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.