read write prompt #100: turning dreams into poetry, by celebrity poet bruce covey

by Bruce Covey

Bruce Covey Explores Dreams and Poetry

“The structure of dreams makes for lousy poetry — the associational and tangential but linear structure of the form is so overdetermined.”

Dreams are so entertaining! But the structure of dreams makes for lousy poetry — the associational and tangential but linear structure of the form is so overdetermined (a rhetoric everyone experiences daily, then tries to repress!) that the imagery quickly becomes flat and dull. Or we tend to bring our Freud- and Jung-inspired critical tools into the fray, producing a piece that is tiresomely analytical.

These hurdles, however, don’t require that we abandon our dream lives entirely when writing poems; instead, we might consider rassling one out of its own structure and into an inherently poetic form, out of its visual world and into word.

This prompt (thank you, Dana, for inviting me to participate!) won’t yield a well-honed masterpiece, but the odds are good — if you’re honest with yourself and the text you’re producing — that you’ll create something which sparkles in its own unruly way.

Here goes:

1. Bring to mind one of your most vivid dreams (preferably one you haven’t already spent a lot of time analyzing in therapy).
2. Choose 8 to 12 “moments” of varying narrative significance from the dream (i.e., one might be a brief flash of an image that seems to have no significance, while another might represent the dream’s central theme) and record them in a numbered list.
3. As you develop that numbered list, let each dream moment find its own independence as a separate poetic line; if you have to, spend a day or two or a week or two on each line. During that time, work only on that individual line.
4. When you’re finally happy with all of the numbered units as a line of poetry, turn back to the piece as a whole and see if the lines belong in a different order. Play with different potential sequences until you’re happy with the order of the poem (no longer the dream).
5. At this point, if you have to, remove the numbers. If you’re really into polish, form them into stanzas, play with line breaks and transitions, remove an overly unruly line or two and add another. Or you can just sit back and revel in your new poem’s messiness.

Here’s one I made recently using this technique. I like to think of it as garnet-speckled rubble. I like rubble.

X=13, Y=21

Where there are coins, there’s matter,
A narrow strip of over 700,000 in this province.
Today the birds are green and the roofs are woven
Of string. You pick the spot, please:
Its zoo built with moment upon moment of cola fountains
(although the one at the center sprouts ginger ale), or
The checkerboard landscape with a single checker making me sweat.
A nest of spiders spins its lines of code — where something is and isn’t —
underneath the netting, the surface para-graph,
A wooden barrel in front of every scrap.
Half kangaroo and half gorilla would be very versatile,
Especially here, where rain has turned the road to muck.
Next to the thicket and upon a rock, my translator
Teaches card tricks to all the babies, changes their diapers.
Later we played an asphalt fight until the killer bees,
Digitally enhanced, came — an extensive natural race
That brings the good in night, its tropical players.

I hope you have fun!

Bruce Covey is the author of three books of poetry, The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires, Elapsing Speedway Organism, and Ten Pins, Ten Frames. His recent poems also appear or are forthcoming in Aufgabe, Verse, LIT, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket, Sonora Review, Lungfull, Cimarron Review and other journals. He edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut.

The poem included in this post is shared with permission from the author. Contact Bruce Covey before using or reproducing the piece.