excerpts from poem “Courtly Love (for Courtney Love)”
VII. BONDAGE
I loved a man as wrong as rain
as right as red paint,
as strict as whips and chains.
He was my nothingness,
my bodhisattva, my less
self-conscious-in-a-dress.
When I did the math,
we came out equal,
modern-rock miracle
queen of the riff-raff.
I was his S, I was his M.
My boy in layered sweaters
had me in velvet fetters
but sang himself a requiem.
VIII. HORSEMAN
You wound me, dear Sir, with your cornflower eyes
and your blonde-stringed hair and your two-toned
20-gauge shotgun. You bring me along
when you travel abroad, but that girl Death
finds you, singing, in Rome, gives you pill
after pill, tells you oblivion is better.
That harpy brings you a horse with fierce
gallop, and you suit up with saddle and spurs.
You ride to a greenhouse where the flowers
aren’t potted yet and bury your fingers in humus.
And where is my bonny lad, and why aren’t I
with him? And where is his steed and dear daughter?
You leave me a note under one flowerpot
to tell me the hell-hag was right.
IX. CURT REPLY
The wind of nirvana greases up my hair.
Freedom from pain, but not follicles, not flakes,
not orange Tang, all the floss & prickly pear
of existence: consciousness in limbo, fake
repentance. We deadpan ghouls have stomachaches.
We pendulum. At the end of every prayer
we sigh Namo Amida Buddha, aware
being reborn is dissolving, not a break.
So, I’m the susurration when the wind dies
down, love, the battery acid to mix with
your Evian water (we always tangled
well), stubborn mote lodged, itchy, in the mind’s eye.
Sing your elegies, make me paladin, myth:
your lost savior is not angel but angle.
X. WHAT SHALL I DO?
Che debb’ io far?
—Petrarch, Poem 268
The worst crime is faking it, he said, and
died. My fatal moon, my gentle combat.
He could medicate with smack, lead a band
in angst, nearly stumble on a high-hat,
and still kiss his daughter good night. His hands
signed sorrow-filled—delicate acrobats—
but it looked like an A-chord. Understand,
he kept secrets, a foreign diplomat.
But I injected him with Narcan to bring
him back before a show. I called the cops
then changed my tune when he unlocked the door.
No one can set me free. O Death, your sting
is nothing. You flatten the mountaintops
in fog, but I croon my solo encore.
INTERLUDE
Oh, Courtney dear, I made you say some things
that aren’t true—at best, they’re conjectures
I culled from online rumors; oh, the slings
and arrows of the rabid blogosphere,
your hand on the syringe only a pipe
dream to help me explain the loss you felt.
I could as well have said you’d reached to wipe
a tear with one young hand and, shaken, knelt
under the grief. But that’s bad writing, Court.
I will disclose I knew your brother (half)—
we shared a class in college on the men
who, deemed Romantic, sighed deeply and wrote
some heady stuff. Your brother was brilliant, deft—
and I sat silent, taking notes—yes, then
as now. I’m slave to books—your mother’s, yours—
the Google search, your blog. Without a thought
I could claim as original. Ignore
the flaws; I cannot theorize without
gouging a hollow in attempted wholes.
At heart, I’m an A-minus girl, adept
at masquerade: see, here’s my headscarf, kohl,
and rouge, but what you don’t see is unkempt
hair and my ragged nails. I’d never brave
the ropeline at a club; you’re in the V-
I-P room. Oh, Courtney, perhaps you should
write your own story. I’ll try to behave:
refrain from practicing hyperbole,
mythologizing you. Repent. Do good.
XIII. SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
You know me as a blond chameleon,
from drug addict to haute couture, but what
the headlines leave out are theology
studies in Ireland (Trinity College),
a novelist grandmother I never met,
my recitation of a poem by Plath
the time I tried to join the Mickey Mouse
Club, and devotion to the Buddha’s way.
But, true: my mother ditched me when she moved
abroad. My father gave me LSD
when I was four; my mind was freed. I’ve fought
(or skirmished with) the bête noire of drugs,
and once I stood near windows, almost thought
to jump—what else do you expect from Love?
XVI. THE ADMIRER SPEAKS
Oh, my glamour-shot queen, your blond tresses
and lingerie-under-sequined-jacket
are just for me, your red swollen lips bless
me with curses, with cast-off cigarette.
I put it with my collection, a set
of guitar picks, fingernails, cassettes:
your band in its early glory, distressed
and drug-laden, but equipped for success.
I wait outside your building for the sight
of your rail-thin beauty, mismatched fabrics
and oversized sunglasses. Would you let
me touch your clavicle in the moonlight
or give me the finger, dominatrix?
Let me breathe in your ear: I’m no threat.
XIX. IF
(IN HER OWN WORDS)
We’d probably live on the Upper West Fucking Side now
and have three fucking kids.
We might even have divorced, like,
both be on our third marriage.
He might be a playwright or have his latest show
at MOMA. I’d have a 16-year-old son
and be the model wife. Given the money
involved here, we could probably have had
a fucking yacht. I don’t fucking know.
If he came back right now,
I’d have to kill him for what he did to us.
I’d fucking kill him.
I’d fuck him,
and then I’d kill him.
Conversation with Phillip B. Williams and Lisa Ampleman
Phillip: Thank you, Lisa, for agreeing to do this interview with us at Vinyl. I want to jump into the selection of sonnets from a longer sequence called “Courtly Love”. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of these poems? When did you come up with this idea to write poems in the voice of Courtney Love and dealing with her life in love? How long have you been working on these poems?
Lisa: You’re welcome! I’ve been a big fan of Vinyl for awhile now; you guys are publishing some amazing work by amazing poets.
The Courtly/Courtney love project started as a joke, during my oral PhD exams. I’d been reading about the medieval courtly love tradition (which morphed into the Petrarchan sonnet tradition that inspired Sir Thomas Wyatt, et al.) and also thinking about the ways in which the paradigms of courtly love (someone deeply in love with a cruel person who doesn’t return the affections; deer; the icy fire paradox) also appear in contemporary culture (think: Bruno Mars’ “Grenade”). I told my examiners that I had to pronounce “courtly love” very carefully when people asked what I was studying because otherwise people of a certain age heard “Courtney Love.” Because we’d been talking about sonnets that afternoon, I joked that I should write a sonnet sequence for Courtney Love. We all laughed; then, I started to think more seriously about the ways in which Courtney’s biography echoed aspects of the courtly love tradition–and challenged it. Because unlike the (usually) male personas of the sonnet sequences I’ve studied, she’s a woman in charge.
That conversation happened in the spring of 2012; I started writing the Courtney poems that summer and returned to them off and on until the fall of 2013, when I wrote the final few (and also decided to see if I could find any “found poems” that might work, like XIX, “If”). I’m not a formalist, so sometimes the drafts took quite awhile; other times, they came easily.
P: We can go so many places from here, but lets talk about form for now. How close to the Petrarchan tradition did you want to be while composing these poems? The choice of sonnet seems to be determined by fate: the love poem, the Love of Courtney’s last name, the edge of desire in these poems that deal with sex, drugs “X: What Shall I Do?”, S&M “VII: Bondage”, and defiance of tradition in so many ways. Did you find that writing the sonnet informed you about your topic in unexpected ways?
L: That’s a great complex question. I knew that I wanted the Petrarchan tradition to inform what I did but that I’d have to move away from it formally. A side note: Petrarch’s long sequence, often called the Rime Sparse or Canzoniere, includes sonnets–but also madrigals, canzones, and other forms. I decided to stick with sonnets because the “sonnet sequence” has become a dominant long form in contemporary poetry that I wanted to try. I think there are a few poems in the sequence (maybe one or two) that have iambic pentameter and the appropriate rhymes (either Petrarchan or Shakepearean schemes), but I wanted to experiment as well, like great contemporary sonnet writers do (Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons was influential, as was Carrie Jerrell’s After the Revival and Rita Dove’s Mother Love). So, some poems have rhyme but no meter, or meter but no rhyme, or even free verse, with just the turns of meaning of the sonnet.
The choices that I made for form definitely determined the content of some of the poems “VII: Bondage,” for example, was one of the first poems in the sequence I wrote, after reading Courtney Love’s Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love. I should admit that she talks about an S&M relationship in that book, but it’s likely an earlier lover, not Kurt. Still, the concept of bondage relates directly to what many courtly love speakers in the past have said: feeling trapped or bound by their love for the cruel lady. There’s definitely some masochism in the way they position themselves. And even though Courtney and Kurt likely didn’t practice S&M, there’s a kind of bondage in grief.
“X: What Shall I Do?” as a title translates a line from Petrarch’s poem 268, one of the first poems in which he discusses Laura’s death. It’s different emotions that I have Courtney speak, but I tried to imagine what she might say–and that one needed to have a Petrarchan rhyme scheme.
I should also say that some of Love’s lyrics with the band Hole fit the courtly paradigms; think of “Doll Parts”: “I love him so much it just turns to hate … Someday, you will ache like I ache.”
P: “Someday you will ache like I ache.” That’s something else, haha. I think about empathy and what it means to feel something the way another person experiences the same feeling. This brings me to my next question about persona. How many of these poems are in the voice of Courtney Love and, too, did you ever find that you were using Love as a mask for yourself? I think the idea of persona always has the speaker hidden within that identity whether in part or as a whole. Were there moments where you felt intrusive of either Courtney Love’s life or your own?
L: Ooh, interesting. I think roughly 13 of the 21 poems are in Courtney’s voice; others feature people talking about or to her, including Kurt, a stalker, and her daughter Frances Bean. And I even speak directly, take down the mask at two points in the sequence (including “Interlude”). I did have to imagine Love’s voice and experiences, and her voice sounds different in different poems. When I’m calling up the tradition, it’s often more formal and uses figurative constructions further away from natural speech. I will confess (which will not surprise people who know me well) that the more risque subject matter (drugs, stripping, rock and roll lifestyle) isn’t things I know first hand. So, I didn’t feel hidden in the subject matter itself–but I could identify with her early pursuit for Kurt, her longing for the husband she had lost (we’ve all lost people we care about), her anger at his actions.
And writing these poems felt VERY intrusive at times; in particular, when I read her mother’s book, Linda Carroll’s Her Mother’s Daughter. Carroll tries to explain how Courtney ended up living alone in the US as a teen while the rest of the family was in Australia and why she might be so troubled. (A brief and likely reductive summary: Carroll thinks it’s genetic and implies that Courtney’s father had challenges with mental illness.) As I read this book and looked at the pictures of her family, I remembered that I’d gone to college with one of Courtney’s half-brothers (and that I sometimes see pictures of her nephew on my Facebook feed). Courtney is so much of a persona, a celebrity and tabloid figure, but thinking about her as a person, as someone with family and challenges just like the rest of us, made the entire project feel a bit icky sometimes. I even debated publishing it but, instead, I decided to go meta and point out those icky feelings in “Interlude.”
P: Yes, let’s talk about “Interlude”. I was split on what I thought about it. It felt necessary to hear the speaker in the sequence, but then it also felt as though there was a loss of faith in the project that made me nervous because the poems are, in my opinion, incredible and very empathetic. So I wonder if you felt a kind of split, too, when writing “Interlude” about how it may affect the very nature of the poems before and after it. Can you share your feelings with us about this very complex poem?
L: Sure. I wrote a failed shorter version of it many months before I was able to do the version in Vinyl. I’d dreamed about that half-brother who I knew, but the poem didn’t go very far (the final line was “the ickiness of this,” coincidentally). The later version–which is the only double sonnet in the sequence and one of the few that relies on rhetoric instead of voice or image–needed to account for the fact that in the previous poem, Courtney Love’s voice says that she injected Narcan to bring Kurt back before a show. This is something she’s repeated in recent interviews, but I think when I first saw that story, it was internet conjecture and I wanted to clarify that. “Interlude” does happen to fall halfway through the sequence, and when I was ordering the poems, it felt like the only way to return to the other poems was to think about her work with Hole. The loss of faith in the project was temporary, but strong enough to make me think hard about why I was doing it–and what the effects of writing about a real person were. Of course, I do go back to mythologizing her in the later poems in the sequence too. Writing things out of sequence helped!
P: Let’s talk a bit about the project in which these poems will appear. Is this a chapbook? Are you working on another book? What are some Lisa Ampleman updates that you can give us about your writing?
L: I do have it as a chapbook manuscript, but it’s also a section in my second-book manuscript, currently titled The Rules of Courtly Love. The poems in that book do similar work as the Courtney poems (questioning the male voices in the courtly tradition as a female writer who also wants to write about love, both in courtly modes and in ways that emphasize mutual relationships). In that larger book, I do write about Petrarch’s Laura, Dante’s wife Gemma Donati, and an Italian Renaissance female Venetian poet, Gaspara Stampa. Stampa is mentioned in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, but she isn’t as well known as the male sonneteers in Italy or England in that time frame. I translate a few of her poems, sometimes faithfully, sometimes more loosely. I also think about the experience of love in the body and illness in a few poems.
That manuscript is basically complete; my next project, in its infancy (10 poems or so), has a loose connecting thread of suffering–how we look away from it at times (think Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”) and other times watch it for entertainment. I’ve noticed lately that my desensitization to violence has disappeared recently; I can’t watch movies in which people are deliberately cruel to each other or torture each other. And yet I don’t want to ignore suffering altogether because particular things are happening in our society that need to be given witness to. I may not be the poet to do that exact witness, not suffering the exact indignities, but I need to be reading those who do and participating in the conversation in the ways that I can.
P: Thank you so much for giving us your time. This has been a great and insightful interview for a great selection of poems.
L: You’re welcome! It’s been fun to talk about this project in some depth and remember its origins. Thanks for giving these sections a home at Vinyl. If people want to see more about my obsessions with courtly love, they can visit lisaampleman.com. Thanks again for this opportunity.