January/2001
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NIGHT ERRANDS: Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg |
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"Poetry is a hard-won kind of dream," writes Roderick Townley, a poet himself and editor of Night Errands. In his book, 26 contemporary poets explore the links between their dreams and their poems. There are no debates here about whether or not dreams have meaning. These poets all acknowledge their debt to unconscious sources and the benefits of sleeping "with one eye open." "...A poem is like...a dream scrubbed up and sent to school," writes Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. "The wonderful thing about starting with dream content," she says, "is the unpredictability of the outcome." For Kumin, dreams that evolve into poems almost invariably involve family members or close friends. She had a succession of vivid premonitory dreams about the impending death of her brother from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, she reports, the early dreams rich with denial, the later ones horrific in their acceptance. Listen! I love you! Kumin describes vivid, lingering dreams and poems about her best friend and fellow poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974. These dreams, she says, initially reflected her bewilderment and desolation. Later, they expressed anger as well as sorrow. Many years after Sexton's death, Sexton's appearance in a dream triggered Kumin's reflections on her own mortality. ...You haven't changed. In another essay, Patricia Traxler explores the utility of dreams. The dream you can recount in detail the next day, she writes, may prove "a tool or resource useful and beneficial to your everyday existence." But the dream that hovers out of reach holds more import for her work. "It captures our imaginations, inspires in us a longing, a striving to retrieve what has been lost to us before we ever had it," she asserts. "To feel whole again we must retrieve it and reconstitute it in words." Edward Hirsch reports that he sleeps poorly. While some writers build huge gothic mansions in the rolling countryside of sleep, he asserts, he merely leases a room in an apartment beside a busy road. Sleeplessness at 4 a.m. torments him: The hour of nausea at middle
age, Yet even as Hirsch bemoans his insomnia, he celebrates it. On those nights when he comes up against a blank wall, sleep sometimes provides "an odd stuttering in the brain," and morning brings fresh thoughts delivered "like a postal service from the deep." Other contributors to this engaging and thought-provoking book include Laurel Blossom, Michael Burns, Nicholas Christopher, Sarah Cotterill, Rachel Hadas, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, David Ignatow, Robert Kelly, Faye Kicknosway, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Gerard Malanga, Paul Mariani, J. D. McClatchy, Wesley McNair, Joyce Carol Oates, David Ray, Diane Wakoski, Jane O. Wayne, Theodore Weiss, Richard Wilbur, and Robley Wilson. |
Copyright (c) 2001
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