Just as Humpty Dumpty celebrated un-birthdays, some of us at the University of Michigan on Monday celebrated Un-Valentine’s Day. Our cupcakes were topped with hearts, yes; but they were also topped with swords impaling those hearts. Four faculty members read poems in the spirit of the holiday, while several dozen undergrads ate and drank and reflected (I’m guessing) on love’s caprices and catastrophes.
I started the reading with Geoffrey Brock’s “And Day Brought Back My Night,” a mind-bendingly good sonnet that you can read here and watch here. I followed Brock’s wry bit of heartbreak with three poems from Catherine Wing’s Gin & Bleach, including the wallop-filled “The Darker Sooner.” (Sample wallop: “The day was duller, duller / was disaster.”) I wrapped up my portion of the reading with a couple of short poems from Wendy Cope’s Serious Concerns: “I Worry” and “Two Cures for Love.” Cope may be the patron saint of Un-Valentine’s Day. Writing to an ex-love in “I Worry,” she concludes: “They say that men suffer, / As badly, as long. / I worry, I worry, / In case they are wrong.”
Linda Gregerson was up next, with a handful of darts from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Among the sharpest: “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” (Sonnet XLI). In the poem, Millay describes a tryst that seems, well, pleasant enough; then she pivots:
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Ouch! No Cupid’s arrow, that. A real dart, and one that smarts.
Gregerson ended her reading with Rosalind’s speech on love from As You Like It. (Rosalind acknowledges that “men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”) Then John Whittier-Ferguson recited, from memory, five poems by W. B. Yeats, including “No Second Troy” and “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” Whittier-Ferguson’s nomination (which I hereby second) for lines unlikely to appear on a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card: “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”
The afternoon’s final reader, Keith Taylor, offered several poems by Philip Larkin (another potential patron saint) and one by Robert Lowell. The Lowell poem, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” is written from the wife’s point of view; it imagines the husband “whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.”
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.
(Those last two lines give Yeats’s lines some stiff, or not so stiff, competition.)
Writing this recap has made me consider other poems we might’ve chosen: Sir Walter Ralegh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “love note / I: surely,” nearly anything by Dorothy Parker. What are your favorite Un-Valentine’s Day poems? To make a proper list, we’ll need 364 entries.