout for five years and finally staked my claim as a writer and artist. I pray it may continue. (c). These anthologies were The Nation’s Favourite Love Poems, edited by Daisy Goodwin, BBC Books, 2nd ed., 1998 and Poems on the Underground, Cassell, 1994.
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“how far would you go for a love poem? […] you will find yourself having to Admit To Things.”
I'm feeling seen, here. Also, I recognise that island; I've waded that causeway as the waters rise 🙂