Using Jealousy and Anger to Write Better Love Poems

Lesson 5 | An Affair to Remember: Leveraging our emotions to make great poetry from bad feelings.

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

This is class 5 of 8 from Shannan Mann’s Forever Workshop “Hot and Heavy: Writing Love & Sex Poems that will Actually Get Published and Have Readers Begging for More”

One misconception I’ve seen is that people think a good love poem means there’s going to be a lot of love in said good love poem. Seems like a fair…conception, right? Nothing too amiss about it. But I have read poems that I would, without a second thought, classify as love poems that are in fact full of rage, jealousy, chaos, anger in all its manifestation, cursing, hating, and cruelty. Maybe I’m just super fucked up but many times it is in these poems that I see this hot burning core of lava-like love, bubbling and spitting and hissing, curdled and soured perhaps, but still blazing, transformed, embittered and yet bright, sharp, stinging – fucking real. 

There are certain pitfalls however that we ought to avoid when plunging our poetry in the deep end of the emotion pool. Vivid imagery and metaphor can help us locate these emotions (generally unruly and, if the poet is writing personally, then perhaps these are also fresh wounds). However, there is tendency for poets to become over dependent on images and comparisons. Pain often feels larger than us and it is natural to want to display it as such. 

One way to curb this is to think of yourself as the poet-peacock. Yea, I said that right. A peacock does his beautiful feathers-all-fanned-out dance at critical moments (specifically, when they think a peahen is DTF). They’re not just prancing around all of the time like that. But they have the potential to, and they’re ready to pull off the full shebang when it’s time. So! Be the poet-peacock. Have your pretty feathers ready to go, but keep them hidden until it’ll truly have an impact. 

How do we know when that is? I have found that first understanding what emotions can do to us is helpful (so we know when and how to manipulate the reader…er…I mean guide the reader!)

Understanding Emotional Valence for Love/Sex in Poetry