Writing Poetry from your Dreams

Guest blogger, Anita Sullivan

There’s no reliable, repeatable process for writing a good poem. You just have to plunge in somewhere and start around the circle—or rather, the spiral. Even if you have an idea, an image or a kind of “plot” in mind, the real subject is hidden away like the head of a pin inside a sofa cushion, and you will have to bounce around and pinch and sift through reams of squishy stuff before you recognize it as the source of your unease. Only then you can go about writing the sting out of it.

What I’m saying is that you need to zero in on what’s really bothering you before you can get going on a poem. Writing a good poem will be like tracking a wild creature and convincing it to stay with you awhile. Only imagination will allow you to do this work, so learning to be a good poet means nurturing a healthy imagination.

That’s why I steal ideas from my dream journals. Dreams are free raw material; they belong only to you, and they are a constant reminder of all the variations and possibilities “out there” that your normal word-bound brain could never think up in a bazillion years. No, I don’t mean you want to be writing poems about flying houses or blue cows. I’m saying that the heart of your subject often reveals itself to you most truly in a state that does not involve words. Dreams speak in the language of metaphor, which is an ancient and very physically direct way that we humans interact with our world. Visiting and paying attention to your dreams is one way of preparing yourself to be a fine poet.

A short example: I was moved by a newspaper account of a young woman from Nigeria who witnessed the brutal violence that killed all the other members of her family. She escaped by lying still in a ditch full of blood and pretending to be dead. Although I had read similar stories of atrocities, this one kept bothering me more than usual. I remembered a dream I had about a series of volcanic caves out in the desert. The place was like a huge sculpture, with hundreds of secret nooks and crannies, and a community of mysterious people seemed to be living there. I turned this setting into a “safe house” for women who had been through atrocities. The second stanza of the poem goes like this:

Reading while eating together in the bloodlit
evenings candles not yet
as up from the basaltic
caves they come to sit on the
floor among cushions.

Thus a dream allowed me to speak directly/indirectly about something vital, and surprisingly, to allow beauty to enter a space I would normally think had been closed to such solace.

Anita Sullivan has recently published a poetry collection Garden of Beasts with Airlie Press. She is also the author of two collections of essays and a poetry chapbook available at seventhdragon.com.

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