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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
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Prompt: Zachary Schomburg's poetry collection Fjords Vol. 1 (Black Ocean, 2012) was inspired by his desire to write poems based on the dreams his friends had shared with him. In an interview for the Pleistocene, he explained that part of his process was "e-mailing my friends or having a beer and talking to them about their most interesting dreams or their most recent dreams, and trying to make poems out of them." The resulting poems have the odd clarity of dream logic.
Have you ever written poetry or stories based on your dreams either your own or friends? Let's discuss dreams a bit. Do you believe writing about yours or someone else's dreams can be beneficial? How reliable do you think dream recall is?
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I used to write down my dreams about 30 or so years ago. Then I stopped after several years, not seeing the point in them. Some time ago, when I was looking into that dream note-book, I realized some of those dreams came true later on. One is even scary. I had dreamed of 9/11 and my older son in it, 9 years before 9/11 happened, and my son was really in it, as he was working in downtown NYC, but luckily he came out of it physically unharmed, except for PTSD of some kind. There are other instances, too, but this one was the scariest and the weirdest. I don’t take precognition very seriously, even though I don’t deny it.
I guess writing our dreams can be beneficial for introspection and that was why I was doing it when I was doing it. After a few trying dreams like the one I mentioned above, I decided I'd rather write after I’ve had a couple of cups of coffee in the morning and I am wide awake. But I may have poems on dreams or some such thing. I’ll check and then continue with this entry.
Okay, here’s one I wrote in 2015 after I dreamt I was living in NYC again. First stanza is totally the dream itself, if I recall it correctly. Second stanza has something from my real life in just a couple of lines, so I must have inserted that part to give some meaning to the poem.
Keeping It Molten
Back in the vast city. I’m nowhere and everywhere,
tunnels, canals, tankers, taxis, slums, skyscrapers
webbed, veined, and no skin transparent.
Crooks and junkies in this dark metropolis?
But no, only phantoms smelling of fish
ghosts from a graphic story--singed, somber
and tragically misread—still hiding
in the tenements of my mind.
This city has been a bloody slaughterhouse
littered with noise, and I still writhe
in a corner park, watching
the 59th street bridge with steel biceps
where she once said they met in secret
and broke all circuits inside me, and
voiceless, I screamed underground poetry
to inflame the avenues in my roiled solitude
igniting the Hudson River.
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Prompt: What do you think affects a good night’s sleep in a negative way? The kind of bed, the pillows, the covers, life’s stresses, relationships, noise, illness, medication, and/or anything else you can come up with, in addition to all of the above?
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I think anything and everything might mess up a peaceful sleep at night. Most people who have studied the subject advise to go to sleep at the same time each day and to keep away from napping. But that doesn’t work because it isn’t doable, at least not always. Even when it is doable, many things can interfere with our sleep anyway. Other professional recommendations may not work most of the time, also.
Reading in bed before feeling sleepy helps me, provided the physical requirements--such as a quiet, dark, and cool room etc.--are in place. Then, when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, I use a tiny music player, similar to an iPod, and listen to music or books. I have had several dreams about the music and the books I’m reading and listening to, which were a lot of fun to recall in the morning. I’d rather do this than get up and lose even more sleep or use pills or other sleep-aids.
Prompt: Do you believe hate, fear, and bad behavior can be contagious, not only among kids but adults as well?
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Absolutely. Bad behavior and negative feelings can become an epidemic if people do not watch themselves. I believe such contagion may arise from being inspired, a desire to imitate or to belong, perceived similarities, idolizing or sympathy with a cause, a wish for fame.
Since like-minded people are emboldened when they can clump together and feel justified in their anger to the point of acting that anger out, negative feelings and behaviors are bound to increase. Then, their group violence emboldens such people and forces the others either into a fearful submission or detachment. Very few can rise to defend their personal views against such violent behavior.
I think such people who are so easily persuaded are the insecure ones, who in a group of offensive people, feel emboldened and even idolized with the help of the internet, corrupt media, and the undeserved accolades. This way, they are no longer alone with their insecurities, since they’ve now joined a subculture to feel special, apart, and above the rest of the society. To them, what is deviant is acceptable and even noble.
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