SELF-INTERVIEW IV
WRITING “NIGHT THOUGHTS”
(night thoughts: 70 dreams & notes from an analysis was published last month by Knopf.)
I’ve always told myself that, as a poet, I’m only waiting and listening. However, making night thoughts wasn’t like that. I did a long analysis, studying my dreams–it lasted ten years. The dreamwork, the practice of free-associating from dreams, fascinated me. It was both anguishing and liberating.
Urged by an agent, I set out to write a book about the experience. I studied my notebooks and journals; I selected the important dreams; I began to write. I planned to describe the dreams and then explicate the process of using them to uncover and understand lost and troubling experiences.
The agent wanted me to write the book differently: it should be about my life in New York, my life as a single blond poet suffering over love in artsy downtown New York, while in psychoanalysis. A memoir of a sexy life in New York–but my life, despite all the cocktail parties and art openings, was not all that action-packed or sexy. I tried alternating discussions of the analytic sessions with accounts of meeting my boyfriend; it didn’t work.
Finally the agent and I couldn’t agree, and I gave up.
Almost a year passed.
One afternoon I sat down aimlessly and began to write out the dreams as poems. This was not a decision; it was an impulse without forethought. Once I had begun, my mind rifled through all the dreams I had chosen and pondered for the prose book; I made a list of them and tackled them one by one.
This was not like writing on request or choosing a topic; here was something that was burbling or burning inside me, longing for expression (I don’t know which it is, water or fire).
These were narrative poems, narrating a story I already knew; I hadn’t done this before. I didn’t cry or laugh as I wrote them. I was skeptical of this working method but carried on.
I thought at first that the poems were too formulaic; I believe I thought this because I knew the narrative of the dreams before I began to write the poems.
And yet, the narrative of a dream by nature is lyrical, surreal, hopping over space and constraints.
I began to see that often, writing the poem as a dream, I was working out its meaning. I had understood the dream–from my free associations of years before. But here was a new level of meaning that contained a surprise. So the poem was a further free association from the matter of the dream.
Many of these sprang fully formed; others I had to try again and again until I got the right tone and angle. I couldn’t leave out a dream because the poem didn’t work; I needed it for the evolution of the story, so I had to try. Trying and not trying at the same time is a curious exercise.
More than trying to get the right lines, I was trying to get in the zone where the right lines would come to me.
Here are two poets on dreams:
Aiken:
Oh God, Oh God, let the sore soul have peace
Deliver it from this bondage of harsh dreams
“Preludes for Memnon II”
Keats:
The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes,
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.
from “Hyperion”
I want to say that I had complete conviction, and many doubts about this book–at the same time, or alternately.
MAKING A HYBRID BOOK–HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
At first my editor was as bewildered by the dream poems as I had been by the dreams. I had had a mental picture–a vision (I use this word lightly)–of a cross-referenced book, with notes and marginalia. I wrote some comments about some of the images that appeared in the dreams; showing them to her, I asked her if she would like me to annotate the sequence. To my surprise she said yes.
The notes, as I wrote them, gathered or spun into a narrative. This was moving and troubling and satisfying. It was also what I had been trying for in the prose book: a study of the dreams and the revelations that unfolded as I considered them.
I don’t have much to say about the index right now: only that it was a fascinating and evocative undertaking.
So the hybrid book was not a plan: it was an evolution.
The jacket shows a loop of ribbon, in many beautiful colors, on a black background. Perfect for the darkness out of which the dream emerges–and for the colors of the dreams.
Another designer (from the same team) posted her designs on the web: many small scribbles in different colors of ink, on a vanilla background; cut-out items of clothing, also in many colors, floating on a vanilla background. These are fresh, marvelous jacket designs, reflecting aspects of the dreamwork; but they don’t quite match the darker, harsher mood of the book.
One of the names that arises in the dreams is "Sabon"; to my wonder, the book designer came up with a font also named Sabon: See the “note on the type” at the back. Here is an extra, unexpected layer of hybrid meaning.
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