Arguably, modern poetry in the West begins with lyric, and lyric poetry begins with love. But it is hard to say whether love or poetry is what love poetry is really about. Think of Petrarch and his beloved, Laura. She is remote, remembered, and definitely someone else’s wife, a figure to write about, not reach out and touch. Her name rhymes with “aura,” and her lover, inspired by her, becomes the poet laureate. Which might be what he had in mind to begin with.
Anthony Walton is a love poet, at least in the poems sampled here. He styles himself not as Petrarch but as Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist whose deployment of multiple authorial identities made him “several / of the greatest poets who have ever lived.” “If I Were Fernando Pessoa” is a delirious fantasia in which love makes Walton not merely a poet but many poets at once. The beloved? Well, we don’t get much sense of her except as a ruse for the poet to release “the chatter of my other selves.” She is an occasion for him to daydream about the romantic cities (“Buenos / Aires, Barcelona, Marseille, Milan, Mexico City”) where “we would go dancing.” There is a funny grammatical ambiguity in that phrase. Does the “we” who would go dancing refer to the lover and beloved, or to the poet’s many selves? Maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters is the singing and dancing that the “you,” whether imagined, real, or some combination of the two, makes possible.
“1968” is another kind of love poem entirely. The childhood memories Walton recalls here are in black and white because it was his family’s flickering Philco TV that imprinted on his consciousness the murders of JFK and Dr. King, the Tet offensive, Bobby Kennedy’s killing, and the police brutality in Grant Park at the Democratic National Convention. Pressing back against those realities, skipping rocks on the Fox River west of Chicago, the boy sang Motown love songs to himself that were at once “a dirge” for the public world around him and “a little prayer” for a lover, his longed-for “you,” who would join him in his solitude someday.
Perhaps love poetry is always misaligned in time, written in a space somewhere between memory and hope. There is a trivial version of this condition, which the founders of Facebook cleverly played on when they created a social media platform named for the photo directories that college students once used to scope out the more and less attractive of their classmates. Walton has no use for social media’s weak version of the virtual. Like that boy skipping rocks and singing, he prefers “to be alone” and dream of a “space-time” connection with a higher power—for instance, with the unnamed Aphrodite who once so ravished him with her glance that all he could do was continue walking along the shore of Lake Michigan into a future that would now be permanently haunted by “what if—.”
By dwelling in the subjunctive, with what might have been and what yet might be, love poetry is in flight from grief and mourning. Walton faces up to these themes in “Arkhê Kakôn,” which might be translated as “the origin of our ills.” The poem deals with all manner of mortal loss. Yet even here, Walton approaches his subject as a lover who knows there is nothing to do but let those we love “go wherever / it is they must go, and wait.”
