Friday, February 06, 2009

Dream About Selima Hill

Last night I had a strange poetry dream. I was sitting in my living room with two other poets, both fairly well known. I had met one of these poets once before, a few years ago, and I’d met the other briefly on a couple of occasions. We were each reading a book. I can’t remember what I was reading, but one of the others was reading my copy of Selima Hill’s Gloria: Selected Poems.

“It’s highly inventive work,” I said.
“But not in terms of form,” said the poet.
“I mean, it’s inventive in terms of content, the way she deals with her subject-matter,” I replied.
The other poet silently went back to the book and didn’t look up again.

Then I woke up.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm - intriguing. But the dream poet is wrong of course - Selima is one of the great iambicists!

Unknown said...

Very intriguing, is your poetry subconsciousness trying to tell you something about form..?

Rob said...

Roddy, I can't even begin to fathom what the dream poet was going on about, or why I didn't contradict him there and then in the dream, but that's dreams for you.

Barbara, I hope my poetry subconscious isn't trying to tell me anything about form from this dream!

Anonymous said...

Very cool. How come I never have poetry dreams? I'm going to start ordering myself to dream about poetry before I go to sleep every night.