Dream Awake: Poetry & Prose

Poetic Dreamers (Half Awake, Half Asleep)

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Such things are objectively verifiable. You can tell, in a free verse poem or a poem in traditional form, how the syntax and the line structure play against each other.

Consciousness in Poetry and Prose

That, too, is verifiable enough. But then there is a kind of subjective standard that has to do with what you think song or singability or musical quality might be, and that's going to be harder to get at. All you can do is what Pound recommended, and that is to put one example beside another, see the differences and talk about them insofar as they can be talked about.

What do you think it is about song that has to do with encapsulating experience, with keeping things here? In this example of vision coupled with song, and the mind singing of itself to stay awake—what do you think is going on there? I suppose you're talking about continuity. The music in a song or in a poem is its continuity, what keeps it coherent and alive. It then becomes a sort of metaphor for whatever it is that keeps us alive in the world, all of us creatures together.

But what you're trying to do in any kind of writing is to keep the thing continuous from end to end. You can interrupt a continuity for certain effects, if you want to—you can put a caesura somewhere in the middle of a line—but if the continuity isn't strong enough to accept the interruption and carry through it, then you've lost more than you've gained.

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A novel is an attempt to ride out continuously to its end the impulse of a story. That's how you know when to stop.

When you can't continue, when the impulse is exhausted, you put down the final dot. Another instance of song that comes spontaneously from the wind is from A Continuous Harmony , from "Notes from an Absence and a Return": Then one can hear the songs that travel through the air like the Indians at the peyote meeting. Is that what you had in mind?

Well, I now think we have to be pretty careful about how we resort to Castaneda, or any other writer, about a culture that's radically different from our own. The old Indian don Juan in Castaneda's books comes from a culture that prepared him to know when and how to do the things that he did.

Our culture, such as it is, prepares us differently. I remember Gary Snyder saying that the action of LSD or peyote on an unprepared mind is like the action of chemical fertilizer on an infertile piece of ground. The alignment between our life and the life of the world—in my work that's more of a goal than a realization.

You may be having moments, you may be able in parts of your life to get yourself fairly aligned with the creation. But how are you going to do it in any profoundly meaningful way when, for instance, you're utterly dependent on fossil fuels? How do we adapt farming to the nature of a given place? Howard was saying if you want to know how to farm, look at the forest.

And you see my little farm, rough and marginal as it is, is surrounded by the woods. So I have Howard's paradigm in front of me every day. Wes Jackson says if you want to know what's the matter with the Midwestern grain fields, lay them side to side, so to speak, with the native prairie, and note the differences—much as Pound says to do with poetry. And, of course when we don't align our methods of agriculture and forestry with the processes of the local ecosystem, then we get all kinds of trouble: The hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the continuation of agricultural error in the Midwest.

Howard said that we had to see the health of soil, plants, animals and humans as "one great subject. You were talking about making moments impossible as we go along and creating with fossil fuel usage these other problems that absorb any kind of surplus energy that we might have to observe or be aligned [with].

Something like what Thoreau was getting at when he said "simplify" and do without. In A Continuous Harmony , in "Notes from an Absence and a Return," which is a series of journal entries, you recount a walk when you had a magnifying glass, looking into some bluebell flowers. That's in A Continuous Harmony?

I don't know what's in those books laughing. I've used a lens that way lots of times. I didn't know I started so early. It made me think that when you have enough desire or energy to do things like that, the more you look, the more you see. To me it seems that is a possibility only when, as you say, the usage of resources is in equilibrium. In that context, what are the limits of human possibility when we're released from our own entrapments?

I don't know what it would be like to be out of this trap of industrialism and the fossil fuels. What we've made is a damned mess. I've put in a lot of work here in trying to use this old place well, and I've put in a lot of work writing about agriculture and other issues, trying to find a way out of the mess. But you have to qualify Thoreau a little bit. He said "simplify, simplify.

But finally you don't do without things by simplification. The mind that does without things is in fact a lot more complex than the mind that doesn't do without things. I lived a far simpler life when I lived in New York City than I live here, because the life of a mere consumer is essentially simple. If you want anything, then you go buy it, if you have the money. If you don't have the money, then you don't go buy it.

Suppose you undertake to raise—and Thoreau quit on this part of his experiment—suppose you undertake to raise the food you eat rather than buy it at the store. That's much more complex. Suppose you undertake to raise your own meat and milk as well as vegetables—that makes eating enormously complex—and if you eat without destroying the ground you're eating from, it becomes even more complex. But when you do manage to work without destruction, those moments are indispensable, just as patches of unspoiled wilderness are indispensable.

They give you a standard.

Access Check

Sir Albert Howard found his standard in the woods, Wes Jackson finds his in the native prairie. Good work, by those standards, becomes itself a standard. I use those standards to think about the practical problems of farming, but I use them also in my work as a poet and fiction writer. I'm using my own moments of good work, "Sabbath moments" I call them, as a standard. And so when I'm working at the mess I at least know what for; I know what I'm hoping for.

That brings up Wordsworth's idea that the source of poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotions that takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. So the moment recollected informs the whole of the life. I was interested in how sustainability would transform itself to function in the moment of the spontaneous powerful emotion. Well, if you lived in a sustainable society, one thing you'd feel initially, before you got used to it, would be relief. It would be a hell of a big relief. And it would be a kind of freedom. It would be freedom from the knowledge that, by living in it, you're helping to destroy the world.

Imagine how free you would feel if you knew for sure that you weren't doing that, and if there was a way laid out for you and other people to quit doing that. But we're perceiving these moments from the perspective of the mess we're in, and we're also perceiving the mess we're in for what it is because we have these moments. But theorizing about the origin of poetry seems to me a little bit futile.

I don't think Wordsworth knew very much about it.

Poems about Dreams & Sleep

I don't think I know very much about it. In the first place, when you're at work on these things, when you're really at work, you're not paying attention to how it's happening; you're just making it happen. It would be like a quarterback stopping in the middle of a play and explaining to himself what he's about to do. That's not the way it's done. Something you're not conscious of is happening. It happens to poets, it happens to athletes, it happens to horsemen, it happens to good workmen of all kinds. Why did you make this choice and not that one? Poets and artists in interviews love to be asked questions like that, and then they love to tell you exactly why.

If they're any good, I don't think they know. I think all that's fiction.

I don't trust it. Wordsworth said a number of things I don't trust very much. He said some very good things, too. Do you think poems like "Work Song" from Clearing are instances of singing to keep the mind awake? Writing poems, I mean; do you think they might be in some instances the songs that come through the air? It infuses the nervous system and is integrated into our ongoing experience. As we have said, in this experience the experiencer is beyond the boundaries of thought; beyond any boundaries at all, beyond even the boundaries of space and time. This is an experience of a developing state of consciousness, of expanding human awareness.

We are all familiar actually with experiencing different states of consciousness. As you read this article, you are in one right now. As I write for you, I too am in that state. We call it waking state of consciousness. When we go to bed later today, we will fall into sleeping state of consciousness and then dream state. Every state of consciousness has a specific style of experience.

When we are awake, we look around and experience the objects and circumstances that surround our lives. When asleep, we have no experience.

Famous Poems

In dream state, we have an illusory style of experience. These then are three different states of consciousness, with three unique styles of experience. It also turns out these distinct states of consciousness are supported by three different styles of physiological functioning. Our experiences are dependent upon how our bodies and our brains are functioning. In waking state, the body is characterized by the most activity. In dream state of consciousness, the body is characterized by some activity.

In deep sleep, the body is characterized by deep rest. Scientific researchers who have been looking at the experience of transcendental consciousness for more than 40 years have concluded that scientifically it is a fourth major state of consciousness. Seemingly disparate words, sounds, images, ideas, themes, and events connect across the poems and become like the one-dimensional particles of string theory—they begin to vibrate. Poems merge and resonate with each other—we can see and travel through one to any other. These interconnections deepen further into the book, and suitably with oceanic imagery.

Most evocations of the senses in literature, for reasons of clarity of expression and concept, concentrate on one or two senses at a time, but Beesley juxtaposes them all together: When I was reading Jam Sticky Vision, I found multiple uncanny moments that coincided with my actual life experiences, two of which are simple enough to explain here: A double knot in my dream. I had a double. There are no seams. It has adhered to a memory …. The morning train trips become the ideal fodder for Beesley to discover and rediscover wonder in the mundane. Also, as a newish parent myself, I found that the descriptions of interrupted early morning sleep—of settling and re-settling a toddler, and of the subsequent difficulty but absolute necessity of waking up first thing to tend to breakfast and all manner of morning rituals—ooze with that irl feeling.

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