It’s the week of Valentineā€™s Day, and Iā€™m having my undergraduate students write sonnets and explore the magical love poem (or anti-love poem).

I often look to surrealist poets when it comes to passion, eroticism, and love poems because love is often a resistance to logic and sense-making. Surrealism in poetry does have sense if you read with all your senses.

Here is a surreal love poem from the French Surrealist poet Jacques-Bernard Brunius:

> I Love
>
> I love sliding I love upsetting everything
> I love coming in I love sighing
> I love taming the furtive manes of hair
> I love hot I love tenuous
> I love supple I love infernal
> I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass
> I love pearl I love skin
> I love tempest I love pupil
> I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer
> I love oval I love struggling
> I love shining I love breaking
> I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth
> I love blue I love knownā€”knowing
> I love lazy I love spherical
> I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
> I love to the left I love in the fire
> I love because I love at the edges
> I love forever many times just one
> I love freely I love especially
> I love separately I love scandalously
> I love similarly obscurely uniquely
> > hopingly
>
> I love I shall love
>
> Translated by Mary Ann Caws
>