May 20, 2024
Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry
An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.
The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.
No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!
But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.
So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.
In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!
What Young Love Poetry Looks Feels Like
As I said, young love is confusing. One moment you’re in heaven and you can’t imagine a happier existence, the next you’re in hell and nothing, ever, can be good again.
In a way, I’d argue that young love (and its poetry should reflect that) is about “failures” more than it is about “successes”. Young love is about rejections, false starts, misunderstandings, bad timings, and whatnot.
Of loneliness the bitter tree is watered best by others’ blissful glare.
To be surrounded by exuberant and unimpeded joy,
to hear behind the wall the sounds of love himself could not enjoy,
was like a force acutely pushing into dire despair.
The Effect of Time
I mentioned rosy retrospection earlier, and one of the things I’ve added (only semi-consciously) to this young love poetry collection is a subtle temporal play. It’s about young love, yes, but there seems to be “something” outside its context.
The urban sounds enwrap a feeling that still lingers.
And as the board says sad goodbye to small and tender fingers,
we hear the bell. The formless mass pours out, escapes such plain, mundane banalities.
But I (betrothed to odd realities) remain immobile.
Come back in forty years, when more the art and less the matter,
and visit me at night – a whisper, a vision, a chatter.
Many of the poems precisely seem to approach young love from a position of reflection as well as experience. In other words, young love isn’t experienced only by the youth, but also by the youth as they will be older.
Young Love Poetry and Experience
The idea of experience should pervade all art. More than half of any artistic endeavor is about seeing the world in all its (only apparently) mundane moments. Only then can we ever hope of reaching some sort of understanding of ourselves and one another.
As such, Old Memories Murmured in Dreams approaches experiencing from a collective perspective. That is to say, these experiences both are and aren’t autobiographical, both are and aren’t post-autonomous, both are and aren’t imaginary conceptual landscapes.
I watched with appetent, desirous eyes his girlfriend nodding,
her slender form shifting her weight,
her youthful breasts showing the way as she flirtatiously walked by,
her crimson lips surrendering a crafty smile,
her piercing gaze imagining another fate, inviting to a prurient and diabolic dream.
Young love is confusing, what can I say!
Where to Read Old Memories Murmured in Dreams
Most of my fiction is available as an immediate free download – simply visit the Fiction page on the main site. And remember, you can also just email me and ask for a free, no-strings-attached (e.g. review etc.) digital copy of any of my books.