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Understanding how to read and discuss new poetry is important precursor to talking about it. That's what this first part of class is for. Use this space to write through your initial thoughts about what "Why Write Love Poetry. . . " could mean.
8 Comments
Alexandra O'Brien
11/5/2025 03:17:00 pm
The world, at times, can feel like it's chewing us up just to spit us out. And to train yourself to find something - that comes from a wanting, a longing to belong. A wanting to see good in a sea of bad, a wanting to see poetry in things that arguably to others might not be poetic. The poetry in violence, cancerous things, in fixing a porch step, in chewing, in doing the simplest of things. To think romantically about things when life is simple, plain, complicated, and bad - to think of it at all times. And to wonder what good that is, a mind like yours in a burning world.
Anna Dykhoff
11/5/2025 03:17:20 pm
I truly struggle with reading poetry, but I enjoy this poem a lot. I think the idea of trying to not only find love in a world that can feel bleak and loveless is essential, but the poem reflects not only the need to find it for oneself but to spread that hope for love as well, to "offer poems of love to a burning world." I find myself a little lost at the inclusion of replacing the porch step in the lines that seem more focused on the body - if anyone could help me with the meaning there I would appreciate it. I also think the visual of standing in a doorway, making it impossible for the door to shut is powerful. To stand in the way of those trying to close the door to love, to humanity, is what a lot of us are trying to do nowadays. Finally, I appreciate the idea of training for this - that loving and being loved is always a work in progress, something to challenge ourselves with.
Paul Sweeney
11/5/2025 03:17:44 pm
What most jumps out at me is the use of the phrase "the body". The body is a central concern of the poem, taking up the bulk of the second stanza. To write love poetry in a burning world, even as the body is "bald, cancerous", is to still live even if the world around you is falling apart. It's to remind yourself and others of the concepts of love and caring for others even when it feels like you're living in Hell.
I.S.
11/5/2025 03:18:30 pm
I think the author of the poem has cancer and is trying to find beauty and love within the terrible experience she is having, but this can also apply to other negative situations or events in the world. Writing love poetry is a way to find meaning and positivity when it is otherwise difficult to do so. It is “training” her to not focus on the negativity while also offering this positivity to others through her writing.
Ashley Luise
11/5/2025 03:20:36 pm
I generally struggle to read poetry, but I thought of “Why Write Love Poetry…” as an exploration into the importance of artmaking as essential catharsis in the wake of awfulness. While “the body [may be] bald, cancerous” (line 3), either literally or figuratively, art can be an outlet for people to find the good in a situation. While I know poetry is vastly different from a five paragraph essay, I find myself thinking about this poem as such—the first and last stanzas are the introduction and conclusion while the middle two stand as further exploration into how the speaker inhabits both the good and bad aspects of life. Even in all the horror, the speaker, or their body, continues doing “what it takes to keep a body/going” (9-10). Art in general, and in this case love poetry, is almost as essential to a human’s life as the tasks we find necessary to one’s life, like cleaning or feeding our bodies.
LT
11/5/2025 03:22:17 pm
The title suggests the poem will tell us why. We pause on the idea of a burning world. Our world feels like it is burning generally--climate change, cruelty, war, authoritarianism, etc. The idea that to write this poetry is to "train" oneself. Like one trains oneself to run a marathon or lift weights, something that requires repetition because it does not come naturally. It's not like breathing. We the reader are living in a burning world, Howerver, our narrator, we learn in the next line, is living in a specific burning world. Cancer. Possibly dying. But this is not a poem of giving in or giving up. This stanza--the repetition of the body five times in 8.1 lines. We see the body living doing things a living body does (not a dying or dead body);. What is "this scene:" Our short life or the life we are given to live. There is meaning in it--a tune a language. The stanza ends on resistance: a wedge against a closing door. A Shield is the last line of that stanza. The narrator resists giving up. Last stanza, we return to. the ;question: why not give up? Why write love poetry? Again, to train--this isn't easy or natural. But it is how we show we are alive. The last line to "offer" giving love '"to" a burning world. That is how we live in it. It's how we make it better.
Glen Beaulieu
11/5/2025 03:22:31 pm
My immediate thought about this poem was the idea of love being in the simple things. That in hard times, it's often the simple, little nothings that mean the most, you know? Farris talks about these simple things, like "washing the body" and "replacing the loose front porch step," and, to me, it feels like it's trying to evoke those little comforts we search for during hard times. I'm still thinking about the the second and third stanzas especially. The lines "This scene has a tune/ a language I can read/ a door I cannot close" I think talks both about this sort of search for things that make sense in times that don't make sense at all, but also this sort of inability to forget these things. Maybe it's something along the lines of not willing to succumb to the insanity of a burning world? That these little moments, these little nothings, are "a shield" that allows for one to keep going when everything around them is on fire.
Nina
11/5/2025 03:24:41 pm
I actually really like this poem. It's about finding a reason to make meaning and enjoyment in a world that lacks these concepts explicitly. It reminds me of that corny saying everyone's parents tell them before moving to college: "You have to make the most of it." I mean, what is the point of life if you do not find what you love? That sounds a bit intense, but there is truth to it. Like, We live in this world with so much conflict, death, war, destruction, hatred, etc, yet somehow we find ways to make our lives worth living in this world. It seems like the poet has an optimism towards this concept, despite the poem having a pretty dark tone at the beginning. She establishes that she stands in the way of life being completely hell, and that is because of her willingness to block out anything that takes away the opportunity of finding good and love in life. I think a lot of poems, such as this one and the ones that we read for class, serve as social commentaries for different ideas. This one is a bit more broad, but it can be interpreted differently regarding as to what makes the world hell. That in itself makes this poem pretty interesting Leave a Reply. |
Torda and the 489sWe'll use this space for synchronous and asynchronous work this semester. Q&A discussion board is housed in February archives of this blog. I check it weekly. Archives
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