The Garden of Verse: The American "Dreamtime" in June's Verse-Virtual

           We all have parallel lives, that overtake us in our sleep. We call them dreams. As irrational and absurd as our dreams may appear, we sense some overlap between our 'real' waking life and dreams. As Prospero's memorable reflection on this theme in "The Tempest" tells us:

"we are such stuff

as dreams are made on, and our little life

is rounded with a sleep."

            Some poems in June's Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal, deal with 'dream-like' aspects of our wide-awake lives. In Donald Krieger's hair-raising poem "Dream Street," the speaker gets home from his job in emergency medicine to

"sleep with eyes wide open:

a child shrieking on a hospital gurney,
her spine flayed and straightened,
the smell of burning in my hair..."

            The poem's last line, "never dreaming what will come next" reminds us of the many nuances of that busy word "dream." A tough, but marvelous poem.

             Alan Walowitz's droll conflation of dreams, comedy and self-mockery, "Dream of the Standup Poet," he tells us, has this origin: "I jotted down this particular dream verbatim one morning when I awoke feeling more mean-spirited and self-pitying than usual." The poem's twisty, dream-like logic conflates poet and comic, self-doubt and aggression, beginning with the 'stand-up poet' s pre-emptive attack on a "heckler":

"Poseur, Scrivener, Amanuensis, Lightweight."
            Stand-up comics, rather than poets, are expected to face hecklers, and this dreamlike role-reversal plays through the amusing, on-target business that follows. The poem keeps doubling back on itself, the way our own dreams undercut our sleeping brain's ever-failing attempts to 'make sense' of the plot. All in all, a stand-up performance, with a surprising punch-line at the end.  

            

            Donna Hilbert's superb "One Night, Three Dreams" also digs into the mechanics of the bizarro world of dreams, beginning with an opening advisory: "If you are having trouble with this dream, please contact our dream technician." Oh, if only. Here again we find ourselves shoved onto the stage of an anxiety dream: "Though
my glasses slip from the perch of my nose
and I have not rehearsed, I plod on.
No one thinks my jokes are funny
or my examples apt."

            Sound familiar? I am reminded of a famous Dylan line about nuclear annihilation, "Everybody's havin' them dreams." The following stanzas, an inexplicable visit to "Falcon Day" and the dreamer's guest-shot appearance at the communion rail, confirm the essential 'lostness' of such dreams: We know we're being told something, but we can't put our finger on what.  

             

            "​Lives of the Dead," poet Judy Kronenfeld tells us, was "elaborated and heightened from the feeling-tone" of a dream:

"Alive in my dream, and serene,
they sit in our old 40-watt-
dim Bronx kitchen on the lollipop red
dinette set leatherette chairs."

            Dreams not only access the surreal, they are time lords. Able, as in this warm-hearted and mostly jolly romp, to take us back into some mixed-up version of the past. The couple play a game of scrabble, "though neither dad nor mom could spell." Meanwhile the poem's speaker has been robbed of the "grocery money" by someone "brandishing an AK-47." Nevertheless the game goes on, "both of them comfortable and anarchic in their little pocket of moored time." The superb phrase "moored time" images for us the eternal availability, in some part of our minds or souls, of all our lived experience.

             Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Daydream" plays on another aspect of the "dream" -- dream as longing.  

"If I could play the piano and speak Italian
I don’t think I’d do anything else, not
if I had Bill Evans’ hands and Mastroianni’s voice."

            Beyond the stylish imagery, the poem is very satisfying formally, wiggling its opening line through a half-dozen three-line stanzas until it becomes the poem's closing line. The texture of poem has charm too, with its references to composers and quotes in Italian and its classical definition of cool: "All my words would be music, my chords poems,"

             Kate Sontag's "Merwin’s Doors: In Dream & Elegy" speaks to an elemental connection between dreams and poetry. The poem cites the mind-opening example of  the "doors" of perception that the poet found in the work of the recently deceased poet W.S. Merwin.

"you had so many doors
I walked through
a mere ghost of a girl
lost at sea hearing
the odd formality
of your foghorn
drawing me closer"

            The poem follows the rich imagery of 'doors' to this satisfying conclusion:

"In dreams all doors are open
to the one who is dreaming..."

            I also admired in June's Verse-Virtual Tricia Knoll's three lovely, free-spirited poems of fresh air and outdoorsy, spring-like imagery, especially this praise-song to the life of trees, "I Want to Write."

            Great lines throughout. To cite just a few:

"how quaking aspen memorize
  the end rhymes of creation myths
how dance classes for willow branches
  warm up by sleeping beside the mother

I want to write the prayer winds
  that fan the ginkgo’s gold"

                  The poem makes me ask, 'why am I not outdoors climbing mountains or hiking woodland paths?' Maybe that's the message. 

             Steve Keptar's "Night in June" carries a similar free-flowing energy, with its strong response to the wonders of the cosmos that's out there all the time, and then sometimes our senses and our minds catch fire from its immensity and we burn as well -- "their eyes on fire and their tongues
preserved in ice." It's a poem of seeing the world with fresh senses, a landscape "where hills rose like teeth from the red earth."

            His poem "Where Was Your Father Born?" begins with one of those revealing quotes from the anti-poet in the oval office concerning the birthplace of one's father. The title question provokes a marvelous riff on birth places from the exotic (though true) -- "Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire" -- to the familiar ("California, in the Plieto Hills near the San Joaquin Valley"); and then to the mythic realm, with a brief dialogue on the birth of the single-dipped Achilles.

             In poems, as in dreams, we are born in many places.

The Garden of History: Paying the Costs of 'Getting On'

My father, a World War II veteran, had the good fortune to miss the D-Day invasion. All his good fortune, as I am well aware, accrued to myself, my brother and sister, and all the others whom his life subsequently touched. 
             This simple fact of my own fortunate existence is brought home to me at each commemoration of the D-Day landing at Normandy, France, and of the other momentous dates that followed in the bloody campaign of Europe's liberation from Nazi control. Many are the ways produced by natural and human history to shorten lives before their natural span, but taking part in the justly famous invasion of June 6, 1944 was surely one the most conspicuous of these. As commentators pointed out this year, the world will probably never see its like again. 
            And, as historian David Christopher pointed out in the first sentence of his recent moving and informative essay on D-Day in the New York Times: "Most of the men in the first wave never stood a chance."
           And as other deeply reflective accounts of the deadly start of the great invasion pointed out, the companies and battalions of infantry chosen for this first wave knew that they had  been chosen to be human sacrifices to a battle plan that required a frontal assault on fixed defenses long in preparation. Still, these men climbed out of their landing craft and slogged toward their deaths.
          Here is Christopher's account of those moments of the invasion:  
"Concentrated in concrete pill boxes, nearly 2,000 German defenders lay in wait. The landing ramps slapped down into the surf, and a catastrophic hail of gun fire erupted from the bluffs. The ensuing slaughter was merciless."

           The enduring courage of soldiers facing the strong possibility of violent extinction is one of the sad miracles of human existence. War is nothing without it.
            The best, and best known, of American correspondents reporting the Second World War to the homefront, Ernie Pyle detailed the deadly intensity of Germany's defensive wall on the Normandy beaches: concrete walls, immense ditches, barbed wire, mines, big guns, hidden machine gun nests, and many armed veteran infantrymen.
             And still, Pyle pointed out, after paying the cruel price exacted by such well prepared defenses, "we got on." 
              As Christopher points out in his piece in the Times, Pyle, who was on the beach by the second day, also wrote very frankly about the cost of the battle and the heroism the soldiers had displayed. The bodies he discovered sleeping in the sand and floating in the water would not wake up to celebrate a hard-won victory.
             A current source reports this accounting for that first-day's fighting: 4,400 men died on the Allied side; 1,000 German deaths; civilian casualties estimated at 3,000.
             And that was only the first of many deadly days to follow. Pyle continued to provide readers back home with concrete accounts of the conditions of battle and the cruel costs of the war in France. Though Allied armies advanced, the costs mounted steadily in a campaign that lasted almost a year before the liberation of Paris, the recapture of the remainder of France, the breaching of the German border, and eventually the German surrender on V-E day in May of 1945. Before that termination was reached, Pyle announced to his readers that he was leaving France: "I've had it... I've had all I can take."  
               All of this has a personal resonance for me, as it must for many Americans.
               My father, Alva J. Knox, missed being part of that invasion and the costly slog to victory on the Western front, even though he had enlisted in the US Army in 1942. He wore corrective lenses and by Army standards then his vision wasn't judged strong enough to place him in a combat unit. Instead he was given the job of helping to process other recruits, from training to unit assignment. Then, some time in 1944, as the war persisted, demanding more and more soldiers for larger and larger armies, the US Army lowered some of its physical standards and concluded that someone with Dad's vision could be assigned to a combat unit after all. 
             His regiment was trained for combat and sent to England, to be prepared there for transport to the front lines. 
             By this time, late in the year 1944, the summer invasion of northern France had taken place and the Allied armies had driven deep into the country. But when bad weather grounded their air force, depriving the Allies of a major advantage, German forces launched the counterattack that would lead famously to the Battle of the Bulge. 
           As that battle raged, Dad's regiment was loaded onto three transport vessels to cross the English Channel and join the armies battling in France.
             Then a cruel fate intervened. While Allied naval forces believed they had eliminated the German U-boat threat by this late date, apparently one enemy submarine had escaped detection. It torpedoed and sank one of three transport vessels as the ship neared the French coast. Attempts at rescuing the men forced to abandon ship were stymied by poor communications and a lack of available help. It was New Year's Eve; coastal commanders were off at parties. And winter in the North Atlantic is a swift executioner; cold water, brutal weather. Almost no one survived the sinking.      
            The consequence, as my father pointed out to me -- he was in his late seventies then, and this was the only time he would ever speak at length about his wartime experiences -- was that his regiment was now judged undersized and a poor fit to commit to a raging battle. Instead of being sent to the front lines, the diminished regiment was sent to man the holding position around the "Nice Triangle" and pin down the German force that was still holding that city and its port for use by the German Navy.
            In his understated manner, Dad pointed out that he had been lucky to escape two bullets: he was not on the ship that sank on that tragic night -- a disaster, as he also knew, the Army kept secret during the war: He showed me the newspaper clipping that reported this story after the was over. And he and his comrades were never sent into the raging, uncertain Battle of the Bulge. 
             Fortunate, indeed, were the surviving members of this unit not to be sent straight from a training base to a desperate battle. As I know from reading accounts of the war on the European front that inexperienced American forces tended to suffer high casualties in their first weeks of action. Apparently it took some time and experience to learn to keep your head down, dig your foxholes deep, and be ever on the alert for signs of trouble. 
              As I said above, and as Dad implied (but felt no need to point out), my siblings and I were fortunate that our father was one of the veterans who returned home from the European Theater after the heavy fighting of the campaign of 1944-45. Sent to the South of France instead, his platoon encountered a German patrol on at least one occasion, when Dad fired his weapon and shot a rifle from the hands of a German soldier. The standard German-made infantry rifle became a war souvenir, stored in the basement, and one of the touchstones of my youth.   
             The other, broader memory of Dad's war was his service in the Army of Occupation that remained in Europe for the most of the following year. His regiment was quartered in Salzburg, Austria, Mozart's birthplace. Dad showed me the programs from the concerts he attended during that time. And the copies of the GI newspaper that continued to be published then. I was in the newspaper business then, and admired the standards of composition, layout and cartooning these period pieces had been able to maintain. 
              I believe that my father fought in a war that -- when it knocked hard on the doorway of his young manhood -- had to be fought. The only good wars are those that are prevented, but by 1942, it was too late to do anything but pay the terrible price demanded by the dire circumstances of a world war raging in both Europe and Asia for the restoration of some form of international order and peace. 
              I honor his service and, again, recognize how fortunate my family is he survived. The cemeteries in Normandy and throughout France and the rest of Europe are eloquent testimony of the price humanity pays when disasters of our own making pull down the houses of friendship and justice.
              I faced somewhat similar circumstances in my own youth, but the war in Vietnam that came my generation's way need never have taken place, and I stand by my decision to avoid taking part in it. My father was of a similar opinion -- at least in the matter of my possible participation in that war -- and maintained a keen interest in my deferred draft status. 
             Wars -- my father's, and all others -- continue to disturb and intrigue me, as they have throughout my life. I can seldom pass up a story, or newspaper article, about one. It as if we are all survivors, connected by guilt and mere humanity to all those dead and heroic soldiers, to the unheroic ones as well -- those who ran from sound gunfire (as I can imagine myself doing) along with those who advanced bravely toward it. 
              Years ago I wrote a published story about my father that dwelled in part on his military career. Later I wrote a poem about the terrible fate that befell a large part of his regiment on their way to join the bloody battles in France, which I read recently to an audience. D-Day was coming up, and people applauded.
              But, obviously, the subject is not exhausted, and never will be. I have accepted and stand by my own choices. And I am grateful for the choices made by my father, and my uncles, that helped preserve a world worth living in for all of us. But I am desperately unhappy about contemporary America's apparent willingness to throw away the gifts that were so dearly purchased for us. 
              After so many millennia of human dominance on Earth, we have still to address the problem of how to live together without succumbing again, and again, to the communal madness of a vast internecine blood-letting. 
             I hope we get there. I hope the sacrifice of the fallen may someday prove a gift we are ready to accept. 

The Garden of Verse: Perchance to Dream

          The theme for this month's issue of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry journal, is dreams. For me, dreaming is an almost daily puzzle, sometimes with a power that wakes me up.
           I wake up feeling that something important, or meaningful, or at least real is being dramatized -- however absurdly -- in those nightly transmissions from my subconscious mind that pull at my conscious mind for the first few moments of wakefulness. Then they go up in smoke when I try to "recall" them in the language of the waking mind. 
            So, a fertile subject for poetry, that literary genre that feeds on emotion and imagination. Dreams and the subconscious mind. Dreams and absurdity. Dreams and the way real problems, anxieties, changes and challenges get encoded into the surreal images of our unconscious mind.
             In a poem titled He Dreams He Burns His Book, the only clearly recollected image taken from a dream is the one that appears in the first line: a large (and naked) man exiting a toilet -- a picture that certainly resounds of the unconscious... 
              My conscious mind -- imagination, fears, self-dialogue -- must take responsibility for the thoughts, words and jumble of ideas that follow in this poem. These ideas and images come from my obsession with a society, or civilization, drifting toward disaster -- this is not a dream I would like to understand as a prophecy.    
                Here's the first stanza of that poem, one of three of mine that appear in the June issue.   

He Dreams He Burns His Book

A very large man emerges from the toilet
It's not his fault, we say
We all must give something up.
Not my chocolate, I protest,
huddling in the corner, the blanket pulled over my head
Thus I appear to strangers as a slumped mountain
covered with coarse, brown grass, begging
for somebody to take me down
As for the others
They survive on ants and mud-covered
acorns, unearthed by leased squirrels
Times were hard too, when I was a child,
Gramps says
You think this is bad?
We ate the toes of plague victims
Our pens skipped
And we coated our fingers in icicles
to have something to drink
...

 

  You can find the rest of this poem, my other two, and poems by 28 other poets in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.
        Here's the link:

https://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-june.html