Prompt #8: "Woke up with"- Writing from Dreams

and other ways to break out of writer’s block

Happy National Poetry month, friends! This month, Catherine and I (along with our friend Juliana C., who initially suggested this- ty 💕) have been attempting to write one poem each day. More than anything, this exercise has forced me to find creative ways to break out of boredom, whether that’s boredom with my own style or just a writing block where nothing seems worth writing about.

This is, of course, the great fear: that you’ve sat down in front of the page to write, only to find that nothing moves you. All the great ideas you had when struggling to fall asleep at 2 am, when reading someone else’s work rapturously, or when your mind inevitably wanders during the all-hands meeting you just cannot stay awake for have suddenly disappeared back into their dens, and you are left...bored with the page.

Writer’s block…it hits ya like a wave

This week’s prompt is designed for breaking out of blocks by giving yourself permission to be strange. Because often, strangeness is generative; in a talk last year, Ross Gay described the difference between prose and poetry as the difference between his “relationship to not knowing.” He described how in prose, he doesn’t know where the piece will take him, but in poetry, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. This strangeness, the permission to not know where we end up, is a particular power that poetry gives us. Poetry inhabits a limbo space between fiction and nonfiction, story and image; who is the speaker? What exactly is happening? Is this poem about you? We don’t know! And the not knowing sets us free.

In a generative session at this weekend’s Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, Dana Levin outlined a single, brilliant strategy for fighting writer’s block: get your will out of the way.

By this she means: leave things up to chance. Draw cards. Collaborate with someone who writes very differently from you. When you let something external to you have a say in where the poem goes, you get to give up control. Making decisions about everything gets exhausting, doesn’t it? Handing over the reins to something else, anything else at all- a pair of dice, a bowl of words, a tarot deck- can be the springboard our tired minds need. 

A specific idea she suggested, which I love, is to keep a dream journal and mine it for linguistic material. It’s a prime example of getting your will out of the way, even though dream-you is still you; in a way, you’re collaborating with your unconscious self. Levin’s poem, “January Garden,” was actually written this way; the lines that come after “Woke up with:” are actual lines she had in her head upon waking. Unedited. They became the backbone of this poem:

Woke up with:                 the minute I let “I love you” touch me, trees 

                                  sprouted from my hair—

So, this week: write from your dreams. Keep a dream journal, if you can, and search through it for linguistic inspiration. I’d love to see both your poems and the dream-bits that inspired them. Get strange with it! Take linguistic risks, let yourself inhabit a different body, try different things on the page.

Another Levin technique for getting your will out of the way is to collaborate and borrow ideas from someone who thinks differently from you. In this spirit, I’ll kick off the chain with a piece from my own nonsensical dream journal and the resulting poem (about spiders, snails, and expired cake 🍰). If you have trouble remembering your dreams, feel free to use my dream fragment as a starting point! 

I can’t wait to read your dreams and dream pieces.

<3 and good dreams,

Steph

actual excerpt from my April 5 dream journal. please don’t judge. do, however, use as inspiration if you are in need of dream documentation