I can think of no greater truth when it comes to love poetry, and that is why men with the courage to write it benefit so much. To write anything decent, you have to be honest. The men I know who have done so are appreciated by their partners because that honesty requires an opening of the heart.
Such honesty has a salutary effect on the writer; it is a good experience. He has to search within himself to discover and bring out what is there so that he can be honest. Writing is not an expression of something already known; it is a discovery of the unknown that would not be known without the act of writing. For example, I often start with something I see, and then as the pen moves, anything blocked up inside me starts to move as well — images, ideas, feelings, emotions. I begin to discover new ideas and energy that I did not know were in me. Sometimes they go in a single direction like a beacon of steady light. Other times they lead to complicated pools of feeling or experience. Here is an example of one such poem from a few years ago.
Blackbirds at Dawn
In an apartment in St. Paul,
a man stands in the window,
looking east. Red rays
and dawn’s rosy fingers
spread across a sky
whose message is nothing
…but possibility.
Black birds swirl in unison
as if the undulating air
were two lovers on which
they rode; up and down,
on and off… One can only see
the pure joy of instinct
as the birds obey an unseen
force — the one
that makes even God blush.
That man soothes his heart
in the knowledge the blackbirds
confer. Their story signals
something we cannot know.
There isn’t an idea that can
cause that experience; only
the inexplicable joy of the divine
instinct when the right man
and the right woman join.
Presence is everything.
Longing is something.
Absence, a sin to endure.
And here he is, standing alone.
The sun rises and says all these
things, yet he stands alone.
He thanks the sun. He thanks
the blackbirds. He dreams
of her with the saddest
joy-filled heart on Earth.
-Anthony Signorelli
This is a poem about being separated from my love. It was early and I actually did sit down looking out my apartment window. The blackbirds were doing that thing where they swirl through the air in unison. From there, the poem brought me into the sense of possibility, the lovely undulation of the birds, and then this:
Presence is everything.
Longing is something.
Absence, a sin to endure.
For me as the writer, the last three lines were the delightful surprise:
He dreams
of her with the saddest
joy-filled heart on Earth.
There’s a moment of discovering my complex feelings. It captured the sadness of her temporary absence, and yet the magical joy of our growing love.
I share these because they are a few of the gifts I received from writing the poem, and perhaps they demonstrate the benefits of discovering a language of the heart.
For me, the joy of love poetry is the honesty one discovers by writing — it feeds the love. The heart opens with it. Men who do this actually become better lovers, and I think that’s why women tend to enjoy the poetry. As a practice and for a relationship, it doesn’t really matter if the poetry turns out good or not; nor does it matter if it is actually shared with the partner. What matters is the cultivation that occurs in the process of the writing. A man’s heart gets deeper. He comes to know his complex soul. He is more aware of himself, more present to his partner, and more fulfilled and joyful as a man.
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Anthony Signorelli authors books and articles on men, #MeToo, postcapitalism, climate, green energy, political history, poetry, and books. He is the former editor of Inroads: A Journal of the Male Soul, co-facilitated men’s groups in the wake of #MeToo, and has published six books.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Anthony Signorelli (Author)