Thursday, July 22, 2010

"Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."

from Fragments of a Broken Poetics
by Jennifer Moxley
from Chicago Review, Spring 2010

(once again i am lifting from Silliman's blog - and from Pierre Joris, who also linked to this piece)
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2 comments:

  1. Robert MossJuly 22, 2010 at 2:16 PM

    I think of poetry as dreaming on paper. I also love the statement by a young Moroccan poet to Stefania Pandolfo that "all poetry is the result of flooding." I retell the story of the dream of a flood that turned a gun-happy tribal shaikh into the foremost poet in a rural Moroccan community that reveres poets here: http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/2009/03/poetry-comes-from-flooding_23.html

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  2. PierreJuly 22, 2010 at 9:26 PM

    Ah! Robert! — "Impasse of the Angels" has been one of the most essential books for me ever since it came out.

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