Merry Christmas : Open House

Wednesday, December 20
7:00 - 9:00
Potluck appies or dessert
byob

PLEASE RSVP
(so we can make sure we have enough plates and cups)

Let's all get together for a bit of holiday cheer!
Bring a friend, bring a neighbour, bring your spouse!


If you want to bring an assignment for reading or showing (this week's assignment welcomes art or photography as well - let's show off), I'm pasting details below. If you don't want to bring one, come anyhow! We want to see you -



DREAM ASSIGNMENT
Poetry, prose or song - or art, or photography!
This assignment is taken from a poetry workshop book, but our assignment welcomes all disciplines.

From Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), Chapter 9, p. 86, Poem 17: The Dream Metaphor

Dreams often function as complex metaphors. Use a particularly vivid dream of your own as the basis for a poem. Do not tell us it's a dream but simply relate it as powerfully as you can, making us feel what you felt during the dreaming. If you understand the dream--that it was a metaphor for our anxiety about your new job, or fear that you will fail in a new relationship, or resentment at not being able to make a lot of money--the poem is likely to be more successful. But don't tell us explicitly what the dream means. You must tell your story in such a way that the significance is implicit in the tale itself. Don't hesitate to deviate from the actual dream if you feel like it--simplifying, leaving elements out, altering whatever you need to in order to create a powerful poem.

From Steve Kowit, Chapter 14, p. 127, Poem 29: The Dream Poem

In Chapter 9, it was suggested that you write a poem based on a real dream, a dream that you could sense was a metaphor for some charged element in your life. Several of the model poems in that chapter, the ones made up of strange, fantastic stories, would also be called surrealistic, though their symbolic significance is perhaps clearer and more straightforward than that of the poems in this chapter. Write another poem based on an actual dream. But this time, concentrate on the image rather than the narrative.

Usually dream records have to be transcribed immediately upon waking for dreams have the mysterious quality of evaporating quickly in the light of waking consciousness. Keep your notebook beside your bed and spend a few minutes in the morning jotting down whatever images, feelings, and thoughts you remember from your dreams. Then, when you have more time, start shaping those images into a poem. You are probably better off not telling the reader that the poem is the transcription of a dream or worrying too much about the specific meaning of the dream. Rather, concentrate on the intriguing images. Let it remain a poem that is not obviously about one thing or another. Feel free to let the poem veer as far from the actual dream as you like. You might wish to read some of the many dream books that are on the market. These books will give you lots of ideas -- many fanciful and far-fetched -- about interpreting your dreams. Unlike many of his other books, which are technical and written for fellow doctors, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was written for the lay reader and remains an exciting and provocative text. Any fair-sized library will have a copy.