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“Poetry, here, meaning: whatever language helps you sleep at night” I can’t sleep—I’ve wandered home drunk high and exulted in that pre-dawn glow, flopped on my student futon, some poetry book grabbed from the shelf or picked up from the reading pile on the floor bedside A poem I’d read earlier, or one assigned for a class, or one open before me by happy chance, that’s now singing with vibrant, resonant meaning, and I read it through, it’s a long poem, to exhaustion, until my mind just can’t make anything more of it or my eyes blur too much or wander in different directions and I have to pass out though I’d rather read on... I can’t sleep—Some rhythmic twitch in the hypnogogic body pulls me out of bed to get down that line before I do fall asleep and it’s lost forever despite my repeating it to myself over and over sure given its certain rightness I’ll remember it come morning, which I never do, a line that leads to another and another urged by the rhythm of that twitch, that then call to be reread, altered, played around and with, rearranged, changed back to the original... I can’t sleep—The lines of the poem I wrote today pull me out of bed to reread them, repeatedly, reorder the lines, change them back to the original, then change them again, in tercets, then couplets, then back to tercets again, reading the poem over repeatedly, changing this verb that pronoun, googling or looking up a reference so the figures are correctly suggestive, hitting on the right phrasing or syntax so it makes a subtle joke or links up with that correctly suggestive figure... I can’t sleep—I get up to trace the thoughts I’ve only had a chance to begin to form and develop having gone to bed, complicated lines of speculation about how a poetry might be dialectically negative, resistant and revolutionary, why, despite such constant thoughts, my own poems gravitate to a writing degree zero, or how to collate the poems I have, or what I might title the book they make, or where send it, or how it doesn’t matter, “a book is a box”, and all that matters is writing the poems down, as they come, as they’re given me to write them, just as I drift off to sleep and get up to get them down so they’re not lost, or, once they’re down, get up to look and work them over, to change the lines, the stanzas, the words, to relate the figures, to change it back again, change it again... I’m asleep
I haven’t written a poem since I don’t know when
I’ve lost faith I’ll ever write a poem again
But I’m not asleep, not unconscious: I’m dreaming, in ursurreal wild colour, as I always do, and the dream is long and complicated and vivid and profound, and when I finally wake up, well-rested, the fading memories of that dream, of its complications, its vivid profundity, remind me even when the poems don’t give themselves to me, when they don’t float phrases through my hypnogogic mind to get me up to write them down so they won’t be lost, and their rhythm makes me write down more lines, that I go over and rework as I’m wont, even then, in my sleep, the poems are at work, keeping me awake. |
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