Love Letters to Poetry | The Poetry of Love
Most of my recent verse novels are young adult love stories. They are also STEM books. Your Heart, My Sky, Wings in the Wild, and Wild Dreamers (scheduled for 2024 publication by Atheneum) are both romantic and scientific. I don’t know if anyone else is writing YA verse novels that combine biology, climate action, and romance, but I hope young readers can find something to love in this unusual hybrid form.
In Catching the Light, Joy Harjo’s prose book about why she writes, she states that “every poem is a kind of love poem.” I find that to be the case for me. Every poem is a love poem because I love poetry. Even a poem about rage can be filled with the passion of loving musical, rhythmic, melodious words.
I’m thinking about love poems, realizing that the ones most people revere are outdated. Many were written by men who lived in pre-feminist centuries, and did not understand women, equality, or egalitarian love. Others, like the verses of Pablo Neruda, became obsolete as soon as I read his biography and realized that he was a misogynistic predator whose love poems now seem hypocritical. For that reason, I would like to offer a few of my favorite poetry books for teachers to introduce women’s romantic verses to high school students without resorting to archaic stereotypes.
One of the most powerful romantic young adult verse novels is A Time to Dance, by Padma Venkatraman. In this book, the main character is an injured dancer who doesn’t even meet her love interest until halfway through the story. That is because she needs to learn to love herself before she can fall in love with someone else.
Dizzy in Your Eyes, by Pat Mora, is a collection of poems about love that range from humorous to serious, passionate to undecided, and even confused. It’s perfect for teenage readers, and some of the poems are suitable for younger children, because there are poems about family love, and love for pets.
A more mature collection is Words Like Love, by Tanaya Winder. Topics include all the mysteries that teens wonder about, as well as poems of environmental devastation, language loss, and other social justice issues. How are these love poems? Love is not just romantic and sexual, it is also about relationships between societies, and between strangers, relatives, and friends within each community.
If you have favorite love poems, romantic verse novels, and collections of poems about love, please let me know. I’m always looking for challenging books, and new perspectives.
