“The dream thinks like a poet” – Bert O. States

If our dreams think like our poems, then every night gives us each two hours of rough drafts for poems, in a state of mind where metaphor, wild and brilliant leaps of association, puns, extraordinary images, and so much more are offered us. If poems, as a parallel, also think like dreams, what do those forms of thinking sound like—what are the forms in how their sayings move, and why? How do poems and dreams proceed—with what interior logic–from one assertion or image to another, and how does that procession differ from less “bizarre” ways of speaking? In this workshop we’ll dig into poems and into dreams to learn from dreams about how poems move and learn from poems about the imagistic, linguistic and narrative assemblages of dreams. This is a generative workshop using exercises, dream-images and fragments, borrowed images and dialogue from workshop colleagues’ dreams to lead to new forms of poems not by imitating or recording our dreams but by building poems that learn from dreams’ intricate structures of metaphor, juxtaposition, metonymy, wordplay, and radical compression.