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30 September 2024

Posted by Tabby Hayward

Dream Poetry

9 attending

This week, we explored dream poetry. To begin, we listened to Liszt - Liebestraum No. 3 (Love Dream) for a free write - what images, colours, places/landscapes, people/animals, movement, weather did the piece suggest? Did a story start to emerge? When did change come - what kind of changes?

After hearing some beautiful and evocative ideas, from ballrooms to a Laurel and Hardy-esque sketch over a picnic, we looked at some poems about dreams - an extract from the beginning of The Glass Essay by Anne Carson, Dream by Sir William Askew (courtier to King Henry VIII), Bottom's Dream by Clive Wilmer and Dreambaby by Chloe Elliott. We explored and discussed these dream poems - plunging the reader in, with the most surprising image, like the speaker in a volcano in 'Dreambaby'; waking from a dream and trying to ground oneself, in 'The Glass Essay'; using a famous character from literature, in 'Bottom's Dream'; and setting the context for the dream 'after three pints of Vanzeeli's wine, as in 'Dream' by William Askew. Inspired by these four very different approaches, the writers worked on their own dream poetry.

Here are two rich and evocative examples, from Lawrence and Tia:

By Lawrence:

Father Time takes me back to childhood.
He keeps his back to be, black robe and hood lined in gold
thread, thread I sense rather than see;
It moves almost as waves do, except, up, down and around
again.
He steals glances at Mother Nature through our French
Windows; his head traces the flickering motions of our liquid amber.
He sighs. I feel his breath pass through my bones, coming to
land heavy at the edge of my soul as he says, “Beautiful this time of year,
isn’t she?”

By Tia:

Light without
darkness within
A blanket of stars
whispering
soft and true
A secret of their own

 An empty throne
Always just out of reach
or unreachable?
Only you can decide
which path to take

 Focus
now, you must
and trust
that you will find your way through
the darkness somehow

For without darkness
Light cannot lie within

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