Teacher note: This class ended with a collage poem.

 Poets wrote two poems from two class exercises, one based on prompts, and one based on poetry videos. After each composition poets were asked to write a poetry fragment from the poem. After the second compositon a second fragment was written. Two rounds of collage poetry were then read. Here’s how the fragments from the class were turned into one poem and read as one poem:

Collage Poem

Innocent eyes
 
wide pleading
 
Mine with tears
 
onto murky water
 
My fingers full of earth shock
 
each rock I touched, sighed, no opal
 
Who is talking to me please?
 
And where do you want me to go?
 
Tall & straight
 
 Lithely dancing in moonlight 
 
a home built in trees and flowers
 
a dream that the earth lives on
 
So important how a student
 
can help you dream. 

Partial Class Syllabus for Dream Poetry

Fall For Writing: Dream Poetry
Poem-Making With Jim Moreno (760) 802-2449 Sunday, 9/01/19, 12:00 P.M. To 1:45 P.M.

 1st 60 Minutes, 12:00 P.M. To 1:00 P.M. When You Are Sleeping Dreams
 
First Twenty 12:00 P.M. To 12:20 P.M. 
 
Quotes: San Diego Writers, Ink: What happens when you write a poem from dream material? What happens when you carve out time to write verse about that one dream that seemed mysterious, funny, disconnected, deep? Why do you keep having a recurrent dream or a dream with the same themes? Find out with poet Jim Moreno at SD Writers, Ink.
 
Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand poet): The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chances of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind. She died at 34 years of age.
 
Steve Kowit: Influenced in part by Freud’s ideas, a group of brilliant poets and painters in the early decades of the (20th) century conceived a program to create an art that would celebrate and and explore the powerful reality of the unconscious-the turbulent river that streams beneath the surface of consciousness…
 
Kowit: Out of that impulse to explore and transform our reality by giving voice to the strange language of the unconscious the Surrealistic movement was born. Surrealist paintings by Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, & Rene Magritte, have make surrealism…familiar to the general public.
 
Carl Jung: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. Dreams… are invariably seeking to express something that the ego does not know & does not understand.
 
Five Choices of many in Writing a Dream Poem: 1. Story 2. Emotion 3. Detail 4. Who 5. You.
 
Play: Reading by Joy Harjo – September 15, 2016 (Start at 6:24, end at 8:08)
 
Edgar Allan Poe ~ A Dream Within A Dream, Poem with text (1:43)

Second Ten: 12:20 – 12:30 P.M. Write out a dream

If Dogs Fly Let Them Fly: Have participants write out a dream they had, being specific about images in the dream. A dream “speaks” in images-the pictures that come to us in the night. All that really has to be done to write a successful “dream poem” is to transcribe to the page the images that appear in the dream. Let the dream tell its story, and write the story down as the images unroll…just like the scenes in a movie.
 
Teachers & Writers Collaborative www.twc.org by Bill Zavatsky If Dogs Fly, Let Them Fly! Writing a Dream Poem Volume 40 Issue 3, page 25 Genre: Poetry Tags: poetry; memory; dreams Grade: 1-12 Population: All
 
Now Read: William Stafford, The Way It Is; Cutting Loose; Lee Young Li, Excerpt From Dreaming of Hair; Jim Moreno, Julian’s Dreamcatcher Song; Nancy Wood, Dream Ravens
 
Play: The Dream Of Life – Alan Watts (3:38) 

Third Twenty 12:30 P.M. to 12:50 P.M.

1) Keep your lines short, . We want the images to stand out in a way they can’t in prose and the short lines highlight the pictures in the dream. 2) Start in the middle of the action (latin poets say : In medias res.)…. 3) Write in Free Verse… write a free verse poem-and poems written in free verse do not have a regular beat (meter) nor do they rhyme….avoid rhyme and meter so you won’t be tempted to sweeten up the poem or tone down its images or reject parts of the dream because they’re difficult to find rhymes for or to fit to a beat. If people speak in the dream…let them speak. If dogs fly, let them fly! … get in the colors, sounds, and textures of the dream. All of it is important. It’s better to put in too much detail on the first draft; the excess can be cut back in subsequent drafts, if necessary.
 
Last Thirty 12:50 P.M. To 1:15 P.M. Read End with writing down a poem fragment? 
 
 This class will be offered on my new website jimmorenopoetryclasses.com in the near future.