Michelle Tennison

by

Beginning I’m a Slow Drifter

eye signed

I, the Language of Dreams, photograph by Michelle Tennison

What will you find if you write down the dialogue of your dreams?

The following are  excerpts from my own dreams, copied verbatim upon awakening. At the time I was experimenting with writing poetry during hypnogogic states. It has been said that such dreamspeak has something in common with schizophrenic language and can be meaningful in an abstruse way. It can also be quite comical.

Below you will find snippets from a pedantic conversation about sculpture (which at the time seemed quite erudite), proverbial wisdom, and surrealist poetry:

Upon viewing art in a museum setting:  “That’s a beautiful booger named gunshot.”

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗

Walk to the lake on your many-toed journey.

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗

dolls roll down in village trees

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗

kisses salt until the sea salt that led the sea

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗

beginning I’m a slow drifter

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗

beauty of 
the sunshine weight
of butterfly 8

by

At the End of the World, All the Unrequited Love Stored in the Flowers

 

Theologian II

Theologian II, Sabine Miller, Oriental lily petals and pulp with citrus juice and graphite pencil on watercolor paper. Tinted and brightened.  2016

Opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot,

as sung by wildflowers:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the lily is spread out against the sky
Like a ghost orchid etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless asters in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with fresh bluebells:
Poppies that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the cosmos come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

 

Source: Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963), adaptation by Michelle Tennison

 

by

Lose your mind and come to your senses — Fritz Perls

I live for those wild — and strangely peaceful — moments when I am given a rare objective glimpse into the universe of thought.

Am I here?
          the fragrant molecule
                       on a path
                 to wilderness

Question Michelle Tennison,  Answer Richard Gilbert (2017)

The concept of  Ma is central to the Japanese haiku aesthetic. Richard Gilbert’s Poems of Consciousness and the interviews with contemporary Japanese poets found therein helped bring this difficult-to-pin down concept to the West.  The translators of one of these interviews with Hasegawa Kai define Ma in terms such as

space — ‘betweenness,’ alternate dimension or time, a psycho-poetic interval of betweenness — non-literal reality arising as resonance, between and through words, and beyond them.”

This gap or space between images, elements, and/or ideas created by “cutting,” whether as juxtaposition or disjunction (see Richard Gilbert’s remarkable The Disjunctive Dragonfly to really explore this exciting poetic territory) is pretty much the soul of haiku,  and it is why we as fans of of the genre can keep coming back to a haiku again and again and continue to encounter something new there, depending upon where we find ourselves at that moment in our lives.

Clearly there is something similar going on here with the gap between questions and answers in the Surrealist Q&A Game, with its communally creative space that gives the sense of being infinitely possible.  Could it be that this gap that arises in Mind, this empty space, is where all the fun really is?


Rejecting a sentimental utopia, what is your vision?
          The white door between things

Question Richard Gilbert,  Answer Michelle Tennison (2017)