Funny, weird … sexy? How to find your perfect wedding poem

The Guardian

2 days ago

I married my wife in October 2022 and, in the lead-up, it was obviously my job to source the wedding poems. I have published seven poetry collections, I read poetry every day, I own more than a thousand poetry books. I should have read through my favourites till I found the perfect fit. But that's not what I did.
Instead, for some bizarre reason, I sat down at my laptop and furtively Googled the words 'wedding poem'. Why do we all do this, poets included? Well, I think, even though we want to express something deeply personal, the word 'wedding' makes us all panic and reach for stock texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee? or The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe ('Come live with me and be my love') or Ecclesiastes 4 ('Two are better than one').
Up until very recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention. Now, gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; you can get married in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster. But the old traditions die hard, and despite these new freedoms, the word 'wedding' still influences our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the 'wedding poem', even a Star Trek-themed do will find us translating the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.
My friend and fellow poet Rachel Long and I decided the time was right for a brand-new wedding anthology, 'alternative poems for alternative weddings', shaking up the genre. When a publisher picked up our idea we felt smug that we would be getting paid to spend months reading love poetry – now all we had to do was pull together 100 wedding poems that fitted our brief of 'something new'. We arrived at the Poetry Library in London, the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world, armed with a list of our favourite contemporary poets. The hard part, we agreed, would be whittling them down.
In order to sift for suitable poems, we'd given ourselves these criteria:
1) Does not necessarily need to mention weddings, but must believe in the concept of lasting love.
2) The hope must outweigh the sadness.
3) No profoundly grim last lines.
Simple, right? As we quickly discovered, these criteria ruled out nearly every contemporary love poem ever written. Our Poetry Library days looked something like this: two women hunched in silence over poetry books, speed-reading and frowning. Our dialogue consisted mainly of 'No'. Occasionally one of us would say, 'Maybe?' – and the other would sit up like a meerkat, briefly hopeful – then we'd read on and say: 'Oh no, sorry, the last line is about the inevitability of death.' Charles Simic's Listen begins 'Everything about you, my life, is both make-believe and real' – promising, I thought – then ends with 'a small child leaping out of a window with its nightclothes on fire'. Fantastic ending, not a wedding poem.
Sometimes one of us was sure – 'Yes! This is a beautiful wedding poem!' – then the other would take a closer look and ask 'Isn't this about an affair?', or 'But doesn't this leave the reader with a deep, pervading loneliness?' or, and this became a frequent question, 'Is it a bit too sexy?' Could a wedding poem really proclaim, 'I place your ring on my cock where it belongs'? (American Wedding by Essex Hemphill.) As the piles of books dwindled, our list barely grew. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Reading love poems became a slog.
As summer turned to autumn, Rachel and I spent the evenings manically texting each other vast threads of poems from our personal bookshelves. What the hell did we actually mean by a wedding poem, anyway? What were we looking for? Love poems, of course. But what kind? As our reading attested, a huge majority of contemporary love poems are tinged with doom; and this is expected, after all, as often the emotional key to effective poetry is contradiction, an alloy of joy and sadness, anxiety and hope, clashing together to spark the unparaphrasable world of a poem.
However, if a celebrant stood up and said, 'Statistically 42% of marriages end in divorce,' they'd be breaking the rules of the day and perhaps get a glass of prosecco thrown in their face. The point of a wedding is to provide you with enough optimism, support, encouragement and affirmation to sustain you through the hard times ahead; therefore, to be a wedding poem, a love poem mustn't let in too much hard reality, or predict the end of love, or contain so much emotional ambiguity that it pours a gravy boat of sorrow over the vol-au-vents. But what about tone? What tone should a wedding poem have?
We realised this was the wrong question. Every wedding, every couple is different. The dream of the 'perfect wedding poem' is something that speaks directly, seemingly specifically, to a particular love. We can all picture that guy standing up to the microphone to awkwardly read a poem, using words (and a wooden poetry voice) that sound nothing like him. Well, I'm a firm believer that if a poem speaks to you, it will speak like you when you read it aloud. So, we didn't want a 'one-size-fits-all' anthology. We needed to be braver. Maybe a wedding poem could be a bit sexy? Or reflect real love in a difficult world? Unrequited, probably not, but funny and irreverent? Yes. These were alternative poems for alternative weddings, after all, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shotgun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a 40-year love.
Who says a wedding poem should feature stars, skies and rivers? Who limited our imaginations in that way? What about vacuum cleaners, the Tapton Bridge, black Chevrolets, cheese and onion rolls, brass bands, scaffolding and kittiwakes? What about 'the ethereal gleam of wet tarmac'? (Michael Pederson.) Or laughter that 'fills up the corners of the room with a thousand upside down cartoon bats'? (Hera Lindsay Bird.)
After all, weddings need poems because poetry can express the inexpressible, translate longing into language, throw a can of paint over an abstract feeling. We reach for poems on these days because 'love' is too small a syllable to elaborate on the endless uniqueness of the heart. So, rather than creating a safe generic tone across the whole anthology, we decided to include all tones, so that at least one poem would speak to a reader's wedding specifically. Perhaps the couple are two lighthouses joined by a 'beam of alignment' (Two Lighthouses by Julia Darling)? A Mr and Mrs 'unveiling each other' (Measuring Light by Theresa Lola)? Masons, building a wall of 'sure and solid stone' (Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney)? 'Pure flame and song' (Serenade by Terrance Hayes)? 'Two fat cats in love' (Cat Worship by Golnoosh Nour)? 'Less silk and lace, more heather and thistle' (A Boy Gets Married by Lewis Buxton)? Or flying to the moon 'by the speed of queer zest' ( i love you to the moon & by Chen Chen)?
Finally, we had an anthology of one hundred (and one) newly selected poems for the big day, of all sizes, flavours and styles. Some are cheeky, some are weird, some sexy, subtle, domestic, ecstatic and sweet. You won't find many featured in your frantic Google search, but we can assure you that their hope outweighs their sadness, and they all believe in lasting love.
Something New: Alternative Poems for Alternative Weddings edited by Caroline Bird and Rachel Long is published by Picador. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Two Lighthousesby Julia Darling
I would like us to live like two lighthouses
at the mouth of a river, each with her own lamp.
We could see each other across the water,
which would be dangerous, and uncrossable.
I could watch your shape, your warm shadow,
moving in the upper rooms. We would have jokes.
Jokes that were only ours, signs and secrets,
flares on birthdays, a rocket at Christmas.
Clouds would be cities, we would look for omens,
and learn the impossible language of birds.
We would meet, of course, in cinemas, cafes,
but then, we would return to our towers,
knowing the other was the light on the water,
a beam of alignment. It would never be broken.
The Kissby Stephen Dunn
She pressed her lips to mind.
– a typo
How many years I must have yearned
for someone's lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.
She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.
Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she's missed.
How had I ever settled for less?
I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek's ear,
speaking sense. It's the Good,
defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.
Excerpted from Everything Else in the World: Poems. Copyright (c) 2006 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Andrew McMillanThe joy of a wedding is the singular love celebrated within a community; and the party afterwards, of course. The Wickedest, by Caleb Femi, is a collection that captures that vibe perfectly, and a great one to read aloud would be Max Meets Shelley on the Balcony. It begins: 'like a planet flung I danced / unroped'. A perfect start or end to any ceremony.
Joelle TaylorLawless and adventurous, XIII from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems in The Dream of a Common Language is a poem to launch a lesbian marriage.
The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we're out in a country that has no language
no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years …
It is a sonnet to another way of life, another kind of love, its unmapped territory being the thrill of it. It ends with a moving sense of ancestry, of wrong-walking women connected across time.
Wendy CopeAt our wedding a friend read the Apache Wedding Blessing. My favourite lines are 'Now there is no more loneliness / For each of you will be companion to the other'. It ends: 'May your days be good and long upon the earth.' I later learned that it is 'fake folklore', written in 1947. I'm glad I didn't know that at the time. I still like it.
Michael RosenWhen I got married we read pieces about things we liked that were personal to us, so they don't really translate – but here's a new poem:
When you get married
they ask you to write an inscription
Think of it as being
like taking out a subscription.
You should sign it
with a feeling of elation
and hope it won't end
with a cancellation.
Mary Jean Chan'At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever. /
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.' I love Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems, which speaks about love as a political act, one that arrives like a revelation and endures against all odds in a patriarchal and violent world. Elsewhere, Rich writes, 'I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence'.
Len PennieWe tend to think of love as a completed action, a noun trapped in amber, a red rose. I wrote a poem called The Vow, which will be published in my new collection, Poyums Annaw, to acknowledge love as a verb, a choice, an action and commitment that's continually taken every single day. It's a visceral, embodied action unique to every person and relationship. It celebrates what it is 'To be loved through each compromise, question or qualm / To be sheltered from storm and enshrined in the calm / To be held, not like glass, but the end of a deal'. And ends: 'I am yours for as long as you'd like to be mine / If you ask me, I'm certain, forever is fine.'
Harry Josephine GilesLove is overburdened with old images, so we need poems to help us see it clearly again. In Gràdh (Love) Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul compares it to a bird hanging upside down, eating nuts from a feeder:
Cho daingeann
's a tha gràdh,
a' crochadh an sin
sna speuran.
(How solid / love is / hanging there / in the air.)
Marriage is one of those heavy stories that wants lightening up if it's to sing: this simple lyric, in ordinary Gaelic worn smooth by good use, could bring breath into the ceremony so that people can see love hanging there in the air above them.
Rishi DastidarA friend once commissioned a poem from me for his wedding. I wrote something I thought was plangently romantic. I was summoned to a crisis meeting, where the bride-to-be said: 'Can you make it funny?' Now if asked for a wedding poem I'd suggest Victoria Kennefick's Deposition, with its ardent evocation of the marriage between waves and cliffs: 'silt and foam, my wedding dress; spray and salt, my veil'.