This episode was originally released on February 6, 2023.

Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Around the holiday season, I received a delightful email from a former student. Gina wrote after nearly a decade to inquire about a poem she partially remembered that we covered in class and asked for its title. But she also used the occasion to announce that she met her husband in my poetry workshop; they’ve been married two years now. Now this amped up my holiday bliss.

I’ve long maintained that poetry classes are a kind of dating service, where, as an added bonus to improving your craft, one is likely to encounter a potential life partner and friend, someone intelligent, humane, and sensitive, who will likely, for example, write a poem for you on Valentine’s Day rather than purchase a generic card. Someone who will quote lines of poetry at dinner parties and impress your family and friends. Who wouldn’t want that brilliance in their daily life? Of course, since I’ve started teaching, technology has brought us new ways to help us find that potential beloved.

While the algorithms of dating apps might help to identify a potential mate or partner, after finding that special someone, we are left to our own devices when faced with the task of building a lasting union. No marriage comes with a convenient app, which would be boring anyway. I personally had to fail, then fail better in order to become the partner I am today. Hopefully, with each relationship, we get closer to understanding ourselves, our particular brand of neuroses and desires. Then we can find the kind of person who can, in the parlance of the streets, be our ride or die.

What is true of all relationships is that they change us; ideally for the better. We breathe differently, become more considerate, less self-centered, more thoughtful. In the best-case scenario, of course. Marriages and relationships are made difficult by the fact that, as individuals, we are ever-evolving and the bond we build with our partner, ideally, should sustain us through all manner of changes.

Today’s poem understands to the core that love requires, even anticipates failure. But maybe, even too, that a commitment to finding happiness and joy with someone requires failing and doing it again.

Short Essay on Love
by Sarah Manguso

I was in the alley and then I was in the restaurant.
Something had happened and I didn’t know what it was.
All I knew was I was changed.
The train goes into the tunnel and comes out the other side;
the trembling child emerges from behind the curtain.
Unchain my heart, thou monstrous god.

This is a picture of love: two gondolas in the dark.
This is also a picture of love: a hill covered with snow
and in the distance just within view…a snowman.

Once I learned how to read the lines on the side of my hand,
I was never the same.
A love story: I am cold and happy
and then sleep on the divan and wake up sad.
In the morning I use the dusty toothbrush
that doesn’t belong to anyone. Love?
Practice riding on a skateboard in an empty street at night.

Go to a high school football game.
Everybody there knows what love is.
Another love story:
I think there is a knife in my head somewhere.
Another: There was only one picture of me, and I took it.
Remember the names of towns.
Give birth to something that looks like you.

“A Short Essay on Love” by Sarah Manguso from THE CAPTAIN LANDS IN PARADISE, © 2002 Sarah Manguso. Used by permission of Alice James Books.