As the 2005 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence, Traci Brimhall considers poems as questions, as spaces in which to wonder, where the questions serve as guides through darkness. Brinmhall’s project, which involves a series of “Dream Walls” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, invites attendees both to dwell in doubt and stay in the dream.
“It wasn’t a dream, it was a place.”
— Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz
I live on a Kansas prairie that used to be a sea. Despite the acres of corn and soybeans now, you can still find fossils of dams and corals. For centuries, the Kansa, Osage, and Pawnee tribes set fire to the land to renew the grasses. Now the limestone hills near me are grazed by ranchers to share their secret food pleasures. We read ers who raze the fields every year with controlled burns in order to manage to land. I drive past small licks of flame eating its way through last year’s grasses, and a week or two later the new grass is so green it seems like the Emerald City.
Recently, I attended an outdoor symphony in Kansas. Ranchers take turns hosting an event that attracts thousands across the region. I went on wildflower walks, listened to music, looked at art, and read poems for dozens of people who sat on hay bales and listened attentively. Afterwards someone asked who my favorite audiences were and if others outside of Kansas understood all the references my poems made to blazing stars, compass plants, switchgrass, yarrow, and cat claw sensitive briars. On that day, many people who listened to my prairie poems knew exactly what green resurrections I was talking about when I mentioned prairie burns, they could picture every flora and fauna reference. They understood what it means to live on or next to land that is one of the last remaining examples of a once vast ecosystem across our continent–the tallgrass prairie.
I answered truthfully–I don’t read those poems to other people. Sometimes a reading is a chance to express a specific relationship to a specific community, and the outdoor symphony was a chance for me to share about the prairie and all I’ve learned from it. Walt Whitman said the prairie was America’s characteristic landscape. And yet prairie poems are often something I share with those who share my love. Athol Fugard said “Love is the only energy I ever use as a writer,” and I think that’s true for me and sharing writing. There are, of course, commonalities in that language of love across many spaces, but sometimes I know a place has a dialect, a vocabulary of joys. I want to begin a conversation with listeners by sharing what we love and rejoicing in that space.
When I do my daily walks on the prairie and make the small loops through the grasses to watch the grasshoppers and butterflies, bluestem and milkweed, I’m not trying to analyze it or solve it, but to be more deeply within my own life, my own body.
As poet laureate of the State of Kansas, I very rarely read my own work at events. I share other people’s poems and try to turn a talk about poetry into a conversation. I want to talk about Mary Oliver collecting blackberries and invite others to share their secret food pleasures. We read Lucille Clifton’s “Cutting Greens” and Naomi Shihab Nye’s ”Arabic Coffee” and talk about who makes our food and how we receive it. We read Kevin Young, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and other poets who were born or raised in Kansas and talk about place and the role of questions in a poem.
But we also talk about how we experience poems every day. I ask people about a moment that felt like something beautiful or surprising happened, and we can find those–the birds at the feeder, drops of rain while the sun was out, the deer we astonished in the yard. Heidegger famously said that “language is the house of being,” and a poem is just a way to build a room around a moment where our relationship to life felt extraordinary in some way. There often feels like there’s a space between us and the world and poetry is one way to close that gap, to bring the world a little closer. Most often my talks aren’t at outdoor symphonies but in libraries, community centers, or schools. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says homes are a nest for dreaming, but I want all places to be a space of dreaming, of making, of being. I want museums and farms, cities and prairies to all be places where people can enter their own wonder. The imagination enriches itself with the senses. In his letters, John Keats said that a poem needed to be understood through the senses:
The point of diving into a lake is not to immediately swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You don’t work the lake out; it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.
I love the idea of a poem and a lake being similar in how they need to be experienced and inhabited. And a lake could be any place. I think all spaces can be rooms and landscapes where our minds find new depths and questions if we tune our attention differently. When I do my daily walks on the prairie and make the small loops in doubt and remain curious through the grasses to watch the grasshoppers and butterflies, bluestem and milkweed, I’m not trying to analyze it or solve it, but to be more deeply within my own life, my own body. Attention is a kind of prayer, but one that–if we look and listen closely–the response comes like a clear melody through the static.
This year I have been traveling back and forth between Manhattan, Kansas, where I live and Manhattan, New York, for my role as the Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. Walking up the building’s rotunda is like rising out of the layers of a dream. Image is an invitation to be sensitive inhabitants of the worlds within ourselves and beyond ourselves. Van Gogh said life was probably round, but it is imperfectly round, like the trunk of a tree, its roundness thickening with years.
For my programming at the museum, one of the projects has been to create and curate a series of Dream Walks where poets serve as Dream Shepherds and wander the museum with patrons. Dream Shepherds read poems made of questions as a way to enter their own wonder. Offering a set of questions helps a wonderer and writer enter the dreamspace where making so often happens. I believe people come to poems looking for wisdom, but poets are often living the questions, which is a far better lantern in the darkness.
I have been taking the lines and images from museum patron’s dreams that they have left behind in a Dream Nest and crafted collaborative poems. I read what people shared and try to weave together a collective sense of dreaming from everything I’ve been given. Although it is not the same as hearing each other’s voices and using poetry to create a conversation in a space, I still feel connected to the strangers who leave their dreams for me. When the image is new, the world is new. We often dream something before it is true, but in our consciousness we must stay in our unknowing a little while longer, to dwell in doubt and remain curious about that doubt, to stay in the dream until we are ready to startle awake with our knowing.
I agree with Heidegger that language is a house of being, but it’s also a walk. It’s a question. It’s a dream. It’s a dusty farm and ride through a tornado, a journey through a yellow brick road, and a green city. The spaces we inhabit or that we move through can be a friend of being. The art on the walls can startle us into new ideas and a new alertness. The patch of prickly pear cactus in the middle of the prairie can sharpen our attention. Toi Derricotte said “a poem is always there; you just have to hold up a net to catch it.” It’s a way to shape the relationship between yourself and the world that sometimes seems invisible. But draped in the fabric of language, we see the connections between the worlds within ourselves and beyond ourselves. There’sno place like home for dreaming, but hopefully poetry helps us see the homes we can create wherever we are because we find our connections to those people, those places, those dreams that answer the questions we have not yet found a way to ask.
— © American Poets, volume 69, by Traci Brimbhall