Unlikely Juxtapositions: On "Romances" by Lisa Ampleman

Lisa Ampleman | Romances | LSU Press | February 2020 | 94 pages

One way to think about romance is that it is an unlikely juxtaposition. Like a surrealist collage, romance is full of surprises incongruities, some delightful, shocking, some apt, and some unsettling. Or at least, this is the romantic mood I find myself in after reading Lisa Ampleman’s Romances and it’s a mood I enjoy and feel wiser for having been invited into. 

A poet-scholar, Ampleman’s poems are deeply rooted in her deep knowledge of the medieval and early modern troubadour traditions and courtly romances. She juxtaposes portraits of erased, talked-over, mischaracterized women of the past who are bored of their role as perpetual muse with contemporary women who feel much the same. Using the rhetorical conventions outlined in the twelfth century guide to The Art of Courtly Romance, Ampleman retells the biography of Courtney Love, lead singer of the acclaimed all-women grunge band Hole but better known for being the wife of Kurt Cobain. “Courtley Love” is a 20-part sonnet sequence that paints a portrait of her resistance, not to a lover’s ardent advances as is the traditional role of the feminine voice in a romance, but against a patriarchal culture’s admonitions: “Let go of your firebrand / ways, hold onto your maidenhead.” Love replies: “I’ve got a closet full of mini- / skirts, and I love to flirt, but I write / my own story.” In addition to the pleasures of defiance, this poem is also an example of Ampleman’s dexterous use of sound effects and word play, which is a gift on display throughout the collection. In “XI. Hole,” for example, she describes the intentionally un-pretty and disturbingly sexualized girlhood aesthetics of patriarchy-defying grunge that Hole embodied. She calls this to mind with both imagery and sounds by creating a symphony of repeated long and short Os that mirror the head-banging howls of a live show. 

Girl, sing it like a bore-hole. Headless dolls

like chicken corpses… Their abandoned heads

have Os as mouths, their skulls as hollow as

crack houses.

Another of the pleasures in Romances is Ampleman’s introductions to literary women of the medieval and early modern period. Some will be entirely new introductions to readers, others will be reintroductions to women we have previously only known through the male poet’s gaze. In her poems about Gemma Donati, the wife of Dante, Ampleman tells the story of a woman at the periphery of the story of the great man’s genius. The life Ampleman imagines for her is laced with familiar traps and strictures. When Donati does not join Dante in exile, Ampleman surmises she “did not grieve the loss of the man down the hall, composing poems / not for her.” She proposes this woman might have “grinned / with closed jaws for the sake / of the kids” like so many contemporary women who are disproportionately asked to give up ambitions and dreams for the sake of family stability. 

Ampleman also resurrects the little-known sonnets of Gaspara Stampa, a contemporary poet to Petrarch.  Like Petrarch, there is smoldering eroticism of her medieval Italian relationship to love, but also notes of personal risk and precariousness in these taboo sensations for women that add textures and nuances Petrach never imagines in his poems of yearning. Ampleman reminds us how much women who make romantic or other commitments to men risk in her loose translations of Stampa’s work.

Feeling pleasure is all that matters. The trick 

is to walk over coals and not feel 

pain – and not care that he 

who led me there feels no pity.”

As with many poetry collections that engage with historical material, Romances rewards those who read the end notes with an even more complete appreciation for the layered depths of meaning in the poems. In addition to learning more about Stampa’s legacy there, readers will come to realize the poem “Laura” is a kind of modified cento of lines collaged from the 10 of Petrarch’s 366 poems about her in which she is invited to speak. “’I only wait for you,’ he makes me say. / ‘My lovely veil.’” Other notes, such as those on the female troubadours, known as trobairitz, are equally rewarding. 

In Romances Ampleman tends to keep her attention squarely focused on heterosexual, cis-gendered relationships. I appreciated that Ampleman herself seemed aware of this limitation on her perspective and took many opportunities to undercut all of these relationships with a satirical critique of the complaints of comfortable and complacent couples enjoying a variety of privileges. This is particularly apparent in the turn away from persona poems towards a 1st person confessional voice that marks the final section of the book. These poems are ironic and self-deprecating portraits of white, upper class, heteronormative narratives of love and family, which parallel the courtly tradition of performing love as a way to maintain a feudal order. For example, in “Reading Don Quixote on Our Honeymoon,” Ampleman writes, 

The beloved in literature is a construct; 

the one next to you in paradise 

has the vinyl lounge chair 

stuck to her back with sweat. 

This is a book that would pair very nicely with Jos Charles’ recent collection Feeld , which used many of the same ancient texts Ampleman draws on to reveal the English language holds a far more fluid lineage of thought on gender than most conventional narratives would have us believe. Roger Reeve’s King Me is another book I thought of as an excellent companion to this project, because of how he interrogates the maniacal violence of power that underly the seductive beauty of European court pageantry.  

Romances is erudite and funny in its treatment of historical figures, compassionate but pointed in its critique of ubiquitous sexisms in contemporary life, and refreshingly honest in its vulnerable confessions. Ampleman’s ability to juxtapose the past with the present in insightful and resonant ways is a unique gift and it’s well worth reading this book to discover the drama of courtly love unfolding all around us all the time.  

This review is part of the CRB x Barnhouse Series, which was created in partnership with Cleveland press and literary collective Barnhouse in order to better highlight recent poetry releases. Learn more about Barnhouse here.