POETRY, WEEK 4, WINTER '04, DUE 2/12

Last week I began the assignment sheet with a number of questions that were intended rhetorically, though I'd hoped they would also inspire some contemplation. Apropos of the Week 5 project assignment, I asked What is consciousness? Is it primarily the thinking/speaking mind? Shouldn't it include the alert but non-thinking mind (as in meditation?) What about the mind whose body is skiing down a steep hill? What about the vague awareness of crunching on a cornchip while focused on the riveting climax of Joe Millionaire? What about sleep? What about hallucinations? What about drunken stupors? What about dreams?

All of this is grist for the Flow of Consciousness mill, or course. Whatever you decide is included under your personal big-tent of Consciousness, it's all fair game for the poem you'll need to include with your project. I just want you to keep in mind that the Flow of Consciousness menu is quite large; in fact, it's hard to imagine anything much larger.

For now, though, I want to focus down on something smaller; I want to go back to the question of dreams. Poems about dreams are too dismally common, and they are the bane of the graduate student poetry workshop. Boring. Useless. Interesting to the dreamer, maybe, and maybe the dreamer's therapist, but not to strangers, not to the casual reader who doesn't know about the personal idiosyncracies and weirdness that might explain a dream to the person forced to endure its recounting.

But dreams are also interesting to writers because they sometimes expose a pattern or wrestle with a question that went unanswered in waking life. Dreams often call up strong emotions, or can leave you mystified; they can be elusive or persistent. But maybe the best thing dreams do is draw from the storehouse of images that bristle with psychic energy; Jung called these images archetypes; Freud wrote volumes on the interpretations of dreams. What does a flooded basement really mean? What about a burning house? What is it about images in dreams that allow us to remember them even when we can't remember the context they were embedded in?

Continuing students know I often suggest the use of images to carry emotional content in a poem, since direct calm of an emotion (I felt sad...) is an invitation to shut-down. But emotions, especially complex or ambivalent emotions are sometimes best conveyed/evoked by images alone. The image is metaphor. So. I'll include on the back a poem that illustrates this point, and a poem or two that deals with dreams. The assignment this week is to write a poem that includes a dream or dream sequence. Make one up if you don't dream or don't remember any dreams. The poem can be recounting, it can reference a dream, it can be about dreaming itself, can embody dream-logic; it can be whatever you want. Per usual, there are no stylistic contraints.

I'll put two books on reserve under Transcendent Practice Poetry; both are anthologies. The first is Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel; the John Barth chapter is probably the funniest and best. The second is Peacock and Gorman's Sleep; less meaty, but pretty. Dream on. Then write.