Richard Thompson can write heartbreak songs-- bitter, acrimonious, and full of heart and recrimination ,in equal measure. His album 'Rumor and Sigh' is one of those records .... My pal Steve Earle writes gorgeous ,elegiac, and resonant love songs -- maybe better than anyone right now -- Writing a good love poem almost always involves the losing of the very subject itself. One doesn't pen a good love poem -- one bleeds it.
These are best written at night , when you are alone-- when you are listening to Al Green or Steve Earle or Richard Thompson, or Lou Reed's 'Magic and Loss' or 'Satellite of Love', or Janis Joplin's 'Cry Baby' or the Stones 'Mermory Hotel'......
i don't think anyone ever wrote better love poems than Neruda or Paz..... or Kenneth Patchen...their poems fill you with light and air and promise -- -------the sonsofbitches.
one of my 'chapels' in the New Orleans Biennial, will be a chapel of love poems -- I've written a bunch of them lately ; and New Orleans is that kind of place-- earthy,musk-laden, and full of flesh and the weaknesses therein -- and where ever there is lust -- be assured the heartbreak is right on it heels-- Whenever someone tells me they are in love I think to myself --'You poor dumbfuck -- good luck surviving it'.
I go back to New Orleans on the 6th and I'm looking forward to it -- it has become my other city -- a place where I can shut out the noise. John McNaughton -- the marvelous film director says it best : 'Chicago is my wife .... New Orleans is my mistress". In New Orleans , you can wake up at noon and nobody gets in your shit about it ..... because they aren't awake yet either. I love sitting at Cafe Du Monde at 3 in the morning with my miscreant pals and watching the night parade of the drunken human family walk by .... I haven't written much about Cafe Du Monde yet .... I have kind of been saving it... I spend time there everytime I go to the Crescent City -- I go there at all times of Day -- during the day a lot of older Asian women work there with a kind of genial efficiency -- and at night a bunch of Tulane girls and pretty Creole women work there -- but always the show is New Orleans itself and the people who need this place-- Beignet's are good for soaking up the night's intake of alcohol and the Cafe au Lait will help you sober up a bit-- or function as a stop-gap between drinks . I love how you can be alone in a crowd at this place and just watch -- every strata of New Orleans society does the twilight perp-walk past the Cafe Du Monde-- you notice lots of couples on their honeymoon there -- the poor bastards don't know what they're in for yet-- they believed all of those love songs they heard........

Good for them.