[Kate Benedict]

A number of poems have hit the web lately, including a bunch from Night Queue, my archetypal dream book ms., to wit: The Hollywood Hills, The Plant, Opening Night, Sea Floor, Dreamboat. Those are FV; the ones titled Occlusion and Happy Dream Triolet are triolets and then there are the sapphics 'shopped here, The Carrion Gardens. Anyone interested may find the links on my site:

http://www.katebenedict.com/poetry/onlinepubs.html

These are a little, er, different from the poems critiqued on these blue screens. I'd be interested to know if they're terribly off-putting to all ye classicists and formalists. I wouldn't know how to characterize them; deep image, perhaps, with a tinge of magic realism. PMs and especially emails invited, should anyone be so inclined.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Kate, I'm not sure I have a hat that says "classist and formalist", maybe I can stand on the sidelines and cheer rather than march in the big parade.

I do like experimental though, so I went to your site and clicked around (as you know already by my PM), it was a treat to read through them all.

My favorite? Helen Agonistes. Not so experimental maybe, but I liked that one best. At Centrifigal Eye, the one I liked best was The Intruder.

I'm sorry to be so late with responding about the poems themselves. I read them long ago, but noticed just now that I hadn't commented.

[Rose Kelleher]

I'm glad you bumped this up, Janice, I'd missed it. Hee hee, I just read "Contempt". Good stuff, Kate.

[FOsen]

Me, too. Much enjoyed, Kate.

Frank

[Kate Benedict]

Aw, gee, thanks guys! I doubt if the good grey arbiters of pobiz would consider the dream poems experimental but they certainly took me in a different direction. These things were pulled right out of the interior realm, no outer reality (i.e. real experience and observations), all inner reality. I suspect that some have stayed silent because they hated the things; if so, they needn't have. I need to know what I'm up against.

No matter what one thinks of them, one thing I'm sure of is that they are the genuine article as far as the dreamworld goes--whereas John Berryman's dream poems always struck me as surfacy, comedic, not jungian at all, not archetypal but strictly personal, not messages from the collective unconscious. In mine, overall, I took great pains to remove personal references and backstories. I do realize, though, that these poems ask something of the reader that I've never asked for before: the she or he suspend disbelief and take a ride. I suppose the surrealist painters ask the same thing but it's easier to look at a painting, perhaps, than to dive into poems like these. If a reader has little interest in dreams and the unconscious and the jungian, or believes that dreams need to be "interpreted" for day-world meaning -- and, of course, no interest in the unrhymed and the unmetered for the majority are FV -- they do well to read elsewhere.

I often watch my cat dream, all blissed out in REM sleep. And sometimes he meows in his sleep and wakes himself up ... I think he's having a scary dream. Dreams are another reality for him, and for us.

Anyhoo, I remain a more "normal" formalist too and am getting back into that mode. Maybe. Sorry to be so verbose. Obviously I'm starved for this kind of discourse.