STORM TREE (photo by Roswila) & THE FURY OF RAINSTORMS (poem by Anne Sexton)

THE FURY OF RAINSTORMS
by Anne Sexton

The rain drums down like red ants,
each bouncing off my window.
The ants are in great pain
and they cry out as they hit
as if their little legs were only
stitched on and their heads pasted.
And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.
Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.


[Almost no dream recall from last night. Some lingering, repeated images of choosing between different greeting card designs and whether to offer them in animated color digital or plain black and white paper format. And those images are clearly what's called day residue in dream work -- "days" residue actually, given the weeks of planning I've been doing for my up-coming photo exhibit in July. Which subject is indirectly related to the poem by Anne Sexton that I've posted today. I keep thinking I'm just too depressed to deal anymore with planning and printing, much less actually setting up, handling questions and (hopefully) orders, and then breaking down an exhibit, and that I should just cancel it. But I keep remembering the last three lines of this poem, and I get up (usually from my computer chair) and get on with what my day requires of me. Photo "Storm Tree" by Roswila. I may be stating the obvious, but this picture is of rain making circles in puddles on cement, a rather rare sight around here in coastal south central California. As I was revising this October 2009 photo today I began, more and more, to think of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I wonder how many of my "abstract" photos are pulled forward toward some visual memory like that. Makes me wonder how original any of my more "abstract" pictures really are. This issue is something a poet friend and I once discussed at length. Can we trust that all our wordings are original, or are some from unconscious memory? And even if it were to be discovered that someone else had written the exact same line earlier that we have, would that prove unconscious copying? Might we simply have arrived at the same wording at a different time? After all, there is truly nothing new under the sun ... or even under storms. However, this remains a troubling inquiry for me. And then there's the related issue of work being labeled "derivative." Where does the line get drawn between inspiration and derivation? Is there a percentage or formula? Is any work of art free of "influence"? Sigh, more ants, losing their heads as they fall, beating against the window ...]

PLEASE NOTE that I never have nor do I now lay claim to having been the first to suggest writing about our dreams in the haiku form. In fact, the haijin (Haiku Masters of centuries ago) sometimes wrote haiku on dreams. But even more importantly, what I have been developing for several years now on this blog is not even truly haiku or tanka or monoku. The ways in which I have been using and experimenting with these forms makes the results more akin to kissing cousins of these small Eastern poetry forms. Therefore, I mostly use the term "dreamku" to distinguish what I do from those traditional forms. Click here for a more in-depth INTRODUCTION than follows below, including links to my THREE PART PRIMER on the basic (most haiku-like) dreamku form.

Also, the photo accompanying a daily dream poem or non-dream based poem is not necessarily meant to illustrate it, but to reflect some small, even slant aspect of the verse -- similar to Japanese haiga (illustrated haiku). I've also recently realized that although the dreamku (i.e. dream based poems) posted here tend not to have metaphor or simile, the accompanying photos almost always act as such.

To write a metaphor or simile into a dream scenario is something I rarely do. It can be confusing: did it really look like a hand, say, in the dream, or am I just being poetic to make my conscious point? As these dreamku act as a dream journal, my over-riding tendency is to try to stay close to the actual dream scenario itself. Admittedly making for a tendency to less "poetic" dreamku. Then why pay attention to any haiku, tanka, or monoku parameters at all when writing about my dreams? Because I find in even attempting to adhere to them I'm making choices that relieve my dream recall of a great deal of chatter so that I can get down to some important dream aspects. Here's a link to THE AREN'TS OF DREAMKU & ACCOMPANYING PHOTOS in which I go into some of the basic parameters for dreamku and the photos chosen to go with them (and with any non-dream based poems I post here, as well).

The archives in the sidebar hold years of the daily dreamku, tanka, monoku and photo posts I've made, grouped in one post by month. As I no longer post dreamku (or non-dream based poems) strictly daily, each post will appear below and then in the archives by the day on which it was posted.

There are many other sorts of posts here, not all dream-based. I indicate which are about or influenced by dreams. Some non-dream focused posts are book reviews, "regular" poems (some by other writers than myself), scifaiku, writing exercises, Tarot haiku, photos, haiga, and so on. However, most of those are in much older posts. There's a listing by month going back to early 2006 in the sidebar.

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‘til next time, keep dreaming,

[aka: Patricia Kelly]
**** If you wish to copy or use any of my writing or poems, please email me for permission (under “View my complete profile”) **** My other blogs: ROSWILA’S TAROT GALLERY & JOURNAL; ROSWILA’S TAIGA TAROT; and OPENING TO THE LIGHT ****