Love is a Radical Generosity; Poetry is its Idiom

POETRY SYDNEY orchestrated a smart little project to coincide with Valentine’s Day this year (2021): poems on love, poems of love, from Sydney poets for Valentine's Day.

PS has asked a few of us to make a video on which we recite a love poem and share our thoughts on the nature of love.

Here’s me reading “The Godwit Shores” and making that case that love is the body’s poetry, and poetry is language making love:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjnkjnZx8zM

EVERY POEM worthy of the name is a love poem, really—being an enactment of love as a way of being—of love, in particular, for language, the gift of a life, all selves, all beings, for humanity (in its silliness and beauty and dignity) and the more than merely human world. Sometimes, too, a poem is a celebration of love for another. And so is this poem of mine.

And love, itself? Here’s what it’s not: love’s not a theory, it’s not a ploy, it’s not a play, it’s not a trade, it’s not a deal, it’s not a contract, it’s not a prayer, it’s not an answer. Love may well be, however, a question. A question you live: how can I make my being here (with you) count; how can I help; how can I fashion something beautiful from what I have been given; how can I help each being be itself as well as it can?

Love is how we close the distances down, while keeping our mind and our heart open. Love is a profound generosity, a radical and uncompromising kindness, a stance of immaculate affection. It may be most of what we mean by the Divine, and poetry, the language of connection, is its idiom.

Thanks to Angela Stretch, Michael Aitken, Richard James Allen and others for the project and the chance to be part of it.