I
“The poet who can handle politics is spectacularly rare, but then so is the poet who can handle love,” proclaimed William Logan. From Ovid to Goethe, Wordsworth to Brown, and Dickinson to Plath, love, equally personal and universal, has remained a vocational hazard to poets. Although recently, Carl Terver notes, in a brief intro to Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera’s small book of love poems Painter of Love (Heiress, 2023), that the subject in poetry has “been exhausted with all possible metaphors.” I began reading Chukwudera’s chapbook with a sense that he perhaps presents an edification of this spent although ever-daunting subject of love poetry. However, it is a disappointment to say that this poet goes out of his way to propagate the decline.
From the beginning of Chukwudera’s chapbook, this becomes evident. Alluding to the Shakespearean claim of the immortalising essence of poetry, in such sonnets as the 18th and 55th, Chukwudera opens his chapbook with so bold a pronouncement as to put the starting sonnet of Shakespeare (“From fairest creatures we desire increase”) to its mere contemplative place. One thinks that with such grand pronouncement a much grander poetic vocabulary awaits. No. Instead, we are paid, quite generously, for our naïveté with the dumbed-down version of the Shakespearean claim, in the starting poem “I Have Painted You”:
Like the nectars in a petal
Anyone who comes across these poems
Will encounter this love with which I love you
They shall come across your immortality
My darling
In 18 poems singing love and its attendant emotions to a number of lovers in fatefully accessible language, Chukwudera provides us with a rather convincing evidence that all we can get from love poetry today is not only facile imagination, but also a travesty in its poetic execution. Although romantic love might be said to be consubstantial with naïveté and childishness, both natural offshoots of the former’s shortcomings, poetry is not a medium for the carelessly designed either.
There is no doubt Chukwudera is an interesting prose writer. However, turning to the subject of love—which is sweepingly overwhelmed by unprimed sentiments—as the beginning of his journey in verse is a rather ambitious challenge preconditioned for failure of a rather considerable scale.
Poems impress and survive not by grandeur of subject, because what subject in poetry is grander than love? Rather, poems impress and survive through a competent control of language that charges even the most ordinary words with almost impossible meaning through their association with other words.
For instance, in One Hundred Love Sonnets by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda—the book Terver, in the spirit of advertisement rather than critical evaluation, compares with Painter of Love—this force of linguistic amplification is forcefully, if not flawlessly, achieved. In the spirit of gauging the wildness of that rather far-fetched comparison between the two poets, I offer Chukwudera’s transumptive counter—
I don’t want to love you like a rose
Everyone knows how to love a rose,
—to Neruda’s exordium to his sonnet “XVII”:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
Poetry—as this particular translation by Mark Eisner propounds in its clean, interpretively pregnant constructive principle—is the intelligent flexing of language finely mastered then forcefully subdued to intent.
In those lines of ravishing self-articulation, Neruda, clearly in love, leads us searching for that rare, love-soaked confluence between the faintly known and the totally unknown (“between the shadow and the soul,” both of which escape easy interpretation) in our love-affected mind. In Painter of Love, as already exemplified, one scans in vain for a single moment in which love is treated with the same precision and specificity of romantic vision whose puzzling form, à la Neruda, is proportionate to the inextricable nature of love itself.
Also, one stoops to ask: how do we come from Shakespeare’s beginning to his Sonnet 76: “So are you to my thoughts as food to life,” to arrive at these lines from the boldly entitled “A New Romance” (Chukwudera’s): “I will not kiss you / The same way I kissed you yesterday,” a poem bankrupt of both urgency and convincing rationale for its own wild, seemingly revolutionary title, “A New Romance”?
What purpose, we stoop to ask once again reading the poem, serves this “new beauty, a new love and a new kiss”? A poem, I once read somewhere, is a biography of its title. It is not unfair to say “A New Romance” has lived a poor life with its unimpressive, superficial lines.
II
The verdict, simply put, is that it isn’t Chukwudera’s fault that love poetry keeps declining aesthetically in the hierarchy of the forcefully gripping poetic genres. But Chukwudera is as guilty for continuing its depreciation by following the same tradition that makes love as a subject of poetry bankrupt of imagination and sophistication. Every poet, regardless of their inheritance or tradition, is still vested with the responsibility to not only entertain, but to also astound in every topical or thematic contract he signs.
However, the aesthetic failure of romantic poetry, its lean and facile execution in modern day, is too ubiquitous to be an isolated incidence. The decline in expressing the romantic experience as opposed to eroticism—which fascinates not through much painstakingness of perception but through shamelessness and obscenities, our secret, unspoken fascinations—is part of a larger problem accosting contemporary poetry itself.
The first problem is the inevitable, if sometimes fateful (as is the case now), evolution of poetic language. The second problem (and this is rather palpable) extends to, or to be more precise, distends from the total devastation of traditional forms in our ultramodern poetry.
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Love itself hasn’t changed. Nor has how we feel it evolved. It is still intricate, illogical, confusing, sentimental, specious, and satisfyingly inextricable. Our poetic language, on the other hand, is what has since evolved. Every age of poetry has its poetic language, different in syntactic structure and semantic association, both of which are driving forces of poetry. For the considerable number of our literary centuries, the continuum between these generational languages of love poetry is that they in essence effuse measured playfulness, mirroring the incredible effects of love at its most potent and affecting, albeit with regard to the suprasegmentals of the poetic expression—tone, rhythm, mood, and atmosphere, as opposed to mere rhetorical devices that begin with metaphor and, if expressively ambitious, ends with irony.
This playfulness or sprezzatura then is less a rigidly technical sleight in a poem on or about love than the poet’s seemingly spontaneous yet informed “free play of his own mind and feeling upon [his subject],” to borrow E. R. Sill’s phraseology.
“Informed” because the poet is still vested with the burden of working out whether what he is making in enthusing his romantic feelings is sense as opposed to nonsense, even when integrating the sometimes loose intricacy of content with form in its sometimes flinching rigidness.
Our contemporary language of poetry as far as expressing love is concerned, I submit, by contrast, is anything but seemingly spontaneous in this particular sense of playfulness that mirrors the silly effects of love. By and large—and this is somewhat ironical—its artifice is betrayed by its democratic tendencies towards form.
Peter Davison, writing some forty-two years ago in “The Great Predicament of Poetry,” observes with incontestable insight that “our younger poets, heeding Rilke’s admonition, ‘You must change your life,’ have tried to alter their poetic gait by simplifying it—the immemorial process by which poetry tries to purge itself of the past, of corruption, of the stilted or the venal.” Except learning from the past with an independent mind is neither a subscription to be corrupted nor was the past so stilted and venal as here regarded.
However, this dubious and ill-considered tradition of poetic simplification is what Chukwudera inherits to devastating results. In a poem about his most intense investment in the uncertainty of requited love, for instance, the association of words we get for insinuation slays with terrible superficiality! For the thorough exhaustion of the spent, empty, and generic, Chukwudera is thoroughly superior to almost everyone writing love and romance poetry in Nigeria today:
I am shooting a rocket of love to you
To spell my affection on your heart,
Like projections on a white screen,
that you may glow with a light
Only love brings, and your smile may beam
With rays only sun brings.
Glow. Light. Love. Smile. Beam. Rays. Sun. All these frail words in this little, short poem. One must wonder when they announced the death of the dictionary.
The second reason responsible for the decline of love poetry is our total disregard to form, now an archaic consideration, to say the least, in constructing rhythmic and tonally varied sounds to exhibit the mood, tone, and atmosphere of a poem.
“The business of rhythm,” R. P. Blackmur wrote in 1951 in “Lord Tennyson’s Scissors: 1912-1950,” “is to move perception into meaning, and so to move meaning into words.” Free verse, writ large, has become the devastation of this movement of perception into meaning and meaning into words through measured sounds.
In the hand of the unambitious, free verse is nothing if not as fateful as any pretentious force or form can be. A form that slays through formlessness? What con! Poets like Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, and in our time, Tadeusz Dąbrowski (if only in particular poems) astound versifying love, not simply because of the grandeur of the subject but because of their finesse in both imaginative rigour and executive tenacity.
Our literary tradition has fatefully, even fatally, shunned form and its constituent interpretive effects—such techniques employed to endless and sometimes quite original effects. Like Edward Lear in his nonsense romantic verses, precisely in “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo,” and “The Owl and the Pussycat”; Christopher Marlowe in his pastoral romance “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”; and Sir Walter Raleigh’s response to the Marlovian romantic proposal “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” These poets took pleasure in the constraints of form and made of it something of aesthetic note.
Neither is free verse a desert for the production of impressive romantic poems, as poems like Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s “Redshift,” Carl Terver’s “For Girl at Rubicon,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us” in recent memory have proven. Although, free verse frees the average poet into the illusion of aesthetic fulfillment, they have made the attendant terrors of formlessness impossible as an excuse for any compositional shortcomings of producing decent love poems in the mode.
III
The problem with the poems in Chukwudera’s chapbook is not wholly because of the demand and breadth of their subject. But because the poet’s tradition, this contemporary tradition, does not really possess the technical education, which is more by choice of individual poets rather than the general linguistic evolution, to match the grandeur and breadth of that subject.
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I mentioned masters like Shakespeare and Lear earlier because even the virtually unsayable or the articulably delicate in poetry, such as love and happiness, can be translated marvelously into the sonnet, among other poetic forms. “Shakespeare is permeated with music,” American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in 1934. “Shakespeare’s evocation of things seen is always vivid and haunting; but the objects are more or less liquefied by music, like things seen under water.”
Like things seen under water is an incredibly precise insight into Shakespeare’s achievement with rhythm because even if semantic beauty or depth is not attained by content, which is rarely the case in Shakespeare, form and its strata kicks in to fill the gap. And by merit of this, the poem becomes at least interesting, if not memorable, to read. Even instances like the beginning of his sonnets that are not easily understandable in content perform their aesthetic relevance first through form, especially rhythm and tone. In Sonnet 95, for example, the hearing and feeling of the intense disappointment of the speaker precedes the understanding of the same:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O! in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose.
Indeed, the simile “like a canker in the fragrant rose” is enviable. But it is foremost here in our mind because of how it sounds even before we figure out its suggestion of the gradual and stealthily destruction of beauty by the shame of sin.
IV
The poem to redeem Chukwudera’s least capacity for romantic versification is “To the woman who asked how I feel when I write her love poems,” which forgivably begins with a rather universal mythos: “The feeling of love is a music only the heart hears.”
Among the strengths of the poem is its attainment of musicality through the repetition of the word “through” in the description of his vision, the process which, as it does the speaker, “assumes the centre of my senses”:
Through your eyes, I see the world afresh,
And I try to describe my vision
Through flowers, through music, through sun,
Through breath, through words,
Through feelings, sound or sight,
It assumes the centre of my senses.
However, from the tenth to the twelfth line which follows, Chukwudera fumbles himself by stacking more on his simile than needed:
& even though in the end my words fall short of your power
The urgency exists like pressure in a balloon
Filled with restless gas looking to explode
Looking to explode (the entire line, in fact) is the kind of specificity that is not only unnecessary, but damaging too. This is because the simile in relation with the connotative weight of the word “urgency” has already suggested the force of the immediacy and intensity of the sentiment. With such oversight, Chukwudera shows less faith in his readers, specifically their ability to interpret without guidance. This is the sort of insouciance unattractive even in poets of average or minor standing.
Alfred Kazin once said that we recognise the great writers who help us to live not merely through their quality imagination and craft, but most importantly through their “genius for compression.” The romantic condition is a universal condition, too familiar and distant at the same time. Now, as the language of poetry evolves through our vocational neglect and fascination with the formally free, the simple and the straightforward, the proceeding poetry—not only the romantic kind, but poetry at large—will seem a molehill in quality to the established mountain of the past. The hope of redeeming our versifying power for romance in this age of sexual and romantic frustrations is for poets to learn their lessons, both formal and linguistic, complete, to echo our romantic par excellence Comrade Whitman.♦
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Ancci (Arasi Kamolideen Oluwapelumi) won the 2023 E. E. SULE/SEVHAGE Prize for African Literary Criticism. His writing has been published in Afapinen, The Shallow Tales Review, and The Republic. He is currently pursuing an arts degree at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His essay on forgiveness and retribution was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Academic Prize in 2020, and he is a Writing Fellow at African Liberty (2023-2024).
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