Reverie Prompt:  p 189   “If there are ‘gorges’ (French = ‘throats’) in the mountains, isn’t it because the wind, long ago, spoke there?” In Bachelard’s understanding of poetry, a “light delirium makes the dreamer of cosmic reverie pass from a human vocabulary to a vocabulary of things.” He admires poetry in which “human and cosmic tonalities reinforce each other.”

Here is an example: “Listening to the trees of the night prepare their tempests, the poet will say: ‘The forest shivers under the caresses of the cristal-fingered delirium..’ That which is electric in the shiver—whether it runs along man’s nerves or along the fibers of the forest—has met a sensitive detector in the poet’s image.  Don’t such images bring us the revelation of a sort of intimate cosmicity?  They unite the outside cosmos with an inside cosmos.  Poetic exaltation—the crystal-handed delirium—makes an intimate forest shiver within us.”

Use this prompt to evoke through a poetic image a light delirium in which your nerves run along the “fibers” of your field study.

Sound carries the voice

Through a cavern of the soul

Plucking strings and chords

Creating elaborate vibrations

From the diaphragm to lips

Into air, respiration, spirit

Recycled to more sound

Air in

Sound out

Breathe in spirit, breathe out sound

As thoughts run across a plane of consciousness

Like grass stretched across a field

Nature’s instrument

Organic animate mechanics

Bring sound into the planet

Then breathe it back in

Reverie Prompt:  pp 139, 141  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “When I read this line by Edmond Vandercammen: ‘My childhood goes back to that wheaten bread,’ an odor of warm bread invaded a house of my youth.”  Create a reverie to demonstrate how in your own life “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.”

Our Car Smell

The car had a smell

It wasn’t a bad smell

I can’t pinpoint what the smell was

Where it came from

If it had been there the whole time

It could have been the carpet

or the interior

But when I remember that smell

Maybe it was the fading new car smell

When I remember that smell

I hear the music we listened to

I remember that smell

I see everything we drove past

Remember that smell

Everything they told me

That smell

Roll the windows down, hang my arm out as I

Smell

Reverie Prompt:  pp 88, 93  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of being whom one would love.”  Great dreamers dream their double.  Can you create a reverie to demonstrate how and why the passion of your current field study sustains you?  How is your “letter” (e.g., c is for cacao) your magnified double?  (E.g., While tasting Kallari chocolate can you re-member how C might idealize cacao?) “”Tell me whom you create and I shall tell you who you are.'” Suggestion: Use your reverie on an idealized passion to create a poem that evokes the sensation of how your passion is sustaining you.

Seven years old on my living room floor

I sat down and I wrote those first lyrics

Something new I knew I never done before

So excited for everyone to hear it

They laugh and suddenly crush my spirit

I sullenly return to my bedroom embarassed

Peer at the wall thinking of my appearance

It’s apparent that my words weren’t worth enough

So they’re disparaged

I look up at the dresser with my radio on

sit awake and wait for my favorite song to come on

Rap every lyric as if I wrote it myself

If you don’t know now you know

that’s what I know of myself

So one of those nights when I feel low

I turn the lights down low

Turn on some music and just go.

Reverie Prompt:  pp 38-39, 47  Create your own reverie on the engendering of words in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “Look out for the flamboires, little girl! Look out for the flambettes, booby!” In your experience does a romance language such as French do a “great service” by being a “passionate language” that has not wanted to  preserve a neuter gender, but rather multiplies occasions for choosing/coupling? What words, for you, “love each other?” Can you create a reverie to demonstrate words that, for you, have sexes re: the passion of your current field study?