“Too Many Questions” from Dream Logic

On January 28  I read this poem from Dream Logic in honor of Mme Colette Aboulker-Muscat who taught me so much about the power of images. January 28 is also the anniversary of her birth. Are there really any coincidences?

This poem  illustrates what I mean by “Dream Logic”.  The prose poem can be formless or shapeless, but I feel a true prose poem obeys the hidden rules of dream logic– the logic of thinking in images, and of moving along the line of feelings. The form of the poem– a prose paragraph– evokes the waking mind’s  quest for clarity and logic, in that sense the paragraph is a form like a clear window with square boundaries. The poem within the form deliberately cuts against that waking life logic and moves along the lines of imagery. The ego desires a fixed identity, and tells stories to keep that identity solid.  But the imagination has no fixed identity, and deliberately subverts the logic of the ego.

Here’s the YouTube video from that reading. The second poem I read is “Too Many Questions”

This particular poem is dedicated to Madame Colette Aboulker-Muscatt whom I wrote about in The History of Last Night’s Dream.  She taught a method of working with images, of learning how to listen to words and then make images from them. In one of her exercises— she offered a practice of picking up a dead leaf, holding it to your heart and seeing it come alive.  I play about with that idea, but it is true that the images have a presence in us and a life in us. She said many times,

“Images are sovereign in the mind” and therefore “to choose  one’s freedom is to choose one’s images.”

I was happy to read this poem along with others in a reading sponsored by Matthew Hupert’s NeuroNautic Institute.

Dream Logic is distributed by SPDBooks and you can find it here. 

If you want to be on my mailing list please fill out the form below.