How to Write a Love Jones
‘Romance is about the possibility of the thing…just like how poetry is the possibility of language’
What separates a love poem from a love jones? It has been said that all in love is fair but that doesn’t make it easy to write about. In May, we hosted ‘How to Write a Love Jones’, an immersive poetry workshop class exploring love poems, craft, the literary movement of Romanticism and more.This was the perfect chance for new writers looking to deepen their craft, virtually and in-person. Here’s a round up of the seminar material and discussion points.Poems paint a person, event or feeling on small canvases. When initially presented with a poem, seeing the space it takes up on a page one cannot help but wonder if the promise of couplet shapes contain less love than in the boulder-like boldness of epics. When writers try to contain a lover in a poem and try to give them a sense of presence that allows them dimensionality, they sometimes fail because of a poem’s limited canvas. A poem can capture an internalised moment in lyric and sometimes that is all that is needed to capture the feeling of love, but the risk of writing a poem describing a lover is objectification. A Jones is all about objectification. Jonesing as a phrase grew in popularity in the 1970s to talk about addiction, craving, need, desire, urge an insatiable fixation.
Is jonesing often misplaced for love?
bell hooks explores how love is misunderstood and wrote the book All About Love to break through the fear of love in modern romance, ‘I write to bear witness both to the danger in this movement and to call for a return to love.’
In the book she explains that most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis." and most of us "confuse cathecting with loving."
Cathexis, jonseing and objectifying lovers is all so easy to do. A feeling not cathected with energy, or loaded with a certain quantity of affect does not become fixed in memory, how much easier is it for the writer to remember yearning and investing feelings into a person than it is to remember reciprocity? A love jones interplays with the workings of attention, desire, pain and regression. A love jones can create beautiful and intense variations of traditional love poems, where love is balanced, because a jones implies imbalance, implies a concentrated psychic impulsivity beating below the surface of the page or in the cadence of a spoken piece.
Jonesing is also clear by how when you want or miss someone badly, the world contracts. Everything that isn’t the loved one irritates you with its irrelevance. The plot arc of your life coils into a vicious loop. Jones writing can employ devices like structure, form, language, metrical pattern so lets look at some examples.
Perhaps the traditional Romantic era poetry works that we’ve ascribed under the umbrella of love poems could actually be better thought of as love jones. One of the greatest failure of romantic era poetry is that when you look at the great sequences of English love poetry, you find that they overwhelmingly portray wanting or missing, not shared experience. In other words, they thrive on isolation and in the deluge of all those emotions the beloved—the distant or departed one—a tinge of unreality. Such as ‘I Cry Your Mercy-Pity-Love!-Aye, Love!’ by Romantic era poet John Keats
I cry your mercy—pity—love!—aye, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
David Foster Wallace’s famous claim that “every love story is a ghost story” seems to me to be quite true for this Keat’s poem which is a sonnet. Sonnets have been seen as anti-feminist as they require a silent figure or objectified women to often be their subject, as we also see in Brother to the Night from the 1997 film Love Jones.
Many critics have thought most lyrical blues poetry and sonnets alike have relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought. Blues poems, as do sonnets, address figures or lovers who can’t always speak back to how they’re being objectified but when you look at the origin of the blues poem form this makes a lot more sense.
Blues performance poetry originated from ancient griot oral tradition, and blues music can be dated to the post–US Civil War era (1861–65) and is derived from the spirituals and field songs of Black sharecroppers and slaves of the rural south, particularly the Mississippi Delta. The first published blues composition is accredited to W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” in 1912. The blues were used to share history and news or to call upon a fellow black person along the way, to share and repeat a sorrow, a yearning or a great love sometimes coded and often times repeated in case the wind carried the meaning of what you were trying to say.
The blues often follows a form, in which a statement is made in the first line, a variation is given in the second line, and an ironic alternative is declared in the third line. While the lyrics of the blues are rarely in a structured meter like the ballad stanza, the music often has a driving beat that is not unlike the heartbeat rhythm of the iamb: bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum, bum Bum.
Both the blues and other poetic forms a container of feelings that can help you express the inexpressible. The limits, the shapes, allow a freedom to say in a way that works, that provides some release. This particular container, blues, is over 100 years old and has been evoked by a world of poets and singers and they can use it too.
Blues poems are often about the balance, push and pull of the speaker’s presence and the intended listener’s absence. The labour blues poets, such as Darius Lovehall in ‘Brother to the Night’ takes in describing their love for another often leads them to profound evasion, imbalance, a jones.
A Blues For Nina The Love Jones poem ‘Brother to the Night’ is a blues and a performance poem that is an egotistically sublime attempt a Personism, which is when “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”. He attempts and fails at bringing Nina in as closer as he sensually describes her, his blues performance poem on a stage results in a close intermediary to a love poem, without having any of the closeness of love itself. Although we as an audience know who Nina is, Darius’ poem folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, almost into a blind point. The best example of this is when he likens Nina, this object of desire he does not really know, as a spinning pulsar rather than a bright, fixed star - the typical romantic object.
Although his rhetoric is at first about who he is, the spoken performance nature of the poem - his voice- is the closest thing we have to have an unfiltered truth of who he really is, as he poem is short on autobiographical specifics and the guise of ‘brother to the night’ opens a broad space for reader projection because he is self-estranged; the poem is an escape for his personality to become bigger just as romance and sex becomes an escape from the reality that they just met each other at a bar two minutes ago.
Recognising a ‘Brother to the Night’ and ‘I Cry Your Mercy-Pity-Love!-Aye, Love!’ as a jones poems than a love poems makes for a much more enjoyable reading, so how do we go about writing our own?
Jones poems often mean sharing something deeply personal and unique to the poem’s writer. Only you as a writer can have loved that other person, or place, or thing, in that way. We can use personal experiences of love, yearning and cathexis to check that the metaphors, similes and poetic devices we use are within the world of the poem.
Love is used thematically in poetry as an, emotive, metaphorical or narrative device. Even simply using the word love in a poem can represent re-entry into a new tone or change the pace of a poem like other common metaphorical themes: morality, mortality, nostalgia, trauma, philosophy, mysticism, absurdity ect...
A poem or stanza is like a small argument for something or against. With an ‘intro-discussion-conclusion’ structure in mind your poem should hope to compel the reader to your argument. (Arguments examples: you’re the best person I’ve ever known; our love is one of a kind; our love will last forever or past death and our own mortalities; the words I have to describe our love are inadequate; fate or love knew we would be together before we did; our love is simple and goes beyond ‘beauty’ or ‘glamour’ and thrives in domestic ordinary pleasures ect...)
How do you compel your ‘argument’?
● Setting, specificity of detail, rhythm, metre, form and rhyme
● Test the imagery/extended metaphors. How are you observing this facet of their personality? Or where from? Or how long ago? Is your observation reliable, and can the reader tell?
● Elevate an object, even cliched ones, with imagination so that the end of a line or stanza is more of an emotive experience than a predictable ending
● How much or little the speaker says about the supposed other.
4. In a poem one word can contain multiple contexts and, especially emotionally, love conjures a complex mix of fear and joy. Sometimes it’s hard to bring the reader into that space, in times like this it's great to go to your word bank of multivalent words or the Emotion Thesaurus!
5. Sometimes it is better to convey the emotion of the speaker or subject though as little words as possible in lyric vs prose. Repeating adjectives can hold back the flow. One image or metaphor, the perfectly place introduction of one detail can be enough. Over-indulging in imagery to describe an emotion, event or object can confuse the sense of place for a reader.
6. Also consider your metaphor or image: How did it get there? Why did it get there? Why are no questions asked about the image in the moment? How extended is that metaphor throughout the poem? The simple idea of a brilliant or unexpected image metaphor, however, can be so striking, both visually and verbally, that some of these questions are effectively rendered dull and redundant.
7. The ending of any poem could be a place for surprise and twist, through a shift or pivot in tone from serious to humorous or to imagistic or from rhetoric questions to an answer, after starting with present memories end the poem in the past. Remember that no surprise for the writer often means no surprise for the reader.
