From the earliest records in the Western tradition of poetry, throughout the classical period and during the Middle Ages, spanning the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and beyond, romantic love
has been the obsessive object of poetic attentions. However, modern and postmodern poets tend to avoid writing about love, focusing instead on political, social and theoretical terrains.When
Dawn-Michelle Baude took on the job of guest-editing the sixth edition of the internationally acclaimed poetry anthology Van Gogh's Ear, she deliberately chose love as the theme for the new
edition in order to challenge this modern poetic system in which the vocabularies for alienation and violence have outstripped those of attachment and affection.More than seventy cutting edge
poets from around the globe have answered Van Gogh's Ear's call for poems about love. Van Goghs Ear 6: The Love Edition takes the throbbing pulse of love now, in 2009, in countries around the
world. Sexual, romantic, altruistic, fetishistic, Platonic, political, happenstance and all the rest - the poems and prose in this edition are vital, and, in abrupt contrast to the foundational
irony of postmodernism, even sincere. The writers engagement with the topics ranges from the subtle to the overt, the off-hand to the engaged, just like in life.
