Prompt #9: Love Poems (part 2)

Writing about ____, as if you were writing a love poem

Happy last week of National Poetry month! 

Our last C&R prompt about love poems was about writing into love. 

My question this week is about love poems that aren’t about romantic love. What if you took the least romantic or lovable thing ever and wrote about it as if you were writing a love poem? I’m curious if the energy of a love poem can somehow transmit and inform its own content. Like, if you inventoried your trashcan, but you wrote about it thinking you were writing a love poem, what would that give you? 

Sharon Olds’s “Poem for the Breasts,” “Ode to the Hymen,” and “Connoisseuse of Slugs” achieve this kind of movement: take an explicit subject not often examined in a posture of awe or love, and let the poem do it. 

So, this week: write a love poem about something not obviously “lovely.” Maybe it’ll be an ode to your trashcan, or a poem about your fraught relationship to (your mother) hot cheetos. Let’s see what happens.

Slugs,

Catherine