Most writers have been told to keep dream journals. Leave
a flashlight by your bed, a small notebook open, a pen; wake in the middle of
the night, scribble down the genius, go back to sleep. For me, this has resulted
in ugly scribbles of “lava mermaid” and “heart steal competition” with no
further remembrance of context. Not ideal, to say the least.
That’s
not to say dream journals don’t work for everyone. Our subconscious is a
valuable vault for us to mine, and sleep brings that closer to the surface. But
for me, it has always felt an unreachable goal, an attempt to organize images
that my dream-brain presents, half-remembered and fleeting.
This
January, I had the opportunity to intern with the Palm Beach Poetry Festival,
where I was assigned to assist Reginald Gibbons. Throughout his workshop and
craft talk, Gibbons proposed the idea of an object journal. Objects are those
things that stick with you—images, places, smells, the recurring theme in one’s
writing that may or may not have an identifiable source but comes again and
again into the mind. Allen Ginsberg's “first thought, best thought” feels
applicable here—not that the words will be the same through every edit, but the
thought of the object will stick with you as an integral part of the writing.
These
objects don’t have to have positive associations. They can be related to
trauma—a certain song, a feeling, a moment or place—or to joy, or to moments of
clarity or noticing the world around you. Growing up in Florida, a lot of
objects that show up over and over again in my writing are very personal to
that experience—oranges, fresh squeezed, or drooping mangroves, or pecking
ibises, the slow meander of an iguana into a canal—as well as moments with
distinct associations from my childhood. Their recurrence does not weaken the
writing; instead, it gives me the opportunity to revisit that which is familiar
in new and novel ways. This surprise is one of the key parts of poetry,
specifically, and a lot of other successful writing: a volta, a turn, a
subversion of the reader’s expectations to allow them to experience something
they thought they knew in a way that surprises them.
As
for writers who do this well, there are so many that I could scarcely name them
all. But some of my favorites give readers this new version of the familiar:
Gwendolyn Brooks’ detailed attention to the lives of the people in “kitchenette
building” and “The Bean Eaters” give us, as readers, two different views of
similar living situations. Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead” encourages us to look
at boxes (possibly an object) and grief in a differently tactile way. Oranges
are an object for Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, Gary Soto, Frank O’Hara, and many
other writers. As readers, we are comforted by the familiarity of these
concepts and then stunned, shocked, amused, and alternatively comforted by a
different version of that same concept.
So: keep an object
journal. Write down the thoughts and images that stick with you, that feel like
something when you see or hear them. Type it in your phone notes, if you aren’t
a pen-to-paper kind of drafter. But don’t lose that first thought. It’s coming
to you for a reason.
Haley Bell Keane is a first-year MFA student in Poetry
at Florida Atlantic University. Her work focuses on gender and sexuality,
religion, ecology, and trauma. She has previously worked as an editor for the Kudzu
Review undergraduate literary magazine and a summer intern for The
Southeast Review graduate literary magazine at Florida State University.
She is currently a poetry reader for Swamp Ape Review, the graduate-run
literary and arts magazine at FAU.
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