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