Poetry: Serious. Not That Serious.

DISCONNECT: 1 NOVEL/4 POEMS/THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SEEING EYE TO EYE She's thinking, Those stars are like  meatballs. The universe is a bowl of spaghetti. I'm hungry. I wanted to be a chef when I was young. He's thinking,  I'm going to name a star after each superhero I can remember. There was a time I could remember the names of all the stars my father taught me”¦ Okay, so this one's not strictly about poetry”¦I'M SORRY! STOP HITTING ME! IT WILL BE 100% ARS POETICA NEXT TIME, I PROMISE! I've been reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There is more to be said about this book than can be related in any blog post. It is deceptively “simple” at times, which is probably when it's the most complicated. I'd like to focus on one particular quote/concept (everything in TULOB is word and concept working together simultaneously): that of memory and what Kundera calls the “musical composition” of our lives:“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs”¦but if they meet when they are older”¦their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to them.”What interests me about this is: how does memory color our current experiences? Since we all have different memories, is it ever possible to converge in the same present, to experience something in the same way as someone else? And, if not, then is it at least possible to translate our experience of the moment, of our personal and totally unique “musical composition,” to another person?A couple was talking on the balcony above mine today. The woman spoke in low, worried tones. The man had his elbows bent over the railing and stared into the night. And I realized they were viewing the argument from completely different perspectives. They might be able to eventually understand eachother's points of views on a logical level, but on the fundamental level, on the subconscious level that lay beneath, based on reasons one could trace from their separate pasts and some geneses they might not even be aware of, they would never be able to quite reach a meeting of the minds, or souls, or hearts, or spirits, or whatever. It's like going to a parade with your lover, watching the floats go by and the bystanders moving to and fro, and realizing that every component means something else, calls something different to mind in you and your lover. There is a place where we will never meet. Here are some poems which address this grand, beyond-continental, definitely universal divide (links provided, favorite lines included): 1.   POEM CONSISTING ENTIRELY OF ADVICE by Heather Christleyou must not look        at what may be a man     ormay be his empty car     what if he asks you   whatare you looking at    what if you still do not knowBuy her amazing book, The Trees The Trees here. It only costs 2 lattes and is much more permanent (or impermanent, depending on just how post-modern you're feeling). 2.   KNOWER by Lily BrownFavorite Lines: Trade the images for new stock. / You, lagging between too-close/ and too-far. First I was alone, / waiting. Then I was alone, /alone.Buy her alternately confusing, ravishing, and altogether cerebral book Rust Or Go Missing here. It costs 3 lattes, and is much more of a mindf-ck.3.   MARBLE-SIZED SONG by Albert GoldbarthFavorite Lines: Does she love you? She says yes, but really/how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion, / undoing its petals and laminae, and going in/ below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical/coffer where self-understanding is storaged away, / and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study/in its nakedness as it spins/in a clinical light?—the way/we all, in our various individual versions/of this common human urge, go in, /and in, and in”¦He goes right to the heart of the matter in this poem—and seems to think (then rethink) there's a solution, perhaps a poetically medical procedure.4.   IT HAPPENED ANYWAY by Stuart DischellFavorite Lines: Once you told me stories like that, and of your childhood/Like my own near the sea. You said you felt safe inside/My arms. You said we were alike. You would not/Deny my presence in your life. Nice.First of all, that's a zinger of a last line. Second of all, heartbreaking. Third of all, the difference between what we say (to bridge the differences) and what is reality (unbridgeable differences do exist). Buy the book Backwards Days here for more information on living your life in reverse. --Lucy Hitz