Notes on Kowit's "Dream Work" (In the Palm of Your Hand 121-128)

The Room
by Gregory Orr

With crayons and pieces of paper, I entered the empty room.
I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day.
One day I held a picture against the bare wall:
it was a window. Climbing through,

I stood in a sloping field
at dusk. As I began walking, night settled.
Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights
of a village, and always at my back, I felt
the white room swallowing what was passed.

In chapter on "Flying Into Oneself," Kowit identifies the qualities of dream logic as follows:

1. Time and space are malleable, ex. "The Room"

2. Objects fuse seamlessly, ex. "Hair Poem," "The Room" and "Year's End." 

3. Logic of reality is transformed into the hallucinatory or seductive to create the logic of symbolism (metaphors), ex. "Hair Poem" and "The Bagel."

Notice that "dream works" can use more than one of the above devices whereas the controlling metaphor in Chapter 9 usually worked alone.

Also notice how persuasive the logic of symbolism can be.  If we agree that hair can be a sexual symbol, then Kowit's notion that "Hair Poem" discusses a woman's sexuality makes sense.  Further, his observation that the image "seems more discovered than invented" rings true and raises the question, "What else have we yet to discover?"

 Chapter 14 is significant for two reasons:

1. It establishes that some images lend themselves to more than one interpretation (literal and figurative; “functional ambiguity”);

2. some images are "unanalyzable."

Practical Concerns
William J. Harris

From a distance, I watch
a man digging a hole with a machine.
I go closer..
The hole is deep and narrow.
At the bottom is a bird.

I ask the ditchdigger if I may climb down
and ask the bird a question.
He says, why sure.

It's nice and cool in the ditch.
The bird and I talk about singing.
Very little about technique.