The Poetic Dream: An interview with Lesléa Newman

The connection between dreams and poetry can be illustrated simply by pulling a book of poetry off a shelf, says author Lesléa Newman. ‘Open to the table of contents and you’ll almost always find a poem with the word dream in the title.’

Looking inward toward dreams and poetry

An interview with Lesléa Newman by Tzivia Gover

Lesléa Newman is a prolific writer who has published over 70 books including many books of poetry. Although her dreams aren’t as prolific as her literary output (she remembers a few a month, which is a bit below the average of 2-3 a week) they play a big part in her creative life. Remembering only a handful of dreams, she says, makes them even more precious.

Sometimes those dreams arrive in the form of a sentence that lingers in her mind even after she wakes up. For example, these dream lines: “The pigs are coming today, hooray! The pigs are coming today!” became the start of,?Pigs, Pigs, Pigs!?of one of her many delightful picture books.

In?I Carry My Mother, a poetry collection, her poem “Stopping By Dreams on a Lonely Evening,” was inspired by Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night.” The poem was sparked by a dream Newman had shortly after her mother died, in which she appeared dressed in white, floating in the sky. “She said she was okay, and I shouldn’t cry,” Newman recalls.

It is fitting, perhaps, that she set her dream-poem within the cadences and rhyme scheme of Frost’s poem. another poem by Frost, “After Apple-Picking,” incorporates hypnogogic dream imagery when the poet describes drowsing off to sleep after working in an apple orchard all day long: “Magnified apples appear and disappear/stem end and blossom end and every fleck of russet showing clear.”

I memorized the entire poem during graduate school, and to this day, when I repeat it to myself while lying in bed, Frost’s rocking cadences lull me to sleep. After all, it is not only the imagery and emotion of poetry that can make it dreamy; the lulling music of poetry can put the reader in a soporific state as well.

Newman agrees that poets have a special relationship to dreams, and she often provides dream-related prompts to the students in her writing classes. The connection between dreams and poetry can be illustrated simply by pulling a book of poetry off a shelf, Newman says. “Open to the table of contents and you’ll almost always find a poem with the word dream in the title,” she says.

Once, as a young woman working at East West Books in New York City, she was approached by a customer needing her help. “We got to talking and she said, ‘Well, what do you do when you’re not in this book store?’” When Newman replied that she was a poet, the customer said, “Ah, then I will leave you alone to dream,” before drifting away. The memory itself, she says, is almost like a dream.

“I think as poets we have a rich inner life and dreams are definitely a part of that. Dreams are messages that come from some mysterious place, which is often the same mysterious place that poems come from. So, it’s just about trying to be awake and tapping into something beyond our conscious self.”

? 2021 Tzivia Gover, all Rights Reserved        

Inspired? Learn to Write Poems from Your Dreams.

?BREAKING S’NEWS: Lesléa and Tzivia’s children’s book, How to?Sleep Tight Through the Night, is forthcoming from Storey Publishing in 2022. Stay tuned for details.