Dreams are a popular source for poetry. My hatred of Freudian dream theory aside, I think their twisted logic, random neuron-level associations, and, well, dreaminess can make them excellent poetic material if deployed properly. (Not in a straight-up "let me tell you this dream I had" way. Just think about how bored you are when anyone besides a really good friend starts blathering about some odd dream they had.)

Though my own poetry is fairly straightforward on the spectrum, I have made use of dreams in my work. One poem, "Sleeping Sick," takes snippets from dreams and that half-awake state just before or after sleep, and attempts to recreate or represent the experience of fitful fever dreaming. When I was in junior high, I even wrote a couplet in a dream. It must have been an early sign of my interest in metrical poetry that it was rhymed trochaic tetrameter. I still remember it almost verbatim:

[Some fish], herring, cod, and mullet
All slide down the penguin's gullet.

(It's also indicative of my bookish youth that I knew at that age that a mullet was a fish, but not that it was a hairstyle.)

Anyway, I write this because of a very interesting experience I had this weekend: I had a disturbing dream, not one that I found terrifying while I was in it, but one that definitely unsettled me when I woke up. In it, myself and three other people were stuck in an endlessly repeating horror/slasher movie cycle. Each one would end with three or all of us dead, and then we'd reincarnate in a new movie. In one, one of the people went crazy Shining-style and killed the other three. In the last one before I woke, we were in a small house, fighting off a wave of undead until they overran us, much like Night of the Living Dead (or one of those movies). When I woke up, I knew I had to wake up all the way, or I'd just fall back into that dream. As I thought, I realized I could take a thematic element from that dream and make it into a poem, though I wouldn't use the dream in a literal sense. The next day (Sunday), I finished the whole draft of that poem. A very interesting experience.

So how have you others used dreams in your poetry, if at all?

Okay, Steve passed me the baton for this music thing, and I have nothing else to write about, so here goes:

Total volume of music on your computer: well, my mp3 folder has 1,671 tracks right now, a total of 6.56 GB.

Last CD I bought: I don't buy that many CDs. Last one I remember is A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step.

Song playing at the moment: "Could You Be the One" by Husker Du.

I admired whomever it was the last time a stick was going around who pared the tree by not passing it (sadly, can't remember who, but it was someone on that blogroll over there). Thus, I'm not going to pass the baton. I know it'll get to everyone eventually anyway...

---

While I'm talking about music, I must highly recommend Mezmerize, the new System of a Down record (part 1 of a double album, with the second disc coming out in fall). You have to like brutal, extreme music to like this, but it's just incredible work. System of a Down is like putting the Dead Kennedys, Tool, Frank Zappa, and an Armenian folk singer in a blender on the highest setting. "BYOB" has been all over the radio and is pretty indicative of the craziness of the songs. System of a Down and Tool are really the only two bands you need to take out of alternametal. I highly recommend Mezmerize, which is where SoaD breaks completely free of those alt metal cliches.

Fun Out-of-Context Line of the Day

"The fact is, sometimes Jorie Graham goes to the shitter and stinks up the place for hours."

--Seth Abramson

Okay, as penance for the picture nonsense below, here's some actual writing about poetry. I saw a piece awhile back (I think it was on a blog, but I can't remember for sure, so if anyone can point me to it, I'll be grateful) about the various functions the title of a poem can serve. Since I can't recall where I saw it, I'm going to do a little noodling of my own on the various ways I think a title can work, with examples from literature, my own writing, and my editing experience.

(In the order I think of them)

1. Straightforward setting of the setting, subject, or scene so the poem can get right into description of it. James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" is a great example of this, about as specific as you can get. My own poems usually have a little thematic hint or editorializing in their scene-setting titles, but "Fishing at Flint Lake" is a straightforward example. Rose Kelleher's "Rays at Cape Hatteras" from the 2005 Eleventh Muse is another good example of such titling.

2. A very simple statement of thematic concept that illuminates the matter of the poem in a new way. This one gets overused by bad poets using titles like "Death," "Love," and so on. Jack Gilbert's "Divorce" provides us with an example from a good poem. I'm very leery of such titles both as a writer and editor, but one of my poems is called "A Little Schadenfreude," and Michael Hettich's "Forgiveness" provides us with a good one from the 2004 Muse.

3. Repetition of a key phrase or line from the poem, either exactly or in close paraphrase. This is often a phrase from near the end that you will hopefully not have sitting at the front of your consciousness by the time you get to the phrase in the text itself. Philip Levine's "What Work Is" comes to mind (and by "comes to mind" I mean "is the first good one I found in my personal anthology"). This is another tack I don't take that often in my own work (and actually it seems to be somewhat underused across poetry), but I have one called "Good Indians" that takes its title from a famous (mis)quote about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. From the Muse, we have Karen Donovan's "I Love to Stand on the Backs of the Turtles" using a key phrase.

4. An amusing/catchy play on words or phrase based on the poem to interest the reader before they know the poem. Aaron Anstett's "Man Saves Own Life" is a nice example. I tend to overdo these in my own works. "Prayer to a Higher Horsepower," which appeared in Deborah's 32 Poems, is one of my many.

5. Going back to 2 (sorry about the order issues), a more ambiguous statement about the theme to help understand the poem test. Frost's "The Most of It" is a good example. I'm running way short of time, so I'll drop my own titles from here now. I think this one, along with the straightforward scene-setting of 1, makes up most of the titles in poetry.

6. Poems with the word "poem" in the title. I tend to like poems less as they become meta-poetry, so it's surprising how often I've used this gimmick.

7. Untitled poems, most of which make me cringe. I only like untitled poems when the very fact that it's untitled somehow adds to the theme of the poem.

Sorry I ran out of time at the end here. Anyway, I'm sure there are more functions/types, and I hope to hear about them from you, plus come back to the topic later.

I know quite a few editors despise (or at least mildly disdain) simultaneous submissions. Personally, I don't have an issue with them at all, as I understand the desire to get your work out there, and know how long it can take to get your writing to the poetry "marketplace" even in the best circumstances. Also, the Eleventh Muse is set up so I can respond pretty fast most of the time, and as full editor I have yet to lose a poem I wanted (or even was still considering taking) to another publication.

Now this upcoming little rant here is not directed at conscientious editors like C. Dale, who does an amazing job sifting through tons of submissions, many more than I get, and responding in good time, to judge by Jeffery's response time database (which I just finished adding my own data to earlier this week, by the way). He (C. Dale, not Jeffery) has made his dislike of simultaneous submissions known, but the New England Review still accepts them (grudgingly, I guess), and I think that's a fine stance to have.

BUT

I say that if you edit a magazine that doesn't accept simultaneous submissions, and your average response time runs somewhere near or upward of 20 weeks, you've ceded the right to have that particular guideline followed. I'm looking at the following journals (just off the top of my head): The Hudson Review, The North American Review, and Fine Madness. It's one of poetry's common-knowledge "secrets" that many (if not a majority of) people aren't abiding by simultaneous submission guidelines anyway, but if you think I'm willingly going to kill five of my poems for five months to a year just for the maybe 1% chance that you'll accept one of them, you're nuts. I'll either send the poems somewhere else or ignore the guideline. I'm quite willing to abide by a no-simultaneous-submissions policy for an outlet that responds fast, but if you respond fast, I wonder why you need it in the first place. It really seems to me there are better ways of keeping a cap on the number of submissions, which is what most hoop-style guidelines are for anyway.

Next editorial pontification: e-mail versus snail-mail submissions.

Okay, evidently Peter and Kelli have started a (dare I say it?) meme of posting their first published poems. Since they're both in my "frequently read" section, and since my first poem is available online anyway, here goes. It was accepted in December 2003 and appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of Pivot, a good resource (with its online counterpart Expansive Poetry & Music Online) for formal poetry and occasional (and unfortunate) right-wing polemics. Anyway, here's my poem:


To a Sentinel Marmot

Warned by your trill, the colony
Has scurried to its burrow,
But you lie still with entrails staining
Your boulder-top, a barrow.

Tell us, you husk of altruism
Drizzling blood to feed
The foxes, alarm whistle mute,
Did you die satisfied?

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P. S. This poem is also going to be reprinted soon on Vintage Colorado Poetry (where another of my poems, "Pikes Peak Obscured," was the First Anniversary Poem) as part of a Memorial Day special on loss.

So the poetry panel I'm part of is going to be this Saturday. Here's a bare-bones outline of what I'm going to talk about:

Elements of poetry:
1. Diction & Syntax - the building blocks of any good writing
2. Figurative & Descriptive Language - metaphors, images, & allusions, the most frequently used elements
3. Sonics - Not just straight rhyme and meter but other effects of sound
4. Line & Stanza - an area beginning poets are most likely to neglect
5. Argument & Theme - perhaps the most important, definitely the most delicate

Tired poem subjects:
1. I was walking in nature and had a sudden epiphany at the end
2. Dead friends/relatives/pets/Sylvia Plath
3. It sure is difficult/inspirational/Important to write poetry
4. "Riffing" on language or metaphysical pseudophilosophy
5. Condescending poems about pitying the poor/disadvantaged

Things to do:
1. Know the rules before you break them
2. Know your target audience and think about how you deploy each of the above poetic elements to reach them
3. Be aware of a world outside the self and what the average person can see everywhere
4. Be willing to employ humor, even in a serious poem
5. Don't be afraid to lie - "it really happened that way" is no excuse for not improving your poem

Read Sarah Lindsay's "Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree" as an example of a good poem