The Case for Writing Love Poems
How I Learned to Stop Pleasing Academia and Write the Poems That Actually Matter
I’ve always had a difficult relationship with poetry.
In the fall of 2019, I was dismissed from my senior thesis program for allegedly smearing the legacy of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” by daring to suggest that the poem is, perhaps, not as “feminist” as many scholars consider it to be. The following year, transitioning to grad school and scarred from my undergraduate experiences in the Columbia English department, I stayed away from feminist poetry entirely and wrote my MA thesis on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, analyzing Eliot’s take on human desire against the backdrop of Wagnerian allusions. After satirically concluding that Eliot must have been gay, I handed in the magnum opus of my graduate school years and sat back as the department heads ate up my argument, which, unbeknownst to them, was nothing but a mockery of what the poetic tradition had become at the hands of academic gatekeepers—an absurd homage to social justice.
Withdrawing from academia the following year, I couldn’t help but feel heartbroken. What was the point of poetry at all if it could only be reduced to feminism, social justice, and making outlandish claims about a conservative man’s sexuality? I had written poems of my own, but none of them touched the topics that were in vogue.
Looking back at my college poems, I began to feel somewhat ashamed. Focusing primarily on teenage suffering and heartbreak, these pieces were trivial compared to what English departments seemed to want of me: analyses of identity and critiques of power.
But that couldn’t be the point of poetry.
So, in defiance of the Columbia English department, I gathered my favorite eighteen poems on the cusp of graduation and published Broken Weekend—my first poetry collection.
And I certainly had high ambitions.
By the end of the week, however, Broken Weekend had sold only twenty copies, all purchased by close friends and family. I had no sense of how to market myself, but I suspected that the problem hit deeper than my lack of platform back in early 2021. There were a few standout pieces in the collection, but it felt juvenile overall—the majority of my early poems were about teenage heartbreak and finding my place in the world as a young woman. In consequence, the collection was a lot less profound than I had thought.
I needed to outdo myself.
The following year, I moved back out to Manhattan after weathering the pandemic at home in Chicago. I was finally an adult released into everyone’s favorite concrete jungle, and boy, was I in for some surprises. Between being dismissed from my first real job and having my heart broken one too many times, I was finally living life, capturing my experiences in verse. At the end of that same year, I had written up a series of poems reflecting heartbreak, adventure, and ambition, and I needed to prove that I was a more mature poet than Broken Weekend might have suggested.
Vintage Lovers, my second poetry collection, dropped on Amazon in early 2023. Reading through the collection, I felt proud of several stellar poetic accomplishments—most notably the collection’s title poem—but as a whole, the collection again felt inconsistent. There were a number of filler poems written in passing that tainted the overall quality of the work. Once again, I felt poetically frustrated. I liked to write poems about love and desire, but the majority of my poems came off as jejune.
Was the topic the issue? Could poems only be deep if they tackled feminism, social justice, and identity?
I wasn’t trying to be some poet version of Taylor Swift, after all. I couldn’t just write about boys if I wanted to be taken seriously. I needed to expand the scope of my repertoire.
But was there no more room to write about love? Wasn’t literature about universality, and wasn’t love the most universal human feeling of them all?
Over the next year, I reevaluated my poetic approach, determined to outdo Vintage Lovers by writing not about love but about everything else imaginable—and I was off to a strong start. The collection’s first poem, “The Nursing Clock,” was a loose retelling of Eliot’s Prufrock and tackled the theme of daring and indecision. Several poems later, “Lakeside” addressed the inability to find peace in a chaotic world.
I was finally writing the sorts of “mature” poems that everyone wanted me to write, and they were pretty good! There was a poem about the publishing industry and an elegy to New York City. These were poems I was finally not ashamed of!
Then, one night around 3am, the collection’s titular poem spilled out of me.
“Illicit Kingdom”—a poem about the disillusionment that comes with realizing that love is not always like a fairy tale—was about love…
Again.
From there, I couldn’t stop myself. As if I had just imbibed the blood of the ancient muses, a series of love poems ritually spilled out of me, and I knew that my next collection was nearing completion.
In early 2024, I published Illicit Kingdom—my third poetry collection.
Now equipped with a respectable social media following, I managed to sell hundreds of copies of Illicit Kingdom and waited for reviews to pile in. But sifting through a mixed bag of reader feedback at the end of the month, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Indeed, Illicit Kingdom was about love again—and the poetry community did not want to take it seriously. My poems were too abstract, too steeped in personal memory to be universally accessible.
But I had always thought poetry was about crafting universality from personal experience.
And wasn’t it?
Going back to the drawing board exasperated, I was determined to stay away from love poems for my next collection—I was determined to be taken seriously as a poet.
And there was only one way to figure out what to do next: turn to the greats.
Over the next year, I paged through my Norton poetry anthology and took meticulous notes. What made a poem great? Was it command of meter, quality of rhyme, depth of soul?
Or was it that it had to touch on feminism and identity and social justice?
Soon, I was reading everything—the great Romantics, the confessional poets, the quiet Victorian idealists. But I was hung up on one particular work: Philip Larkin’s Aubade—a philosophical meditation on the nature of death.
Was that the answer? Did I need to write philosophical poems?
It was worth a try.
At the end of last November, I sent off the draft of my next poetry collection to my editor, reading through the manuscript one final time to make sure that I had sent him a publication-ready version. Girl Soldier was replete with philosophical ideas and abstract meditations. It was certainly mature—and it would be my best work yet.
But, reading one poem after another, I felt my heart sink inside my chest.
These poems were not very good.
There were a few gems—such as the collection’s title poem “Girl Soldier”—but as a whole, my philosophical meditations felt too didactic, too stuffy. They might as well have been Substack essays with arbitrary line breaks.
Well, that wouldn't do.
That night, I frantically texted my editor requesting that he table his revisions. I had lost my touch as a poet, I told him, and I needed to figure out what to do next—certainly, I wasn’t going to publish Girl Soldier in its current state.
Had I been wrong? Was it not meditations on philosophy that made a poem great? I had written several beautiful poems in the past, and I had a handful of poems that I was truly proud of.
Maybe I could learn from myself.
There was “Vintage Lovers” and “Illicit Kingdom” and “Carnival” and “Broken Weekend.” What did they all have in common?
Wandering the candlelight You said you liked her sea blue eyes— Why don’t you marry her * I would like to write a book Of all the islands I’ve inhabited with you A paradise that knows no bounds or ends * The boardwalk bears the burden of two little heroes; The oceanside grows jealous, Spouting its complaints and waves
These poems were all about desire.
That was it! Writing about love wasn’t making my poems weak. In fact, it was precisely those abstract personal moments that gave my poems the special Liza Libes touch. These poems were not simply meditations but words grounded in passion and experience.
Yes—poetry was about the universal human experience. And, with a bit more editing and refinement of my craft, those particulars could be easily made universal. My poems—filled with love and passion—were not only unique in their exploration of my particulars but also keen expressions of our shared humanity. We were all human, after all. And passion was at the core of the human experience.
Love. That was what made a poem great.
Over the next few months, I got to editing, picking out the poems that could be salvaged and imbuing them with love, memory and desire. Thinking back on everything I’d lived through in my twenties, I began to create fictional story worlds from personal experience and wrote several new poems—“Peace,” “Stars,” and “Horoscope”—that have become the standout pieces of Girl Soldier—my upcoming collection.
All of a sudden, a revamped Girl Soldier began to come together.
Girl Soldier leaves behind the sketches of my teens and early twenties and steps into something bolder and more ambitious—poems that wrestle with love and loss, rage and beauty, memory and decay. Girl Soldier is a set of elegies for art, love, and fantasy, reveling in burlesque dancers, perfumed love affairs, and the weight of fate and philosophy. Girl Soldier asks what it is like to be a woman in our contemporary world—because being a woman is far more complicated than just being a “feminist.” Girl Soldier is about coming to terms with our chaotic world and finding beauty in its quiet moments. Because, as I argue in “Indigo Arcadia,” beauty slows the sordid traipse of time.
In a world determined to undermine memory, beauty, love, and desire, Girl Soldier argues that these ideas still matter.
Because poetry is more than just identity and justice—poetry is most beautiful when it’s filled with love.
And I can’t wait to show you all the things I love this fall in my best collection yet.
Girl Soldier drops November 15th, 2025.
👏👏👏 Liza, you did such a wonderful job on this article! You explained perfectly why writing about love in your poetry is hardly exclusive to you personally and tracing your evolution as a poet. You had a rough go of it in Academia where you were unceremoniously given the boot from Columbia’s PhD program because you rightly wrote that Silvia Plath’s masterpiece Daddy isn’t about feminist empowerment. Then you wrote a paper that analyzed T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” and satirically concluded that Eliot must have been gay. You were done with woke leftist academia after that. Understandably, it left you scarred and you felt like poetry was being abused and used for purposes that were never intended. Poetry didn’t need to be about social justice, feminism or racism all the time, that was NOT the point of it.
So you started writing your own poetry and tried to get it out there to the world. But only a few copies of Broken Weekend were purchased and only by your friends and family. You were very frustrated at this point. You left Chicago and moved out to Manhattan and started experiencing real life for the first time. You had your heart broken way to many times and were dismissed from your first job. Nonetheless, you were enjoying truly living your life for the first time. But you weren’t getting a good reception from the poetry community on your works and felt like they were just too juvenile. So you started writing poetry that everyone wanted you to write. But in time, you came to see that you writing about love was perfectly okay because love is a universal human emotion we all experience.
Desire is a part of who are as human beings. We all find ourselves feeling a close attachment to someone of the opposite sex who we are fond of. Heartbreak is also a universal part of the human experience. When someone who you love doesn’t love you back or you go through a break up or divorce that is agony and in the most serious cases can break someone. These are not at all things that just apply to Liza Libes but all people everywhere from Boston to Baton Rouge, from London to Lagos, from Cairo to Cape Town, from Munich to Marrakesh, from Buenos Aries to Barcelona. It’s something I’ve struggled with myself as a person on the autism spectrum. I’ve been shamed, bullied and teased about being in love with other people and it didn’t because I have autism I sometimes went about it expressing it in ways I didn’t realize were socially awkward or inappropriate. I often wondered if any woman especially if they were neurotypical, would ever love or marry an autistic man. I also often have also wondered if I even deserved or had the right to feel it given how others always reacted angrily to mistakes I made in love no knowing any better because I wasn’t born dialed into the social cues most people are.
That is why the theme of Girl Soldier resonates with me. That is why the universal theme of love connects to me. I felt for years in my life due to the above mentioned bad experiences, like I was a societal outcast like Frankenstein or the Hunchback of Notre Dame who wasn’t worthy of or should be allowed to experience feeling love for another person or feeling heartbroken about all these beautiful women I was interested in but could never even approach because I had already decided they’d never accept me for who I am. I could never have a family or children, my kids would grow up to be freaks like myself I thought, my future wife if she be neurotypical, would be asked by everyone how she could love or marry a r****d and isn’t she worried how her future kids will turn out?
The same is true when it comes to mental health. Could I truly ever find someone who would love a person who some would deem crazy? Love is truly something I’ve struggled with. But when I read what you wrote here Liza and about the universal themes contained within Girl Soldier it helps me to remember I am NOT the only one who struggles in love and it’s NOT just disabled people or people with mental health issues that struggle with these things-it’s everybody. You don’t have to be disabled to feel rejected or unwanted though the reasons might be different, the feelings that result are the same to us all. Furthermore, love is something available to us all and we all the right to it. You found it and so can I. It doesn’t matter who we are we deserve it and we have the right to feel it and partake in it because we are ALL part of the universal human family.
Love is something that throughout history has been fought over and has been denied to some groups of people. Interracial and same-sex relationships were deemed to be disgusting and wrong. Interfaith relationships were and are to this day disapproved of. Marrying someone from the wrong family or social class was considered unacceptable as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. How about this folks: how about we let people love who they want to love? I don’t care if a white person loves a black person, a man loves a man, a Christian loves a Jew or a Muslim, a poor or working class person loves a rich person, or a Hatfield loves a McCoy, good for them, it’s not your or my business! You don’t get to decide nor does the government, who can live who or who can marry who! I don’t care if a guy on the spectrum loves a neurotypical girl or an American is married to or dating a German, Frenchman or Italian. Who gives a d***?! Just let them be happy!
Also, what you mentioned about the universities using poetry to put forward social justice messages and hackney left-wing political agendas makes me think perhaps this is why it’s a good thing that for example, President Trump took over the Kennedy Center. The Humanities have been contaminated by all this woke propaganda. This is exactly why I applauded the Trump administration for reviewing America’s museums. For example the Smithsonian saying Cubans fled Cuba under Fidel Castro because…of U.S. foreign policy? That slavery was exclusively something done by white people or the United States and that American slavery was uniquely brutal? Having exhibits about how gender testing sports isn’t fair? Come on! On the subject of slavery, no American slavery wasn’t all about race. Yes, slavey was race based and a system of white supremacy came along with it. But here are some facts the Smithsonian didn’t share with you. These people weren’t enslaved because they were black but because they were vulnerable. Their color was just used as an excuse to keep them enslaved and use them for economic exploitation.
Slaveowners needed a justification to keep them in bondage so they used their race as an excuse saying it made them inherently inferior. Furthermore, whites weren’t the only ones to own slaves in America nor were blacks the only ones to be enslaved in America. The Irish and Native Americans also were enslaved. Free blacks, mixed-race people and Native Americans also took black slaves. In fact, the first legal slave owner in American history was a black man named Anthony Johnson who came to America from Angola, he won the right to hold another black man John Casor, as his slave for life in court.
There's the paradox everyone faces in that academia does not think there's anything important about common experience because common experience has to be notably extreme in some sort of way in order to be remarkable or notable or worthy in any meaningful way. But I think you may figured out how to play their game your own way by showing differential conflict in the ordinary. Such as Girl Soldier. A girl can still be feminine even viewed through a nonobjectified nongenderal context allowed by broading the scope of the word soldier. Which doesn't necessarily show confrontational opposition between genders but similarity without all the usual confrontational gender politics. That should be more important because it supports survival instead of disintegration. More friendly emotions aren't necessarily cliche if viewed through a slightly different lense. Academia is a bored mostly manopoly where close observation is crippled by one or more fixed attitudes. So you are making your own way on your own terms. So this a great post that will likely inspire struggling poets or people who want to write poetry but may feel stymied by somewhat artificial academic attitudes that at the end of the day are awfully shallow compared to the deep diver dives of the classics. So looking forward to reading Girl Soldier.