“As No Science Explains Adequately How Dreams Work, No One Can Explain How A Poem Works. Where Is A

“As no science explains adequately how dreams work, no one can explain how a poem works. Where is a dream, sure, but where is a poem? I believe somewhat in Williams’ formulation that a poem is a machine made out of words, but, finally, the poem isn’t where the words are. The poem is somewhere between the words and the reader, or it is the words taken into the reader, who exists within the general society and its history. You enter the poem when you open to its page or remember it, having memorized it, but it is a much larger world than the page. It is transformed when you say it out loud; and it changes from reading to reading—you, the reader, change it, for one thing, as you change—or is it that it changes for you? If you are reading a poem by Catullus, you are in no way the same as an ancient Roman reading it: you are not that person—that kind of person, though it is that poem, as those words. But even if you know Latin, you don’t “speak Latin,” and you haven’t much feeling for what it was like to be a Roman. A poem, like a dream, has an odd relation to time: it is in time, like a poem by Catullus, but it is timeless, as an object made out of words. A dream lasts a moment but endures as a memory might: but it didn’t really happen. A memory can be backed-up, but no outside observer can find the particulars of a dream in time and space (evidence of REM or whatever isn’t evidence of what happened in your dream). A poem didn’t or doesn’t happen, it’s a still group of words on a page; and a story doesn’t really happen either. We say that dreams, poems, and stories occur in the imagination, or the psyche, or whatever word we’re using right now, to invent another entity that doesn’t concretely exist to put them in. But doesn’t the “real world” exist in some collective category like that? All we do is dream; we live in poems and stories we invent.”

— Alice Notley on Writing from Dreams ‹ Literary Hub