While Sleeping

Description

Bill Lavender

while sleeping

9780925904362 (pbk.) (Chax Press)
0925904368

120 pages: $19.95
2004

Bill Lavender’s While Sleeping, published by Chax in 2004, investigates the relationship of poetry and sleep.

From the intro:

Poetry and sleep have always been related to me. What do we seek when we lie down to rest but a pleasant landscape of language? inaudible rehearsals of the auditory, invisible practice of the visual. To rehearse the poem that does nothing more than call up relaxed and relaxing frame of the rehearsal, for the poem has always aspired to sleep and sleep to the poem, referent beyond logic and logic beyond referent. It is possible of course to be asleep and awake at the same time, indeed we are mostly, examples: driving the freeway and missing the exit engrossed in meditation, or better the ineluctable state of napping in my chair, when I leave me there and go out for closer observation, hearing even seeing everything that goes on around but not noticing my own snores.

Insomnia being a condition of language, an unsettling complication of a thing that never was a thing to begin with. After all, no one ever thought to accuse prepositions of standing for something— like winos in the park no one’s ever going to ask them to run for office. I have brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles too, but all flee on approaching this corpus. One is either with you or against you here, some weird hybrid of equals sign and plus and minus, or like the sigmas inserted among the numbers, tiny insects that suck blood and are resilient. You, that is one, has no relations. The entire edifice depends on these shaky underpinnings that have to be shored up every night, or like an old suzuki taken apart and oiled and cleaned and simply fucked with if there’s any hope of it running tomorrow. And lots of times there isn’t and machines do recombine with earth again just like bodies and we leave them both behind and get on like a haiku sleeping.