We prompted the poets with DREAMS
Dreams, dreams, the most ancient thing, we dreamed before we did almost anything!
October, we were clowns, we were coughing. We cancelled our Halloween Workshop, feeling ill. In time, recovery. In time, November. In November, we wanted to hear about dreams. This side of winter feels like slipping into one all the time. With the launch of the Portland Dirt (our local literary & arts newspaper here in Portland that I have shared almost nothing about here - do you wanna know y/n?) The Wizard and I were wiped. Novel opened their basement speak easy and asked if we wanted to celebrate. We said, Yes, of course and we watched the Archive fill and fill. I soften w/ sweetness just thinking about it.
The party was a restless week before the Workshop, we hadn’t fully caught up when it was Wednesday again. The Wizard and I, fits and nerves. We both wore vests & ties, soft knit and velvet. It was the first wet, winter day, already dark out by 4. I had ordered a grilled cheese and soup at the Lebowski bar next door, scribbling out my poems for the night. The Wizard was trying to catch up on dreamless sleep and came packing with Chinese characters. They carried the speaker and I carried the microphone, dark night on the florescent-lit spine of our city.
I felt myself melting like chocolate in the brown leather, sleepy from what the winter will be. We were early, a few hours early, early enough that I was restless. I was off the Hologram socially this month - vowing only to go on the Dirt instagram, using it only for work. Anticipatorily, I looked for hints of who I would see that night - the poets all becoming friends now. A PPS repost and a few hearts going off. Ash’s story, asking around for a ride, their truck a bitch to parallel park in the city but I’m paraphrasing. I asked their address. In the Soul, they asked if I lived in SoPo. I said, “No, but I had some time, wanted you to come.
I parked in front of the theater and the book bar was more full than I had left it, Ash and I in step and heading towards the back, waving. That familiar thrill came back, heart eyes at friends, candles lit one by one. The overwhelm never came, we were safe here. Happy, here. We loosened our ties in unison, outside for a winter spliff, poems in our pockets, poets at our backs. A dream, of course, a dream.
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I N T H E R E C O R D I N G
Post grilled cheese & soup and pre-pre-show spliff, the Wizard was still composing their piece, still working out the kinks in their translation, still decoding dreams with the careful tension of a clockmaker. Silk tie & knit vest to match. They have gotten back into translation, lately, picked up the ink-pooled pen and got tedious about it, tinkering w/ the message and the leaf it blows in on.
I’m imagining a button pin that reads, Ask The Wizard About Translation Sometime
At the start of the night, they were struggling w/ the typical trope about dream writing and dream media. How to break the illusion of the dream into waking world. How to shoot down the dove w/ the bow of animal hunger. How to say, …and then I woke up! w/out hating oneself. The Wizard does what I’ve seen them do before w/ poetry, go in through the back door of the thing, subvert the discomfort, begin w/ what they are avoiding and expound it into it’s own ecosystem, stars among stars. I think the breaking is visceral in this one - it breaks three times if you’re asking me.
The delicate balance of reality in all dreamlike creativity, the subversive surrealism, what we think and what we feel and what does it all mean anyway?? I tell the poets, it all means exactly what you think it means, you just have to know what you think of things. I recall Jung. I recall Sighswoon. I recall conversations had w/ friends and artists and intuitives. At the café tables, we joke about where they come from and who we all are, our handwriting and how we are haunted.
A poet says, I heard that you are everyone in your dreams, and I started dreaming differently. I say, Yes, and. In The Point Obscure, the Wizard talks about a light from the other side clawing and I think of Spirit. I think of subconscious, the murky magical thing it can be. Our collaborators, the Universe. I love that they call it an adventure. It breaks again, more doors, Seven of Cups energy, perspectives all around, splicing it all into unknown again.
When you look up dream poems half stoned sitting like girlhood, belly down on floral bedspread, space heater w/ the door closed in December, you get old poems. I wished I could word search all the books in my house but that tech doesn’t exist yet. Looking up poems on the Internet is a sorry, incomplete task. Academic hierarchies and poor organization. I wasn’t looking for ay classic or modernist pieces. I was looking for a poem that felt like a dream more than anything else. If the word dream was in it, bonus. In these prompts, I like to try and find example poems that sister the piece I bring to the room.
Thriftbooks sent me a notification that an Alice Notley book I had on my Wishlist was back in stock and I barked a laugh. No, of course, I said to the angels on the floor. Alice Notley is the dreamweaver. When I was rewriting the poem excerpt in my notebook on that sticky bar top by the door, I fell into it like an impressionist painting. I almost didn’t write my own poem because this poem did much more simply what I was trying to do. What I love about Notley’s work is how much she plays w/ the Now/Not Now of it all, a dreamlike play that poetry, especially, lends itself to so beautifully. Even the break, the wake up, is made magical w/ words where audio or video would still be harsh. I love the drowning awake/asleep feeling in this piece, it’s what I was looking for in my own work.
I especially love the last few lines, in this excerpt at least. Here are the words you are looking for feels like the odd clarity that dreams give, the strange sense they make. But I wanted something different, reads like a response to Spirit, a push back when even dreams elude us from Desire. I think of how, as we age, we dream more about what we do in waking life, looking down at our hands like video game, holding drink and pen and steering wheel. Even in dreams, wanting something different. Or is this it? The writer asks right after. Is this Heaven? Is waking life all we could really dream?
Anything, a voice says, Anything’s different. This I’ve interpreted on opposite ends of the same arrow. One reading could be from the perspective of lack, of please, give me anything, anything different, still asking, like that Hana Vu song, waiting for something, anything striking. The other reading is one from the perspective of abundance, of possibility, of anything could happen and anything is different than the limited perspective we ourselves have even in dreams. Life beyond, beyond wildest imaginations. Ihope, I dream.
One thing that I write about when I don’t know what to write about is dreams and I use the term dream liberally. Sometimes I make up dreams just to say something I can’t say wide awake. Sometimes my poems are just dreams I had, colors, images, a certain feeling. Often, in poetry, I’m trying to make sense of things as if it were all a dream, a rough translation of life, lots of wandering hallways and doors. On the night of the Workshop, this poem was a stanza or two less. When I reread it at Lincoln’s last week, it was longer and in five pieces instead of six. I think five is the correct number though, I’ll edit that after this.
I. Watching my cats sleep, watching my hands wash dishes, seeing my neighbor across the street and wondering if they will end up in my dreams tonight, the way I conjure people up and they feel it, the way I feel like I’m running when I’m standing over the sink, the way my cat kicks and twitches under my chin in the mornings, the way I love thunder and turbulence and know every day is building towards something.
II. I stole from this entry in September and looked down at my feet again. This was written in a week of no dreams but that felt surreal, weighed like a dream, saying something w/ nothing. I sit like Earth and drift like air. I am reaching, like Notley, for possibility.
III. A dream I had of Lazlo, three years ago now.
IV. A dream I had quickly before waking, ‘22
V. Dreams I have of carrying seeds and being planted, waking for dayjob before I can collect them fully. Some days I wake up and choose softness, undone and unfinished, billowy, my soul beneath me. I keep my music dreamy and look out the driver’s side to see the light touching everything. I remember I dreamt about the artists, I remember it freaked me out.
VI. I am trying to collect my dreams and make sense of them as collectively. It evades me. It is me. I am Desire day in and day out and there’s no pretending in dreams.
The clipboard is in my car, w/ the microphone, w/ the speaker, snow tires on just in time. Everyone’s names clutched from the air and written for the archive of our lives. No Workshop in November ~ we’ll see you when the winter tilts into reality.
xoxo
✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, be sure to follow Portland Poets Society on instagram and please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.
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