As a topic of discourse, love has the singular property that whoever writes about it must also be situated in some way relative to it: as someone who is either happily or unhappily in or out of love, either yearning for new love or relieved, at last, that the whole business appears to be over. A writer on love who had never known love would still be subject to this rule, which would place his entire discourse on the outside of love - face pressed against the window-pane. For the most part when we read and write about love we do so as lovers, albeit possibly spurned or disappointed lovers, lovers of lost loves or lovers-in-waiting. The topic absorbs and concerns us: a good book about love will be one that speaks to our condition, whatever it may be.
We understand also that the writer is speaking from his own condition, that he is situated somewhere inside or outside of love’s kingdom - perhaps, like us, dividing his time between several distinct regions, circulating between situations from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence. Writing about love need not be explicitly confessional (or confessionally explicit), but it is nonetheless inevitably scanned by the confessional apparatus, a combined praxis and hermeneutic of self-disclosure.
It’s no good trying to wriggle out of the clutches of this apparatus: drawing attention to it won’t make it go away. Still, I’ve always wanted to be a bit evasive about love, to say as little as possible about my own situation, less out of shyness than out of a deep mistrust of the language we use to talk about such things. Love has always seemed to me to demand a language subtracted from reportage, irreducible to gossip (“who goes with who, / and what did they do”). But this language can only be that of the poem, the work of art; and in demanding that the language of love be that of the poem I’m aware that I’m at risk of committing myself to a kind of willed obscurity, suturing together two quite distinct procedures.
When it comes down to it, love doesn’t ask much of language: the things it has to say are simple, quite simple affirmations or negations. The complexity of language in the vicinity of love is an obstacle for it to overcome; or, better, a mixture for it to purify. At most, the poem can arrange the matter of language for love’s approval, or for a lover’s satisfaction. It cannot hope, and should not attempt, to capture the truth about love: to perform love’s work, or to fashion love’s truth as its own.
One possible task of the poem with respect to love is to concentrate an affirmation, to localise the point where love’s “yes” passes through language. Another is to observe love’s passing, to gather the traces it has left in its wake. In both of these tasks it acts at a distance, following its own procedure; the pathos that attends this distance is intrinsic to poetry, and has nothing - properly speaking - to do with love itself.
In writing about love, at a distance from love, I find myself both inside and outside of my proper situation with respect to love: both speaking from my condition and inscribing, folding in, something unconditioned by that condition, something from outside. This writing is thus an experimental procedure that passes through the toils of the confessional: an attempt to think, improperly, in my own place.