From the Unconscious

Just as a monk in lotus position doesn't will enlightenment or a dreamer doesn't will a dream—a poet doesn't will a poem.

A woman once told me that her small son would dangle his fishing rod off the end of his bed by the hour. He must have been a poet. Fishing in the air. Waiting for that sudden tug. That flash of excitement. Something out of nothing.

My only exception with the quote above is that psychoanalysts know that the “nothing” from which dreams and poems proceed is more akin to what Alice Jones has touched upon in her poem, “Cliff.” It is from the edge of the known world that dreams and poems are created; the intermixing of our conscious and our unconscious experiences, where defenses wear thin and what seems overly reified and solid becomes more fluid and creative under the influence of unconscious processes.

Alice Jones's books from Alice James Books are The Knot, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award in 1992, and Isthmus. Others include Anatomy, a letterpress chapbook, and Extreme Directions (The fifty-four moves of Tai Chi Sword). Jones has been awarded fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her newest book, Gorgeous Mourning, won the 2001 Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Jones's poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Poetry, The Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, and Best American Poetry of 1994. She is a co-editor of Apogee Press (apogeepress.com) and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.