PopPoetry: The Honeymoon Edition

I'm getting married; you're getting some love and wedding-themed poetry & pop culture treats!

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

I’m marrying my partner of four years this weekend! The future Mr. PopPoetry is my biggest fan and supports my writing unconditionally. And though he doesn’t consider himself to be a writer, he has taken it upon himself to get into poetry and the poetry world for my sake. Writing has taken me away from our family for conferences, taken up my time at night and on weekends, and will direct the course of my entire year when my book is published in February. Who knows where it will take me after that? Through it all, he cheers me on and tells me go, do, take the afternoon, take the day, finish the article, keep working on the poem. Keep writing.

And that, dear readers, is one of several hundred reasons I’m marrying him.

An engagement photo featuring Yours Truly and The Future Mr. PopPoetry, lensed by Chantal Roeske (July 2023).

This year has been incredibly busy, and in some ways, this feels like the apex. I’m proud that I’ve kept PopPoetry going weekly for several years now, even as I had my first child, planned my wedding, traveled to Europe for work, and had my first book accepted for publication.

Y’all have been very generous with me on this journey: I haven’t been able to get out Postscripts with the frequency that I’d like, and there are still many more special projects I plan to move forward with once I have a bit more time. Above all, I keep saying that this newsletter is written by a real human with a real life that has to take precedence, and you’ve heard me and supported that reality time and again. Thank you!

All this to say that I’ve got some bits and bobs of wedding-themed posts and love poetry to check out while I take a brief hiatus before my wedding and honeymoon. I’ll be back again with a new post on October 11!

Love Songs

I’ve spent time reading love poems while drafting our ceremony text and just generally preparing for our wedding, and I came across this fascinating poem by Edil Hassan: “Under the Tuscan Sun (2003): A Romance I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶r̶u̶p̶t̶e̶d̶”.

Hassan takes a “classic” (how is it 20 years old already?!) romcom starring Diane Lane, reconsiders it through the lens of race and imperialism, and ends up creating an erasure poem that’s erotic while refusing to pull punches. The poem is rooted in both knowledge of lived history and a profound desire to be, as the poet says, “ahistoric.” Here’s an excerpt:

I am a novelist, I imagine my past lives  
as the generations that once lived in this house  
and each one of them is white.  
Citizenship goes unsaid; the visa process unsexy,  
taxing, and therefore not worthy  
of a plot line—unlike the man who will teach me  
that after a lengthy divorce I can still orgasm.  
He takes me to Rome—O Roma! I already miss  
the Tuscan fields, where the olive trees are plucked  
by Black hands that were plucked from the Mediterranean,  
and from the road, don’t look like hands  
at all, but like row after fragrant row  
of gnarled branches. Love becomes me in this new city.  
I am always radiant. My body, after all, a vessel  
of history, but I dress it in white, cinched 
at the waist, and no one says a thing. 

Hassan is the author of Dugsi Girl (Akashic Press, 2021). She is the senior poetry fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Next, these aren’t all poems, but I’m very much digging this romantic compendium of wedding readings derived from pop culture. (Don’t worry, I will not be telling my fiancé that he’s my Sun and Stars.)

The first entry is a poem I wrote about from Sex and the City (more about that below). Bookmark the listicle for later!

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Todd Dillard’s amazing “Love Poem with Pop Culture References Because Love is Ephemeral and Linked Inextricably to Its Time” from The Indianapolis Review has been on mind mind lately, too. Dillard refuses to follow the advice that pop culture references “date” a work and comments explicitly on this idea in the poem’s title. The poem itself makes use of memes, internet “moments,” and even Fleetwood Mac to makes its argument about the “you.”

I can’t stop thinking about the bat.

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Old Married Folks

Lastly, here are some posts from the archive you might want to revisit—or check out for the first time—on the theme of weddings and marriage: Carrie Bradshaw’s epithalamium and Four Weddings and a Funeral’s spotlight on W. H. Auden:

Happy reading, and I’ll see you soon!

—CC