Kim Lyons
“a penchant for reporting the liminal”[1]
A “massive contact lens / iridescent / and collecting dew along the base / — this is a thing so / transparently fragile” characterizes the elusive and playful universe of possibilities that is engaged in Ainu Dreams (1999, p. 101)[2] the set of poems George Quasha began writing in 1994, in collaboration with Chie Hasegawa (also known as buun). Ainu Dreams conveys a pictorial, enigmatic magic and flexible dimensionality of consciousness that remain a durably attracting spiritual encounter. My exploration here, of this book’s linkage to Quasha’s subsequent writing projects, has reconnected me with that initial, exhilarating reading and “takes me back / to the unrecallable place” (AD 108).
This set of poems offers many valences, multiple entrances into a specialized universe of quixotic conditions and possibilities. The singular objects and instruments that Hasegawa dreams of, which in part constitute the substance of these poems, could in themselves be a focus of examination—as would the instances of individual consciousness’s merging in funny and instructive ways.
One path of reading through the poems in this volume is to trace the Buddhist, Japanese and western hermetic association with animal creatures — a blue dragon,” dragon fly “lookalikes,” a “white dog,” a “wolf and an elephant,” a red bird, “light” baby bees, “A huge white bear,” a white retriever, and peacocks — which the dreamer, Hasegawa, encounters along with various ancestor presences in often hilariously related episodes. These guardians also herald an otherness of being and provoke gestures of ritual as the Hasegawa/Quasha dream realm is entered into.
What I find most compelling is the plasticity of the reality frames that the poems reiterate. A fantastic malleability of self and radical shape-shifting ruptures the time-space continuum, and is accomplished in minute, subtle gestures that transfigure states of being, as in this discernment: a “very particular body movement / which can only be done in a certain state” (AD 21 ). Feeling becomes aura, as in “the poet / became a soft lavender. / The shape of the body was unchanged but the rest was color, / pure pervasive lavender” (AD 46). The following examples are doubly persuasive in that their diction succinctly describes the action as it happens: “I myself am a bird [….] and out came two trans/parent wings [….] autumn leaves came out of my mouth [….] I am an apple [….] We are roses.” (AD 17, 19, 32,35 ,36).
The trippy, acrobatic change-ups—actually, a spiritual equanimity—and cheerful surprise at landing on the other end of the worm hole (as in “I accidentally found an invisible door, and lo! / It lifted right out of the front of my body” [AD 68]) encourages the reader to align with the narrative as “existable / residues” progress to “still more / reaching dimensions” (AD 25). An elasticity of being is strengthened through the cognitive dynamics of reading. This dynamic raises a set of questions. Does engaged reading of poetry unleash our cognitive capacities and retained and stored dream communiqués which neural pathway retracings re-ignite? Do poetry’s compressed forms interact with mental “storage” so that concepts and pictures are imprinted in a swift sequence that concentrates alogical imaginings akin to dreaming?
After one reading of Ainu Dreams, I dreamt of a cheetah wandering through the dream’s span. The next night, again, a cheetah passed by with a deep glance. (Ten minutes after I write these words, an actual mouse trundles into the room.) Quasha writes that, in the composition of Ainu Dreams, Quasha and Hasegawa discovered just such interactions:
The torque of telling has a quality transport, to ‘a land’ of its own dimension, implying a language specific to another dimension,
to which poetry is liminal. The poem is aroused transversely by the listening, is moved to mind the gap. (AD 134)
The objective of any poem, or one possible objective, is to come fully into being. Such effort extends radially, engaged in all causal directions. Among Ainu Dreams’s trajectories is one tracing an ineffable dream intelligence as it demonstrates the capacity of language to torque its own materiality. In the graphic, dream-sphere space of the poems, the sign dematerializes but not as a deconstruction, rather by a synesthetic further becoming, which manifests within a layer of the possible: a “Translation before my eyes / into many, luminous spots” (AD 32). Surfaces resize into porous textures, as in “latticing / its own life, turning into sounds” and “the green glow in the round calling to the surface.” The lines “A word surfaces / Oki Oki” (AD 111 ) is a dreamed amplification of a phrase that mirrors the emergence of the word into the written text. “The words themselves glow, / expand” (AD 116).
Ainu Dreams enacts a metaphysic described in trance texts (such as the Seth Material and the Pathwork Lectures, among others) in which it is proposed that our perceived spatiality, inherited constructions of reality (“old whatevers” [AD 78]) and the limits of our intentionality are constructed by emotions. In his The Mystical Languages of Unsaying Michael Sells discusses the mystic Ibn Arabi’s reading of the Sufi concept of “the error of binding (taquid).” The binding of consciousness to naming’s ontological categories narrows our capacity to perceive a larger, cosmic, reality. The permeability of frameworks in Ainu Dreams playfully challenges this tendency.
There is yet another purpose for attending to Ainu Dreams. I would suggest that the dyadic project, starting in 1994 with Hasegawa as dreamer and narrator and ultimately co-editor, and Quasha as scribe, writer, shaper and co-editor, contributed to the onset, a decade on, of Quasha’s embarking on the preverbs project. This is manifestly different than one writing project naturally leading to or even overlapping another, however.
It should be emphasized at this juncture (as Quasha has noted in various statements of poetics) that previous to his preverbs he had written poems of an “axial” and “torsional” quality, which were informed by his engagement with the work of William Blake as well as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompsons’s On Growth and Form (1917). Quasha noted, indeed, that axial writing actually began with the “Proverbs of Soma,” (in the poem “Of a Woman the Earth Bore to Keep” in Stony Brook 1/2, 1968), which he composed while still in his mid-twenties. I would contend, aside from the Ainu Dreams poems embodying and reporting instances of radical change, that Quasha also underwent an initiation, one bringing him to the threshold of the specific work of the preverbs. And what here follows can only be my somewhat superficial and speculative discussion of that process, one still to be explored in more complexity.
Surely, the encounter of the Ainu Dreams project must have have constituted a passage in the time sense of this term but more so a fundamental evolution of Quasha’s purposes and capacity. Particularly important to this pre-preverbs phase, I would suggest, was the active speaking and listening practice in which Quasha recorded Hasegawa’s narration of dreams and then constructed that transcription as poems with her present to make adjustments. In the preface to Ainu Dreams the emphasis on listening is articulated:
I have found in the process of this composition further confirmation of a lifelong view – namely, that a poem has a source
outside personal boundaries […]. I understand the poet’s role as maintaining a discipline of listening to a specific source,
in this case situated at once in the dream and in emerging language. (AD 12)
Perhaps that listening intensified into a kind of new, or newly sharpened, reception instrumental to the preverbs’s composition. In “a note on preverbs and axial poetics,” published in a first version on the Jerome Rothenberg blog “Poems and Poetics,” Quasha discusses how “The projective force, beyond the line (or syntactic unit), is not forward but radial, and of course highly variable in reading […]. This includes a “poetics of service”; how we serve by listening […].”
I wonder if the composition of Ainu Dreams, in part written by listening intensely to a speaker, may have contributed to Quasha’s further observation in the “pregloss” of his 2015 book Glossodelia Attracts: “In my ear it implies that intense speaking can spontaneously reveal the unknown. Then it attracts the mind to further (un)knowing. As psychotropic language vehicle, preverbs can reorient the mind by shifting conceptions of what language is” (Glossodealia Attract xi). I have hypothesized a specifically female voice/presence/daemon transmission. The dynamic of Ainu Dreams’s composition allowed the author to develop a hearing of a “muse when you’ve heard it from the beginning and still can’t recall.” (Daemon of the Moment 14).
Quasha has not confirmed my reading, particularly, although he has engaged with the question of source and origins (when Thomas Fink interviewed him, recently, for Jacket 2). “They (preverbs) have the strange quality,” Quasha says, “of seeming both mine and wholly other.” Any singularity or embodied source is to be questioned: “Preverbs seem to want to stay within possible syntactic bounds (inviting thought to try them on), which they violate, perhaps becoming paratactic, through internal multiplicity” (Jacket 2, May 2016). A further elaboration of his preverbs project, from his 2011 volume Verbal Paradise, widens the possibilities of what is speaking and who is listening:
Preverbs also stand at the lintel of self and other and listen in on the ongoing conversation. In that focus they perform a sort of
kledomantic gathering of stray language according to a singularity-centered principle of organization. (Verbal Paradise x)
In Quasha’s exchanges with Fink a process of reception is described, such as we see in these comments by Quasha:
I could say I “receive” them [the lines of preverbs] but that would imply a sender, which I can’t verify or know, even though in
certain moments and moods it definitely feels like they’re coming from elsewhere. [. . . .] From the beginning preverbs have come
mostly preformed and performative in the ear-mind. I write them in a notebook I carry with me everywhere, ever ready to write
because I have about thirty seconds before they recede into the noesphere, back to the wild. (Jacket 2)
Let me, therefore, revise my concept of the transmission. Quasha writes in The Daemon of the Moment that “[t]he messenger is not the message unless it says so, and even then…” (10). My clarified insight is that, as the preverb pronounces within the auditor’s (i.e., Quasha’s) listening field, an afterthought is inscribed of a vanishing “she” whose identity is doubted and reengaged in its elusive flickerings: “Also feeling female the language lets me in another layer to do her waiting. / I’m only responsible for what I can’t control” (Daemon of the Moment 16).
It is likewise useful to note the fields of dreaming and ecology of community within which the poems of Ainu Dreams were created. Robert Kelly, long in conversation with Quasha, outlines in his own Dream Book an experiment to “investigate the dream reports of a chosen community.” The experiment is described in part this way:
We look here for images (things = phonemes?), events (dynamic interacts of things & person, person & person &c. =
morphemes?). We look here for narrative sequences, “stories” (but where does a story end?) (related chain of event, =
tagmemes? Query “related” events perceived by dreamer as “one” story)? Narrative sequences and the odd gaps (=sentence
juncture? Paragraphs?) that seem to separate them. (A Voice Full of Cities 364).
In this passage Kelly is imagining a project to research group dream data. In his later “Seventeen Arcana from the Infinity of Dreams” he offers this further thought: “But I suspect that the dream we do not remember is the dream that heals us. Instead it re-remembers us, and we wake healed.” This torque in thinking, of reversals and challenges to the constructs of reality many of us take for granted, is a compelling and peculiar affinity within this community of poets.
There has been a longstanding, articulated interest in dream work in the Hudson Valley communities where George and Susan Quasha, and Chie Hasegawa, have lived and worked. One particular project is The Annandale Dream Gazette. This online archive now includes several hundred entries of dream transcripts written by poets; it’s maintained by poets Lynn Behrendt and Kelly, who each live and work near Barrytown NY where the Quashas have made their home and center of operations. In 1994, when this project began, at least two important books on dream were published: Lucid Dreaming by Malcom Godwin and Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle. Sometimes, it seems there are converging swells of attention, focus and production of (human) areas of activity (beyond any obvious mapping) that cluster chronologically.
The poet Charles Stein, a longtime collaborator and companion of Quasha, who is cited in the book’s preface as being close to the composition of Ainu Dreams, has remarked in conversation with me that he imagines an “Other Barrytown,” a parallel dream community whose geography aligns with, diverges from, and mirrors the actual Barrytown. And we can be certain that sites of that other town surface elusively in Ainu Dreams; yet this body of poems stands alone as its own phenomenon and project. It certainly shares recognitions with writings by authors as varied as Joseph Cornell (in the published books of his dream accounts), Henri Michaux, Carlos Castaneda, Amos Tutuola, Alice Notley, Philip Lamantia, Charles Stein, Mary Caponegro, Lynn Behrendt and Brenda Coultas, to name a few authors who come first to mind, some of whom also participate within the Hudson Valley’s sphere of poetic activity.
Other significant forces dovetailed with the creation of Ainu Dreams, and they subsequently contributed to the start of the preverbs. An intense period of George’s visual art activities, specifically his axial stone works and a new phase of his axial drawings, converged in the Ainu Dreams years.
The Ainu Dreams project, I suspect, was a collaboration critical to the further creative work of Hasegawa, as well. For example, her handmade book object “Liberalia,” from 2000 (One of a Kind 59), presents earthily tinted open page spreads with a smaller, narrower inset of feathered pages, darkened as though burnt. The inset appears to serve as a labial doorway into the book’s spine. I am inclined to read that entrance as representing the liminal that she so fully explored in the dream reports leading to Ainu Dreams. (Hasegawa has gone on to collaborate with artist David Hammons and seems to be a specialist in dyadic art making energies.)
Viewing Susan Quasha’s vivid photographs, recently reproduced in the book Winter Music (with poems by Robert Kelly), offers an immersion within a kinetic, raw landscape we might see upon first awakening. They demonstrate an axiality that chooses the framed instant. As I write this, a treasured print from her series faces me. In the photograph, a setting winter sun ignites a swath of winter grasses feathered across the horizontal frame. A crimson band brings the viewer forward into the darkened horizon. That band is a crimson sister to the split-open, vermillion pomegranate poised on the cover of Ainu Dreams, which itself brings to mind Salvador Dali’s painting, The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, wherein a pomegranate flung forward arcs out of painterly space into the realm where the poem is spoken, heard, written and read.
During the Ainu Dreams process, too, George was deeply immersed in editing with Charles Stein and launching with Susan Quasha Station Hill’s important volume of Maurice Blanchot writing (The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 1995). In the afterward to Ainu Dreams, he quotes Blanchot, affirming the importance of the latter's thought in realizing that the act of writing is transformative story:
The tale (recit) is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made
to happen—an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale can hope to come into being too. (AD 132)
This sense of writing as locus of event is manifest in, for example, the narrative unpeeling in the poem “I Get Reversed”: “Try not to get confused or lost: / Which is inside, / which is outside. / I start peeling / from the sexual part/ like undressing, folding back/ the inside out, slowly/ where is my center now? (AD 20). The coming “into being” that Blanchot writes of is imagined by Hasegawa/Quasha as a membranous brain/vagina/text that is both inside and outside and which alters our concepts of the linearity and purposes of narration. “What’s it like to be inside a knot?” (AD 37). As in all of the poems in this book, this question, in “I Get Reversed,” compels us to reconceive of the certainties of the surfaces and planes of reality. “This is the only possible way to get there” (AD 21).
Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Edited by George Quasha, in collaboration with Charles Stein. Barrytown: Station
Hill Press, 1995.
Fink, Thomas. “Awareness Inside Language: On George Quasha’s preverbs,” Jacket2, May 13, 2016. http://jacket2.org.
Hatry, Heide, ed. One of a Kind. Cambridge: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2011. See http://www.heidehatry.com/oneofakind.pdf.
Kelly, Robert. A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly. Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh. New York:
Contra Mundum Press, 2014.
Kelly, Robert and Susan Quasha. Winter Music. Photography by Susan Quasha, poems by Robert Kelly. Rhinebeck: T Space Editions, 2014.
Quasha, George. Ainu Dreams. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999.
Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006.
The Daemon of the Moment (preverbs). Northfield: Talisman House Books, 2015.
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs). Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2015.
Verbal Paradise (preverbs). Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 2011.
“A note on preverbs and axial poetics”: http://www.quasha.com/poetry/preverbs-and-axial-poems. Accessed: 11.10.16
Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
[1] George Quasha & Charles Stein, “Publishing Blanchot in America: A Metapoetic View,” The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, p. 512.
[2] Ainu Dreams hereafter cited as AD.
A “massive contact lens / iridescent / and collecting dew along the base / — this is a thing so / transparently fragile” characterizes the elusive and playful universe of possibilities that is engaged in Ainu Dreams (1999, p. 101)[2] the set of poems George Quasha began writing in 1994, in collaboration with Chie Hasegawa (also known as buun). Ainu Dreams conveys a pictorial, enigmatic magic and flexible dimensionality of consciousness that remain a durably attracting spiritual encounter. My exploration here, of this book’s linkage to Quasha’s subsequent writing projects, has reconnected me with that initial, exhilarating reading and “takes me back / to the unrecallable place” (AD 108).
This set of poems offers many valences, multiple entrances into a specialized universe of quixotic conditions and possibilities. The singular objects and instruments that Hasegawa dreams of, which in part constitute the substance of these poems, could in themselves be a focus of examination—as would the instances of individual consciousness’s merging in funny and instructive ways.
One path of reading through the poems in this volume is to trace the Buddhist, Japanese and western hermetic association with animal creatures — a blue dragon,” dragon fly “lookalikes,” a “white dog,” a “wolf and an elephant,” a red bird, “light” baby bees, “A huge white bear,” a white retriever, and peacocks — which the dreamer, Hasegawa, encounters along with various ancestor presences in often hilariously related episodes. These guardians also herald an otherness of being and provoke gestures of ritual as the Hasegawa/Quasha dream realm is entered into.
What I find most compelling is the plasticity of the reality frames that the poems reiterate. A fantastic malleability of self and radical shape-shifting ruptures the time-space continuum, and is accomplished in minute, subtle gestures that transfigure states of being, as in this discernment: a “very particular body movement / which can only be done in a certain state” (AD 21 ). Feeling becomes aura, as in “the poet / became a soft lavender. / The shape of the body was unchanged but the rest was color, / pure pervasive lavender” (AD 46). The following examples are doubly persuasive in that their diction succinctly describes the action as it happens: “I myself am a bird [….] and out came two trans/parent wings [….] autumn leaves came out of my mouth [….] I am an apple [….] We are roses.” (AD 17, 19, 32,35 ,36).
The trippy, acrobatic change-ups—actually, a spiritual equanimity—and cheerful surprise at landing on the other end of the worm hole (as in “I accidentally found an invisible door, and lo! / It lifted right out of the front of my body” [AD 68]) encourages the reader to align with the narrative as “existable / residues” progress to “still more / reaching dimensions” (AD 25). An elasticity of being is strengthened through the cognitive dynamics of reading. This dynamic raises a set of questions. Does engaged reading of poetry unleash our cognitive capacities and retained and stored dream communiqués which neural pathway retracings re-ignite? Do poetry’s compressed forms interact with mental “storage” so that concepts and pictures are imprinted in a swift sequence that concentrates alogical imaginings akin to dreaming?
After one reading of Ainu Dreams, I dreamt of a cheetah wandering through the dream’s span. The next night, again, a cheetah passed by with a deep glance. (Ten minutes after I write these words, an actual mouse trundles into the room.) Quasha writes that, in the composition of Ainu Dreams, Quasha and Hasegawa discovered just such interactions:
The torque of telling has a quality transport, to ‘a land’ of its own dimension, implying a language specific to another dimension,
to which poetry is liminal. The poem is aroused transversely by the listening, is moved to mind the gap. (AD 134)
The objective of any poem, or one possible objective, is to come fully into being. Such effort extends radially, engaged in all causal directions. Among Ainu Dreams’s trajectories is one tracing an ineffable dream intelligence as it demonstrates the capacity of language to torque its own materiality. In the graphic, dream-sphere space of the poems, the sign dematerializes but not as a deconstruction, rather by a synesthetic further becoming, which manifests within a layer of the possible: a “Translation before my eyes / into many, luminous spots” (AD 32). Surfaces resize into porous textures, as in “latticing / its own life, turning into sounds” and “the green glow in the round calling to the surface.” The lines “A word surfaces / Oki Oki” (AD 111 ) is a dreamed amplification of a phrase that mirrors the emergence of the word into the written text. “The words themselves glow, / expand” (AD 116).
Ainu Dreams enacts a metaphysic described in trance texts (such as the Seth Material and the Pathwork Lectures, among others) in which it is proposed that our perceived spatiality, inherited constructions of reality (“old whatevers” [AD 78]) and the limits of our intentionality are constructed by emotions. In his The Mystical Languages of Unsaying Michael Sells discusses the mystic Ibn Arabi’s reading of the Sufi concept of “the error of binding (taquid).” The binding of consciousness to naming’s ontological categories narrows our capacity to perceive a larger, cosmic, reality. The permeability of frameworks in Ainu Dreams playfully challenges this tendency.
There is yet another purpose for attending to Ainu Dreams. I would suggest that the dyadic project, starting in 1994 with Hasegawa as dreamer and narrator and ultimately co-editor, and Quasha as scribe, writer, shaper and co-editor, contributed to the onset, a decade on, of Quasha’s embarking on the preverbs project. This is manifestly different than one writing project naturally leading to or even overlapping another, however.
It should be emphasized at this juncture (as Quasha has noted in various statements of poetics) that previous to his preverbs he had written poems of an “axial” and “torsional” quality, which were informed by his engagement with the work of William Blake as well as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompsons’s On Growth and Form (1917). Quasha noted, indeed, that axial writing actually began with the “Proverbs of Soma,” (in the poem “Of a Woman the Earth Bore to Keep” in Stony Brook 1/2, 1968), which he composed while still in his mid-twenties. I would contend, aside from the Ainu Dreams poems embodying and reporting instances of radical change, that Quasha also underwent an initiation, one bringing him to the threshold of the specific work of the preverbs. And what here follows can only be my somewhat superficial and speculative discussion of that process, one still to be explored in more complexity.
Surely, the encounter of the Ainu Dreams project must have have constituted a passage in the time sense of this term but more so a fundamental evolution of Quasha’s purposes and capacity. Particularly important to this pre-preverbs phase, I would suggest, was the active speaking and listening practice in which Quasha recorded Hasegawa’s narration of dreams and then constructed that transcription as poems with her present to make adjustments. In the preface to Ainu Dreams the emphasis on listening is articulated:
I have found in the process of this composition further confirmation of a lifelong view – namely, that a poem has a source
outside personal boundaries […]. I understand the poet’s role as maintaining a discipline of listening to a specific source,
in this case situated at once in the dream and in emerging language. (AD 12)
Perhaps that listening intensified into a kind of new, or newly sharpened, reception instrumental to the preverbs’s composition. In “a note on preverbs and axial poetics,” published in a first version on the Jerome Rothenberg blog “Poems and Poetics,” Quasha discusses how “The projective force, beyond the line (or syntactic unit), is not forward but radial, and of course highly variable in reading […]. This includes a “poetics of service”; how we serve by listening […].”
I wonder if the composition of Ainu Dreams, in part written by listening intensely to a speaker, may have contributed to Quasha’s further observation in the “pregloss” of his 2015 book Glossodelia Attracts: “In my ear it implies that intense speaking can spontaneously reveal the unknown. Then it attracts the mind to further (un)knowing. As psychotropic language vehicle, preverbs can reorient the mind by shifting conceptions of what language is” (Glossodealia Attract xi). I have hypothesized a specifically female voice/presence/daemon transmission. The dynamic of Ainu Dreams’s composition allowed the author to develop a hearing of a “muse when you’ve heard it from the beginning and still can’t recall.” (Daemon of the Moment 14).
Quasha has not confirmed my reading, particularly, although he has engaged with the question of source and origins (when Thomas Fink interviewed him, recently, for Jacket 2). “They (preverbs) have the strange quality,” Quasha says, “of seeming both mine and wholly other.” Any singularity or embodied source is to be questioned: “Preverbs seem to want to stay within possible syntactic bounds (inviting thought to try them on), which they violate, perhaps becoming paratactic, through internal multiplicity” (Jacket 2, May 2016). A further elaboration of his preverbs project, from his 2011 volume Verbal Paradise, widens the possibilities of what is speaking and who is listening:
Preverbs also stand at the lintel of self and other and listen in on the ongoing conversation. In that focus they perform a sort of
kledomantic gathering of stray language according to a singularity-centered principle of organization. (Verbal Paradise x)
In Quasha’s exchanges with Fink a process of reception is described, such as we see in these comments by Quasha:
I could say I “receive” them [the lines of preverbs] but that would imply a sender, which I can’t verify or know, even though in
certain moments and moods it definitely feels like they’re coming from elsewhere. [. . . .] From the beginning preverbs have come
mostly preformed and performative in the ear-mind. I write them in a notebook I carry with me everywhere, ever ready to write
because I have about thirty seconds before they recede into the noesphere, back to the wild. (Jacket 2)
Let me, therefore, revise my concept of the transmission. Quasha writes in The Daemon of the Moment that “[t]he messenger is not the message unless it says so, and even then…” (10). My clarified insight is that, as the preverb pronounces within the auditor’s (i.e., Quasha’s) listening field, an afterthought is inscribed of a vanishing “she” whose identity is doubted and reengaged in its elusive flickerings: “Also feeling female the language lets me in another layer to do her waiting. / I’m only responsible for what I can’t control” (Daemon of the Moment 16).
It is likewise useful to note the fields of dreaming and ecology of community within which the poems of Ainu Dreams were created. Robert Kelly, long in conversation with Quasha, outlines in his own Dream Book an experiment to “investigate the dream reports of a chosen community.” The experiment is described in part this way:
We look here for images (things = phonemes?), events (dynamic interacts of things & person, person & person &c. =
morphemes?). We look here for narrative sequences, “stories” (but where does a story end?) (related chain of event, =
tagmemes? Query “related” events perceived by dreamer as “one” story)? Narrative sequences and the odd gaps (=sentence
juncture? Paragraphs?) that seem to separate them. (A Voice Full of Cities 364).
In this passage Kelly is imagining a project to research group dream data. In his later “Seventeen Arcana from the Infinity of Dreams” he offers this further thought: “But I suspect that the dream we do not remember is the dream that heals us. Instead it re-remembers us, and we wake healed.” This torque in thinking, of reversals and challenges to the constructs of reality many of us take for granted, is a compelling and peculiar affinity within this community of poets.
There has been a longstanding, articulated interest in dream work in the Hudson Valley communities where George and Susan Quasha, and Chie Hasegawa, have lived and worked. One particular project is The Annandale Dream Gazette. This online archive now includes several hundred entries of dream transcripts written by poets; it’s maintained by poets Lynn Behrendt and Kelly, who each live and work near Barrytown NY where the Quashas have made their home and center of operations. In 1994, when this project began, at least two important books on dream were published: Lucid Dreaming by Malcom Godwin and Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle. Sometimes, it seems there are converging swells of attention, focus and production of (human) areas of activity (beyond any obvious mapping) that cluster chronologically.
The poet Charles Stein, a longtime collaborator and companion of Quasha, who is cited in the book’s preface as being close to the composition of Ainu Dreams, has remarked in conversation with me that he imagines an “Other Barrytown,” a parallel dream community whose geography aligns with, diverges from, and mirrors the actual Barrytown. And we can be certain that sites of that other town surface elusively in Ainu Dreams; yet this body of poems stands alone as its own phenomenon and project. It certainly shares recognitions with writings by authors as varied as Joseph Cornell (in the published books of his dream accounts), Henri Michaux, Carlos Castaneda, Amos Tutuola, Alice Notley, Philip Lamantia, Charles Stein, Mary Caponegro, Lynn Behrendt and Brenda Coultas, to name a few authors who come first to mind, some of whom also participate within the Hudson Valley’s sphere of poetic activity.
Other significant forces dovetailed with the creation of Ainu Dreams, and they subsequently contributed to the start of the preverbs. An intense period of George’s visual art activities, specifically his axial stone works and a new phase of his axial drawings, converged in the Ainu Dreams years.
The Ainu Dreams project, I suspect, was a collaboration critical to the further creative work of Hasegawa, as well. For example, her handmade book object “Liberalia,” from 2000 (One of a Kind 59), presents earthily tinted open page spreads with a smaller, narrower inset of feathered pages, darkened as though burnt. The inset appears to serve as a labial doorway into the book’s spine. I am inclined to read that entrance as representing the liminal that she so fully explored in the dream reports leading to Ainu Dreams. (Hasegawa has gone on to collaborate with artist David Hammons and seems to be a specialist in dyadic art making energies.)
Viewing Susan Quasha’s vivid photographs, recently reproduced in the book Winter Music (with poems by Robert Kelly), offers an immersion within a kinetic, raw landscape we might see upon first awakening. They demonstrate an axiality that chooses the framed instant. As I write this, a treasured print from her series faces me. In the photograph, a setting winter sun ignites a swath of winter grasses feathered across the horizontal frame. A crimson band brings the viewer forward into the darkened horizon. That band is a crimson sister to the split-open, vermillion pomegranate poised on the cover of Ainu Dreams, which itself brings to mind Salvador Dali’s painting, The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, wherein a pomegranate flung forward arcs out of painterly space into the realm where the poem is spoken, heard, written and read.
During the Ainu Dreams process, too, George was deeply immersed in editing with Charles Stein and launching with Susan Quasha Station Hill’s important volume of Maurice Blanchot writing (The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 1995). In the afterward to Ainu Dreams, he quotes Blanchot, affirming the importance of the latter's thought in realizing that the act of writing is transformative story:
The tale (recit) is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made
to happen—an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale can hope to come into being too. (AD 132)
This sense of writing as locus of event is manifest in, for example, the narrative unpeeling in the poem “I Get Reversed”: “Try not to get confused or lost: / Which is inside, / which is outside. / I start peeling / from the sexual part/ like undressing, folding back/ the inside out, slowly/ where is my center now? (AD 20). The coming “into being” that Blanchot writes of is imagined by Hasegawa/Quasha as a membranous brain/vagina/text that is both inside and outside and which alters our concepts of the linearity and purposes of narration. “What’s it like to be inside a knot?” (AD 37). As in all of the poems in this book, this question, in “I Get Reversed,” compels us to reconceive of the certainties of the surfaces and planes of reality. “This is the only possible way to get there” (AD 21).
Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Edited by George Quasha, in collaboration with Charles Stein. Barrytown: Station
Hill Press, 1995.
Fink, Thomas. “Awareness Inside Language: On George Quasha’s preverbs,” Jacket2, May 13, 2016. http://jacket2.org.
Hatry, Heide, ed. One of a Kind. Cambridge: Pierre Menard Gallery, 2011. See http://www.heidehatry.com/oneofakind.pdf.
Kelly, Robert. A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly. Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh. New York:
Contra Mundum Press, 2014.
Kelly, Robert and Susan Quasha. Winter Music. Photography by Susan Quasha, poems by Robert Kelly. Rhinebeck: T Space Editions, 2014.
Quasha, George. Ainu Dreams. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999.
Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006.
The Daemon of the Moment (preverbs). Northfield: Talisman House Books, 2015.
Glossodelia Attract (preverbs). Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 2015.
Verbal Paradise (preverbs). Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 2011.
“A note on preverbs and axial poetics”: http://www.quasha.com/poetry/preverbs-and-axial-poems. Accessed: 11.10.16
Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
[1] George Quasha & Charles Stein, “Publishing Blanchot in America: A Metapoetic View,” The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, p. 512.
[2] Ainu Dreams hereafter cited as AD.