The February 2007 issue of Poetry made it to my desk via interoffice drift, and it contains several short takes on love poems by various luminaries. Garrison Keillor selects a Danish love song, Alfred Molina (yes, that Alfred Molina) gives a high-school-seducer’s guide to Neruda, and Clive James upends the assignment with his take on Paul Celan’s bottomless “Todesfuge” (a staggering poem but not for the faint of heart).
The line that got me, though, was from Chicago’s Stuart Dybek: “One thing I knew instinctively–perhaps still worth keeping in mind–was that writing a love poem to someone spared the poet from dull questions such as: does poetry have an audience?”