Love Three: A Study of a Poem By George Herbert

"Aaron Kunin is based in Los Angeles, California. When I was curating at The Poetry Project, his was one of the guest readings I was most surprised and delighted by. You never know what you’re going to get when someone goes to read their own work, but his was one of the most incredible performances of poetry I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t ostentatious, or a performance that looked like acting. It was a performance that tried to embody the physical experience of taking works from inside you and putting them outside you, using very powerful and exaggerated intakes of breath, long pauses, real physical stillness. It was an incredible reading, and he’s a terrific writer. This book came to me in the mail from Aaron himself. When I opened it today to talk to you about it, I realized he’d written me a little note. I mention that because this is really how poetry circulates: sometimes people send you their books and they turn out to be wonderful! I know that Aaron Kunun is a great writer, but this book is really impressive. It was published by Wave Books, who’ve published some pretty significant titles, including Tyehimba Jess’s Olio (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Dorothy Lasky and Anselm Berrigan. This is a fat, funny-looking book. It looks a little bit like a romance novel in terms of its size, thick and 5 x 7. It doesn’t look like an ordinary poetry book, and it’s not. Before you even get to the title page, it says: This book is a few different things: a study of George Herbert’s seventeenth-century devotional poem ‘Love’, an essay on eroticizing power, and a memory palace of sexual experiences, fantasies, preferences and limits with Herbert’s poem as the key. Each numbered section is a restatement of Herbert’s poem. First, I paraphrase the poem, then I try to see what my paraphrase missed, then I study what other critics have written, and finally, I wrote about the poem through my sexual history. I try to avoid references to outside sources. Interested readers will find a complete bibliography and notes with page citations at the end of the book. This book is for Michael Clune. Yes! There are a bunch of examples of these kind of quasi-scholarly books in poetry circles. Sometimes people call them ‘autotheory’, which just sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what they’re trying to say with that label. But some examples might be Nox , Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) or Bluets (2009), Maureen McLane’s My Poets (2012); Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985) is an early example of this. Love Three is definitely in this tradition. What distinguishes this book from others that might look like it (in terms of genre, or anti-genre) is how very strange some of it is. ‘Strange’ to me is a term of deep admiration. It makes me laugh; it’s charming; it’s so very careful in its examination of this George Herbert poem, which is printed at the beginning and is only 18 lines. And the book itself is 322 pages. But in spite of that length, it’s bound by its own particular conceit. This is three kinds of examination, he says: scholarly, personal, and literary critical, or close reading. But there are all kinds of possibilities. It’s as if he could have gone on forever on this subject. The expansiveness of that imagination, the way in which a very careful critical mind is at work here, greatly interests me. I’ll read you a couple of the book’s phrases. The first line of section 41 is “Love humiliates me by making me act like a slob.” That’s a paraphrase of Herbert’s poem, apparently—but what a terrific paraphrase! Then it goes on to talk about humiliation and what it means to be messy. ‘Love’ is a word, a noun, and a form of address here. ‘Love’ signifies various lovers or one talked about as his personal archive of sexual experience and love experience. Here’s another: “Me: I’m a mess. Love: No, you came here to get messed up.” I found this kind of dialogue that moves between self and love very cute and funny. Some of the appearances in this book are very funny. There’s one by the political commentator Errol Morris. If you live in New York, you know who that is. He appears in this book in a meditation on an interview between Errol Morris and Donald Rumsfield. What a curious, beautiful surprise that just comes right out of Aaron’s personal memory. There’s also a lot of stuff about BDSM here, too, so it appears to be a coming out of one’s feelings about bondage as well. It doesn’t try to titillate; it’s just part of the material of the text, in a way. Lots of interesting things get said. He teaches primarily in Renaissance literature. So this is his area of scholarly expertise."