What is Love to a Poet?
Reading "Suffer for This" by Victor Infante
What is Love to a Poet? : Discussing Victor Infante’s “Suffer for This” (Moon Tide Press)
Why poets keep writing about love
Listeners, on The Poetry Salon-cast I interview a variety of poets about their work. It should come as no surprise that a number of their poems are on the topic of love. Sometimes we veer onto the topic of our relationships, the ones that didn’t work out, and the ones we’re currently in. I don’t always include these discussions on the podcast, but needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to my fellow poets about the topic of love.
What draws us together? What breaks us apart? What keeps us going? Why is it we pick one person or another? Why can we make a love relationship work with this person, but not that person?
There are all different kinds of relationships with different answers. If you’re a writer, it makes sense your work will probe this question at one point or another. Love is one of those mysterious topics that intrigues most people, and for which there never is a certain, mathematical or quantifiable answer. It’s why love remains a rich topic for poetry throughout the ages.
Victor Infante’s novella, Suffer for This out from Moon Tide Press is about what he calls a happy marriage about two people who are already married and who want to stay married. I don’t want to give very much away, but in the book the narrator probes his own relationship to love. He goes into a journey of inquiry thinking about past relationships, reflecting on how they’ve made him who he is. Though this is a novella, Infante defined himself as a poet with his first book of poetry, City of Insomnia from Write Bloody Publishing.
Though this is a novella, it is quite poetic. One could even argue it is a long poem, which is why I’m discussing it on The Poetry Salon-cast.
One
Because nothing happened. Because nothing happened. We find suffering in the inflection of a word, the way we wrap our tongue around a syllable. Love, we say, when we mean love. When we mean a thousand pulses of blood, a thousand firing synapses. When we mean the endorphin rush of a first kiss that leaves us stoned and breathless, staggering alone from her doorway to your car. Or when you see a woman across a crowded coffee house, and know that you will have her – love as clairvoyance, watching the origami of the future unfold, until you are drunk, teeth clenched on her lip, until time falls forward again and you are empty in a parking lot, reading the broken lines of your own palm for some future that ends anywhere but there, and finding none. Finding only inevitability, heartbreak and want.
We say love, but eschew definition, as though it were some mason jar to store in a cupboard. Is love that blush of silence that overwhelmed you in junior high school? The way her smile still jars when you see it on some social-networking site online? Is love the way a teenage girl’s voice haunted you when you left for college? the memory of a kiss in a park, children laughing in the distance as they slid and swung, oblivious to the finality both you and she saw reflected in each other’s eyes, looming deadline of distance, absence and blood which would, inevitably, boil elsewhere? Is love the picture you keep in a box in the attic, the one you haven’t unearthed in years, but which you think about, sometimes, on quiet nights when your wife sleeps soundly and you have memorized the details of the ceiling?
I say all of this is love, and more. And less. I say love is the fact of a person, the way she burns herself into the architecture of your life. Love is what is both inevitable and durable. What burns and heals and batters against your forehead and chest. Love is the voice that will hush all others: each pretender, every demon.
And love is also none of this; but is instead the culmination of every love which has preceded it – mistake layered upon mistake, calculus of what the body needs and what the self no longer wishes to be. The attempt to rectify each faded mistake, to reclaim each ghost of what was right, without the reckoning and fall. This is love as we are now, this particular inflection of us.
Still, the voices still twitter in the distance. And still, there’s a burning at the base of our skull.
What works so well about this opening
What works so well about this piece, chapter, long poem, opening, is what works well in a good poem. The full book is going to give us character, setting, plot, and all the things that make up a good narrative. But the book is about more than just these characters in this situation. The book is also about a universal topic, love. The book opens with a question, “what is love.” It’s a question that interests most people, but does not have a simple explanation.
Starting with a question gets readers engaged
By starting off with this question the speaker is saying that this book is about these characters, but it is also turning towards the reader and asking them what is love to you? What can you learn from this book that might apply to your life? The speaker gives definitions, examples, but they don’t close us off with a conclusion. There’s a moment where the speaker says “it’s all of these things, and more and less.” By leaving the door open the speaker engages the reader.
So, as we’re reading, we’re also engaging, asking ourselves “is this love? If not, what is? How is love for me the same and different as it is for the two characters in this novella.” This is a question that doesn’t get answered directly. It leaves us pondering the question as the novel ends, and I would argue as we go into the next novel. It seems to be a mystery that never ends, but which we as artists keep exploring, expanding upon and considering and reconsidering, adding more and more possibilities for what the answer might be.
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Breaking The Rules — Being Bad Doesn't Mean Bad Poetry: Poet and journalist Victor D. Infante jumps between styles regularly, from poetry to fiction to news reporting to music criticism. Does that have an effect on his writing? It certainly does, and in this generative workshop, Victor will talk about his eclectic career, his new hybrid poetry/fiction novella "Suffer For This," from Moon Tide Press, and how he does ... or doesn't ... keep it all straight in his head. Then it's your turn to break some literary rules and, hopefully, get away with it!
Submitting Poetry Can be Fun!
Believe it or not, you can get work published and have fun doing it. The trick is to do it with a group of friends. Together we will offer practical and moral support, suggestions for where to submit, and tips for how to get your work out there.
Nikki Giovani wrote, “i lay at the foot / of my bed and smell / the sweat of your feet.” Sandra Cisneros wrote, “I want you inside / the mouth of my heart.” Sonia Sanchez wrote, “you are tattooed on the round/soft/parts of me.” In this one-hour writing lab, we will explore love poems from the 20 th and 21 st century and use them as jumping off points for our own poems of romantic and sensual love. With a focus on the “you,” we will get down to what Eileen Myles calls the “messy & brite” parts of worship, obsession, and the body.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press) and Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications). A former Steinbeck Fellow and Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Yefe Nof, Jentel, and National Parks Arts Foundation in partnership with Gettysburg National Military Park and Poetry Foundation. Her poem “Battlegrounds” was featured at Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, On Being’s Poetry Unbound, and the anthology, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton). Her poetry and essays can be found at Acentos Review, Huizache, LA Review of Books, The Offing, [Pank], Santa Fe Writers Project, and other journals. She is the director of Women Who Submit. Inspired by her Chicana identity, she works to cultivate love and comfort in chaotic times.
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