Dream Index

<p>“Poetry puts language into a dream state, thereby reassuring itself of the impinging realities,” Durs Grünbein wrote in his seminal 2009 Frankfurt Poetry Lecture. When I first stumbled upon this somewhat cryptic statement, I took it to be more of a metaphor than something to be understood literally. Why the dream state was presumably key to reassuring ourselves of the “impinging realities” of our world, and why and in what sense poetry presumably translated language into an oneiric state, I didn’t even try fully to fathom (let alone grasp and articulate to myself), happily suffused with the line’s wafting aroma of ambiguity. After all, that’s what we tend to expect poets to do to us: draw us in and enjoin us to surrender ourselves to the magic powers of their symbols and metaphors, to the workings of what Immanuel Kant referred to as the “aesthetic idea,” which, as he explained, “gives plenty of food for thought” yet “can never be captured with adequate thoughts or concepts” or “made wholly accessible through language.”…</p>