🌬️ Poems
🌬️ Poem: [Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up By Bernadette Mayer
>[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up
>By Bernadette Mayer
>
>You jerk you didn’t call me up
>I haven’t seen you in so long
>You probably have a fucking tan
>& besides that instead of making love tonight
>You’re drinking your parents to the airport
>I’m through with you bourgeois boys
>All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts
>Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but
>
>Nowadays you guys settle for a couch
>By a soporific color cable t.v. set
>Instead of any arc of love, no wonder
>The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time
>
>Wake up! It’s the middle of the night
>You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander
>
>
>_________________
>
>To make love, turn to page 121.
>To die, turn to page 172.
🌬️ Poem: I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again By Vievee Francis
>I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
>By Vievee Francis
>
>
>Those who live to have it and
>those who live to give it.
>
>
>Of course there are those for whom both are true,
>but never in the same measure.
>
>
>Those who have it to give are
>like cardinals in the snow. So easy
>and beautifully lit. Some
>are rabbits. Hard to see
>except for those who would prey upon them:
>all that softness and quaking and blood.
>
>
>Those who want it
>cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
>any furred thing will do. So easy
>to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.
>
>
>I wander out into the winter.
>I know what I am.
🌬️ Poem: I Love by Jacques-Bernard Brunius
It’s the week of Valentine’s Day, and I’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 known—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
>