by Athena Kildegaard

I first loved my husband in the fall of 1979, and I’ve been loving him again and again ever since. All that time I’ve written poetry, but until January first this year I’d written only a handful of love poems.

That curious pair of facts began to needle me in early December last year. Driving from here to there I thought about a love poem by Dorianne Laux I’d read that morning, how true and necessary it was and how unwrought it seemed. That thinking led me to wonder why I’d written so few love poems over the years. I realized that I was just plain afraid of writing them.

It’s easy to go wrong writing about love: our culture is awash in trite, corny, simpleminded expressions of love. It seemed to me, on that December day, that a poet needed some kind of protective gear—Hazmat suit or mosquito netting or night-vision goggles, perhaps even all three—to write love poems free of the blight of kitsch. But what could the poetic protective gear be other than an awareness of those clichés? Surely if you know them you can avoid them.

But that seemed too easy. A few days later I was contemplating the topic again. Some of the famous love poems capture an epic sort of love—think Petrarch and Laura—or a mysterious love—Shakespeare’s dark sonnets. The love I feel for my husband doesn’t fit those categories. It’s the steady, quietly delightful, long-lived love of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Touch Me,” one of my favorites. I thought of Pablo Neruda’s poems, their physical passion, their muscular, planetary quality, and I tried to name women who have written poems like his. It felt a little like a challenge, that idea.

And then I had two thoughts: first, that the sensation of love surges up every day, often many times in a day. There’s something mundane about the love of many years of marriage, more like breathing than like weeping. It’s not something sudden and momentous, a tsunami, but rather tidal and persistent. The second thought was that what I needed to do to overcome my fear of writing love poems was simply to write love poems. My mother was afraid of swimming, so she went swimming (with a teacher) and she overcame her fear.

And so was born the craziest New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made: to write a love poem every day this year.

There’s precedent for this sort of thing. William Stafford famously wrote a poem every day. An outgrowth of National Poetry Month is NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month, in which participants “attempt” to write a poem a day for the month of April. (“Attempt” is the website’s word, not mine, by the way, a word that doesn’t inspire confidence.) There is Project 365 for photographers. And then there’s the Seattle guy who swam in Lake Washington every day for a year (really quick swims in January). And our own Minnesotan, John Caddy, has been sharing beautiful poems about the natural world every day for over a decade.

There are many challenges to this sort of project, the most obvious being how to keep going. But the truth is that within weeks of starting I felt a little like George Mallory when he was asked why he climbed Mount Everest: Because it’s there. Now that I’ve set myself this challenge I’m doing it because it’s there to do.

But there’s something else. Stafford remarked that for every ten poems he wrote, probably one was a keeper. That means writing for a week or more before something good surfaces. That’s a lot of failure. But there’s a juicy frisson that comes with the risk of failure and there’s a humility in it too. I may experience love every day, but writing about that experience is humbling, the sheer pressure of creation and the fact of language’s faults. So I stand on a granite edge every day, the heights and the depths only too obvious, my small self balanced there between.

Stafford wrote that poets must have two sorts of readiness. One is the willingness to fail. The other readiness is receptivity. “It is like fishing,” he wrote. “But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble—and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me.” One of the thrills of writing a poem every day is that I can’t afford to say no to anything. Otherwise I run the risk of shutting things down.

In a commencement address a few years ago Stephen Colbert, the comic, talked about how an improv actor must say “yes-and” to the other actor—that is, no matter what the other actor gives you, you respond by saying yes and by adding something to it. “You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. . . .  And because, by following each other’s lead, neither of you are really in control. . . . What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience.”

Saying yes means turning off Jiminy the Verse Editor and going with whatever inspiration comes along, maybe even feeding the muse bread crumbs or a flute of champagne. Sometimes to move things along I’ll open a book or magazine and look for something to say yes to. In the “Findings” feature of Harper’s magazine I learned that depressed people feel gray, whereas nondepressed people feel yellow. So that day’s poem began, “When I’m with you, yellow / becomes green and clouds / skedaddle.” That was surprising, skedaddle, a word I love but that I’ve never used in a poem. Sometimes I’ve borrowed a line from someone, Marcus Aurelius or Hafiz or Elizabeth Bishop. Flower lore from The Meaning of Flowers has been a nifty source of inspiration. On Valentine’s Day I learned that St. Valentine was beheaded, so my poem began with that fact, meandered a little, and ended with this line: “my head hurts I’m so crazy for you.” Perhaps love can make saints of all of us! One poem is the footnotes to an imaginary scholarly article about love. Another begins “Let’s say a didgeridoo is a given,” and that’s because I’d heard someone playing a didge that day—writing about it seemed inescapable. Many poems start with an image from the day—that is, if I’m writing the day’s love poem in the evening, which I often do. I’ve been surprised by many things, perhaps most of all that this project does in fact seem possible. Love is a big topic, really, so of course the world gives up all sorts of things to say yes to.

At first I sent the day’s poem to my sweetheart and he liked that, so I started sending the poems to my two children and then to my sister and my dad. Now I send the poems out to a small group of family and friends. I’ve made a pact with myself not to think about the recipients, not to edit or say no to anything just because this person or that person will be reading it. I haven’t written anything raunchy or overly personal, but I’ve been brave, or at least as brave as I can. My children, ages 17 and 20, haven’t minded the few sexually overt poems, and all the recipients—as far as I can tell—have found a poem they’ve loved. Some have sent back a poem, so there’s a little “yes-and” coming to me in return.

And, as one recipient wrote me, we all need a little more love in the world.

Athena Kildegaard lives in Morris, Minnesota, where she’s a lecturer at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her books are Rare Momentum, a series of Fibonaccis, published by Red Dragonfly Press, and Bodies of Light, forthcoming soon from the same press. She would be happy to include you among the recipients of her love poems. Just write her at the_ahs@hometownsolutions.net.