In our weekly “Poetry Pairing” series, we collaborate with the Poetry Foundation to feature a work from its American Life in Poetry project alongside content from The Times that somehow echoes, extends or challenges the poem’s themes. Each poem is introduced briefly by Ted Kooser, a former United States poet laureate.
This week’s pairing: the poem “How You Know” and a May 2010 post from The New York Times health blog, Well, “Love on the Global Brain.”
For me, the most worthwhile poetry is that which reaches out and connects with a great number of people, and this one, by Joe Mills of North Carolina, does just that. Every parent gets questions like the one at the center of this poem.
—Ted Kooser
How You Know
By Joe Mills
How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning,” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.
In the Well blog post “Love on the Global Brain,” Tara Parker-Pope reported on researchers’ findings about brain activity generated by early romantic love. Brain scans showed “that cultural differences in how love is expressed don’t change the brain’s neurological reaction to romantic love,” she wrote. “The scans showed that love lights up the brain in the same manner, regardless of ethnic background.” The post concludes this way:
Dr. Aron cautions that the findings are exploratory and need to be replicated. But the work suggests, for the first time, that the intensity of brain patterns during the early phase of romantic love may be able to predict the quality of the relationship 18 months into the future.
“I think what we take away from this is that love is not merely a cultural construction,” Dr. Aron said. “What the study does suggest is that love is a powerful force in human life. What is going on at the deep level of the brain is pretty much the same everywhere. But of course how we talk and think about it, what we do to show it to others, etc., may well be shaped by culture.”
After you’ve read the poem and article, tell us what you think — or suggest other Times content that could be paired with the poem instead.
To learn more about the collaboration, and to find ideas for using any week’s pairing for teaching and learning, see this post.
Poem copyright 2010 by Joe Mills, whose most recent book of poetry is Love and Other Collisions, Press 53, 2010. Poem reprinted from Rattle, Volume 16, No. 1, Summer 2010, by permission of Joe Mills and the publisher.
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