Call It Love: Guest Editor’s Discussion, Summer 2024

Dear Readers,

How fortunate I feel to be asked to share poetry during June, Pride month. I’ve focused my selections on queer poets, specifically on poems of address or dedication. I have a particular fascination with the lyric “I” addressed to an imagined “you.” Maybe it’s the playwright in me, who likes to imagine a particular audience, reader, or offstage character. Or perhaps my love of dedication poems owes a debt to “Personism,” as described by Frank O’Hara:

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal.… Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art! … One of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet…), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity.… [Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] on August 27th, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond.) … The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it might be the death of literature as we know it. —Frank O’Hara, Personism, a manifesto

But even before I ever came across O’Hara’s delightful aesthetic, I’ve always loved both writing and reading event poems and occasional poems. I started by writing poetry before I ever wrote plays and gravitated toward writing poems of address, or poems that could be gifts. As a reader, I find myself drawn again and again to poems that feel as though they intrinsically mattered to the recipient, caused them to love or forgive the writer. Poems that make us feel we are looking over the shoulder of the poet as she gives an intimate gift; poems that we can reuse as gifts for our own beloveds.

Such poems seem to collapse time, and they also might mitigate the dangerous solipsism of the poet. Poems of address reach out of the silence and the static Platonic image to find a “you.” They beg our empathy and our urgency, all the way back to Sappho’s fragment 31, through Shakespeare’s Fair Youth sonnets, up to June Jordan’s entire book of love poems dedicated to her lover, Haruko. Kate Rushin’s poem of dedication to Jack Howard, who was born enslaved in Connecticut in 1795, reaches all the way across history to bear witness. Occasionally, I include a poem without a named recipient, as in Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo.” In speaking to green as a beloved, “Green I want you green,” Lorca elevates the green world to an ecstatic animism.

Working on these selections also led me to reflect on legacy and poems of dedication between writers, sometimes between two different generations: Jake Skeets writing a poem dedicated to C.D. Wright; Elizabeth Bishop writing poems dedicated to Robert Lowell or Marianne Moore; Mary Oliver dedicating a poem to May Swenson; and an implied dedication from so many of Rumi’s poems to his beloved, Shams. I teach a class at the Yale School of Drama on “Lessons from My Teachers,” and I’m working on a book of the same title in which I write portraits of all the teachers who impacted me. It moves me when writers credit their elders or contemporaries for their influence and inspiration. Finding queer models and teachers, in particular, feels meaningful because the dominant paradigm has historically excluded such love poems. Without models or a listening ear to answer back, we risk an isolation in which writers appear to be sprung out of the head of Zeus like Athena, complete and formed. But I believe we form each other. We form each other in poetic communities that open and circle outward, sometimes starting with an audience of one.

You might call this poetic mode an implied intersubjectivity. But that’s such a fancy word, and I like plainspoken poems. Or you might call the phenomenon “lyric complicity,” a term coined by my brilliant former student Max Ritvo. But maybe it’s easier and more accurate just to call it love.

- Sarah Ruhl

Special thanks to Robert Eric Shoemaker.