Local Poets on Love

By Brian McDermott, 2-14-07

On this Valentine’s Day, contemporary love poetry is in the wilderness. This is strange. After all, we are awash in the runty stepchildren of love poems– the greeting cards, the pop-music lyrics, the bathroom walls. Love poems are ubiquitous in history: from 12th century Persia, where Rumi wrote about how “the lover’s cause is separate from all other causes,” to Elizabethan England, where Shakespeare wrote voluminously on love. A few generations ago, your grandparents probably had to memorize love poems at school from the likes of Yeats and Dickenson.

Today there are 2,105 books more popular on Amazon than the book the Poetry Foundation lists as the current poetry bestseller, Mary Oliver’s “Thirst.” Most people say, casually speaking, that they like poetry. Few of them read contemporary work.

But isn’t there something romantic about that? So what if no one’s heard of brilliant love poems like “To the Harbormaster” by Frank O’Hara, “For the Stranger” by Carolyn Forche, or “Braiding” by Li-Young Lee? So what if today’s love poetry wears a corset of obscurity to most people? The writing is no less vivid and immediate because of it. And any indie rocker can tell you that there are few feelings as satisfying as knowing about great art when the oblivious masses do not.

You can find powerful contemporary poetry being written in Montana. A strong poetry community, in fact, homesteads here in Missoula. And despite a near-consensus fear of sentimentality, the Missoula poets represented write about love at least sometimes. For Valentine’s Day, here are five local poets talking about and reading a love poem that they wrote.






Ashley Gorham reads "Ghazal."

A short audio interview with Ashley Gorham.






Nabil Kashyap reads "Of Late."

A short audio interview with Nabil Kashyap.






Molly McDonald reads "Complaint."






Greg Pape reads "The Morning Horse, Canyon de Chelly."

A short audio interview with Greg Pape.






Karen Volkman reads an untitled poem.

A short audio interview with Karen Volkman.

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