Love Igniting

Poet Garren Small so thankfully shared some pieces relating, in his ways, to love and desire. Walking into the lecture, I was expecting the forced, overly-flowery poetry about sappy love. The weak, fleeting romances that everyone swears will last forever. Infatuation, I guess. Or, worse, "heart-wrenching" poems about love lost, the guy who couldn't get over it, the girl who hated the boy who broke her heart--that sort of thing.

I was, as it is, pleasantly surprised that these poems did not end up like this. They were about love, yes, but if you were really looked. Throughout class, we've looked at love as though we were the ones experiencing it. Or, at least, in abstract terms. Small offered us a different way of looking at things. By observing others in the context of their relationship. The father and daughter in the subway. The couple sharing a salad with plastic forks. If it's not our own relationships, if it's not in our face, we're judgmental. This came through in Small's work, perhaps on purpose. But it's good. Because it's real and raw and something happens all the time. We need to see relationships outside of just ourselves because while learning from experience is great, learning through observation is also necessary. That could tell us that we either want something or not, without having to go through it ourselves.