Dreams

"The Looming Dark: An Interview with Linda Pastan" by Alex Dueben (2016)

The Paris Review magazine ran an interview in 2016 with Linda Pastan about her poetry collection Insomnia (2015). The interview gives insight into her craft, revision process, and home life. While Pastan feels that she increasingly focuses on death in her poetry as she ages, she keeps exploring the same themes from her earlier work. She lists “the changing of the season in the changing of the seasons, in Eden, in the dangers lurking beneath the surfaces of everyday life, in Death just waiting” as her major metaphors. Sleep also reoccurs throughout her work, shifting from dreams into sleeplessness.

"Wings of Icarus" by Synesius (ca. 405)

Around 1,574 years before Pastan published “Dreams,” 2nd-3rd Century Christian Bishop Synesius similarly celebrated and puzzled over the contradictory nature of dreams. Synesius also noted dreams’ non-linear nature and ability to create beings that do not exist in real life. While dreaming, he states he completed impossible feats “that cannot be readily described.” Both Pastan and Synesius experience the emotions felt in dreams long after they wake too. Synesius even places dream imagery within the heavens. “We can talk with the stars” parallels the comet-like smile of Pastan’s imagined lover. Synesius advocates for interpreting dreams. He believes it makes people better orators because dreams often defy conventional language and logic.

"Poetry is Not a Luxury" by Audre Lorde (1977)

Six years after the publication of “Dreams,” African American writer-activist Audre Lorde wrote her famous essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” While specifically attuned to the experiences of Black women, the essay captures the spirit and aims of many women writers from the 1960s through the 1980s. Many writers sought ways to uplift marginalized voices and find alternatives to white European men’s writing modes and thinking. Lorde’s essay resonates with Pastan’s “Dreams.”

Pastan arguably does what Lorde advocates since dreaming pulls from, to quote Lorde, “a dark place within…an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.” Both works place poetry as “the revelation or distillation of experience” and centering of the feelings created in everyday life over linear, stoic thought.