For all the violence sprung from the official versus the unofficial book, where literature is found has less to do with its force than who we are when we find it. Are we ready to receive it? Many have come to literature from strange paths and pieced it together to their own liking, ignoring all the established orders. Poetry is not for the passive. It is, as Mayakovsky knew, at its very root tendentious. Even the love poem agitates the beloved to fall in love with the poet.
--Jennifer Moxley, Preface to Imagination Verses

then two from Menocal's Shards of Love . . .

p. 88
...we can point to the ways in which the multiple ambiguities and paradoxes within the texts are tied in chainlike fashion: the Beloved is always an Other--and the painful love of Others is the painful love of God. This union of love thus constitutes the ultimate challenge to the self (whether the external and transiet manifestation of the self is fhte flesh adn blood lover vis-a-vis the object of carnal desire, or the Christian vis-a-vis the Muslim, or the supplicant vis-a-vis the Lord). Within the context of a difficult and fading multiculturalism, the Beloved may emerge as that ultimate theophany, all Others. And the Love poetry of the poets of such circumstances may well play back what we can scarcely hear in periods defined by different tensions.

and then a few pages later

p. 92
Among the thousands of different answers that have come with the morning, one singular and unexpected one, the love lyric, has been a powerful and charming defense, a form of resistance commonly taken for retreat.