“The dream,” wrote Carl Jung, “is a little hidden door into the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.” Every dream is a katabasis, a descent into the underworld of our minds. Dreams are already wilder, more original, more metaphoric, more imagistically intense, than even the most experimental poems. In this five-session online class, we will experiment with the ways in which “the dream thinks like a poet” (Bert States) and in which “metaphor is the dream-work of language” (Donald Davidson). We’ll explore the ways that poetry and dreams share radical juxtapositions, hyperassociation, hyperemotionality, and hyperintensities of meanings. These generative classes will encourage experimentation, wildness, linguistic play, strangeness, imagination, and extreme innovation with form as we work with dream images, dialogue from dreams, and emotional and thematic material drawn from one another’s dreams. We’ll write poems that derive from the plots and images of our dreams and that draw new structures for writing from the structures of dreams.

Bruce Beasley is professor emeritus of English at Western Washington University, where he was awarded The Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award. He is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Prayershreds (Orison Books, 2023). His poems have appeared in Agni, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Plume, Poetry, and many other journals.
 
Virtual Sessions | Saturdays, Jan. 4–Feb. 1
12:00–1:30 ET | $250