Recently, I had this dream: Read a Wallace Stevens poem each and every day.

I call this sort of dream a “task” dream. Many of the things I have written had their origin in such task dreams. Since Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite poets, I took up this task with enthusiasm. I decided to read a poem a day from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). As always, I don’t just read a poem, but I read it aloud. To hear the “voice” of the poem, one needs to hear it, not just see it.

A few days into this new “discipline,” something began to happen that is now ongoing. To give this some context, those of you who know my book, Psyche Speaks, may remember my describing a dream I had the night that I heard Robert Bly read Lorca’s Casida of the Rose. In the dream, I was leafing through Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections when a piece of paper fell out. On it was written, “The poem wants a poem/the dream wants a dream.” This dream began to change not only how I experienced dreams and poems, but also how I related to them.

That was three and more decades ago. So this sense of desire on the part of dreams and poems has been bubbling for a long time. It’s still hard to come to terms with this. But here is what began to happen in present time when I followed the instruction of the dream and began to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day.

As I was speaking the lines from Stevens' poem, “Infanta Marina,” a line burst into my experience that was not in the poem. The line was: “cats accepting Christ.” This is not a line I “made up” in any typical sense. It simply presented itself spontaneously. As far as I could tell, it had no relation whatever to Stevens’ poem. But the experience was so strong, that I had to stop and attend to the line and, as I did so, the line became part of a poem. It was not so much that I went into some composing mode. More exactly, I simply opened myself to a kind of “flow” of lines. It was a brief experience and afterward I gave the little poem a title, “Gods and Tuna.”

Gods and Tuna

A little-known secret:

Cats accepting Christ

Buddha and all the others

Like so many tuna

Humans could learn

From cats—but don’t

Wait for that to happen

What is most intriguing to me is that this has now become a regular experience. Sometimes it begins as I open the book to read the next day’s poem. Sometimes, it occurs as I’m reading the poem aloud. And sometimes it occurs after the poem. It has the feeling of a channel being opened, a channel from which words stream into my awareness. This is very similar to what my experience is like when I am writing fiction.

One of my favorite poems by Stevens is his “Mountains Covered with Cats.” I have not gotten to that poem in my daily reading yet, but it came to mind when I wanted to begin putting these little poems together. I call them “Strays.”

STRAYS

Like stray cats,

these little poems

visited upon reading

a Wallace Stevens poem

every day

Here is another:

Advantage

The cat looks at me

Not for praise, or love

Or any such a dog would

The cat looks instead

To brew some advantage

Calculating all the while

The cat looks satisfied

Advantage weighed

Curls up to sleep on it

For now, I just want to report that this is happening and that I experience it as a gift.