Editorial
BY Elena Gomez
I never want to fall in love? But okay
As though there’s a choice between politics and desire. But really, I’m with Lucy Van, who began her crackling, mind-expanding lecture series on Love Poetry last summer with this question*: what the hell happened to all the love poems? I want to know where they went. It’s naff. Or, it was, perhaps, not cool to write love poems. I thought I was writing about planetary decline and food production but it was in fact this: I wrote a love poem myself (you might know what I’m talking about). But Sappho remains of course. And we still run around, cutting off our little lettuce heads, bowing to Adonis. It looks different these days but you’ll see me in Royal Park sometime and that’ll be the go of it... Recently I woke up and played Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ on repeat several times. I don’t understand why and I probably should mention this to my analyst but anyway, that’s besides the point. Obviously the world has broken our hearts, several times over. I’m not here about the hearts we had break on us, or the hearts we broke along the way. I’m here about the love poem. The problem is that love causes all sorts of disasters, except in the poem where some other exciting metabolism occurs. In the poem love is a revolution, a romance, a dear companion. Queer love rules it should go without saying. And then there’s the cosmos! Whatever else I say, the only true thing is the love poem. (I’m blowing it all out of proportion but the love poem is a grand thing, even when it’s silly, even when it doesn’t totally make sense.)
I invited these poets to respond to my quest for a collection of love poetry and each of them surprised and delighted me and I’m delighted to share their works with you. I hope you are also delighted. Have a click around the expanse with Panda Wong’s ‘expanding love poem’. Find cosmology of two hearts, the temporality, the particle, in Shastra Deo’s ‘Three Years After We Left for Saturn’. Discover the body, its itch, from Anupama Pilbrow’s 'Excerpt from Sometimes I'd Like to Die and Climb Inside You Poem' and tear up dresses, look at the old jam pots with Lucy Van’s ‘Shredded Lettuce’. These are poems that are playful, erotic, connective, friend-filled, open-hearted. They crack open a few dimensions, maybe, but they remind me (and hopefully you) that the love poem lives on. Capitalism wants it, packages it, exchanges it and tricks us into accepting commodity-form inflections of it. But as we hold fast to our desire for a world beyond capitalism and its limits, we hold fast, too, to love, and to love poetry, as a form that persists even when it lays dormant. We access our capacity for a new way of life through love. I sometimes also call it communism.
Note
* My memory has reformulated this question; it might have been phrased differently in the original. In any case, Lucy’s course stuck in me like a lodged seed and got me thinking about it in all sorts of ways. I remain grateful to Lucy for everything she shared in that course, and in conversations we had, in the early conception of this chapbook.Elena Gomez is an experienced freelance book editor, speaker and writer. She has previously worked at Penguin Random House and Text Publishing, facilitated workshops for Queensland Poetry Festival and Express Media, and guest lectured at the University of Technology Sydney and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She is the author of Body of Work (2018) and Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020).