Following a return to lectures and worrying for future plans, Originals provides a welcome break to the start of Spring term.
Disillusionment of Ten O Clock
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens is an American modernist poet who was concerned with reality and our conceptualization of the world. This poem is considered one of his most famous works and shows the imagination he values; in this instance suggesting that those who wear boring night gowns will have boring dreams whereas the drunken sailors will be dreaming of tigers, baboons and periwinkles. He even reflects the fluidity of our imagination by writing in free verse.
It always dawns at night
It always dawns at night. At least that’s what I say to myself as the sun never sets. It ascends and remains and never sets. Shadows play across the ground chasing each other in their eternal life; that never dawns at night. Why such light? I can’t sleep in this ongoing dream. I try to wake but my eyes are already open.
Peter Rylands
This a brief example of prose poetry, a form created in early 19th century France to rebel against the closed forms of the day. For this reason revolution is often a common theme but so too is surrealism and I have attempted this by disorientating the reader with supposed opposites occurring simultaneously, such as sleeping in a dream and claiming there is too much light at night. The creation of a dream world allows logic to be forgotten and so it is hard to know which sentence lies in reality and which doesn’t, if at all.
Untitled
Enigmatically gruesome, you weary girl,
Come forth to me in this dream
The yonder reaches of my twisted thought
Are temple walls to your sweet scream
Whilst icy winds may scar a face
You’ll find no elemental hurt here
Because, you weary headed wanted wanderer
I’ve snared you in my cerebral sphere.
Picture perfect spindle of thought
I contort your limbs as I see true
So that your very frame and blurry sketch
Becomes the moulded mess of you.
Morning light does slither like silent fingers
To wrap themselves around your scream,
That’s when I sit up and gasp for breath and
Try to gather the last of my dream.
Mike Burman
Believing that dreams are short lived but have lasting effects. This was written in about 10 minutes and is a reaction to the fleeting moment of seeing a girl earlier in the day. As there are no limits to a dream’s possibilities there is a lack of intended structure to reflect the manifestation of spontaneous thinking when dreaming, which can be seen in the slightly distorted imagery of the ‘moulded mess’ of the girl.
If you would like your poem to be placed in Poet’s Corner please submit to aeypmry@nottingham.ac.uk or arts@impactnottingham.com
Pictures sourced from Flickr via Ross Pollack
