Who among us hasn’t, at one point or another, felt so moved by the tides of Love that they decided to take pen to paper in an attempt to convey the exquisite, overwhelming emotions churning inside? I wrote most of my love poems in 7th grade, when I had a tattered notebook and a crush on a guy named Guy, who had a butt cut and only the vaguest idea of who I was. Similarly, kind of, this week, international pop star and former monkey owner Justin Bieber wrote an ode to his wife, Hailey Bieber — née Baldwin, of the Baldwins — on Instagram, three times.
After a couple of false, deleted starts due to typos (“Abyss” spelled “Abiss”) Bieber posted the following poem alongside a picture of his betrothed in front of the Eiffel Tower:
Waves crashing. The sound of crickets. SOULMATE in all caps. A moving dedication, certainly. To better understand the merits of this piece, the Cut spoke to Jeffrey McDaniel, a creative writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College who’s published five books of poetry.
“My first thought was that this love poem written at dusk to a distant beloved was rather pedestrian, and that maybe it would work better as a single couplet paired with the image,” McDaniel wrote in an email. “But as I have spent time with the poem, there are some engaging possibilities to explore in revision.”
As for the piece’s strengths, McDaniel said he liked how the line, “The smell of camomile [sic] fresh from the garden” “plays to the reader’s senses,” and that he’s interested in the “chilling breeze” that embraces the speaker.
Its weaknesses? The rhymes are too predictable, and there are too many abstractions. Still: While there’s work to be done on the piece, McDaniel says there is potential, especially in this line: “My life is a movie that both of us star in.”
“The speaker acknowledges that he and his beloved are trapped (or at least contained) by his fame. And yet the paradox is he chose to share this intimate address on social media thereby perpetuating his fame. That is something to explore in revision.”
Perhaps Bieber will post a fourth version in the coming days.