THE DOLPHINS OF ATLANTIS

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON EDITING AND DREAM POEMS

Back in graduate school, David Schloss slept late. If I knocked on his door before noon, I might not get an answer or else he’d be in a fog and unable to function. But usually by twelve-thirty or one, he was up when I came by with a draft of my latest poem. Pulling on a pair of black jeans and lacing his boots—the sharp city-kid look he brought with him from Brooklyn—he’d pour some cereal in a bowl and, while spooning it in, read over my poem. If it showed any promise, he took out a pencil and framed with thoughtful brackets every superfluous word. Then he read it again and underlined anything that smacked of cliché, lacked clarity, or struck him as “intellectual bullshit” (his critical term of choice).

The early poems of Ezra Pound were David’s touchstones and until I could develop the ability to step back and see my own work with sufficient detachment, I relied on his editorial judgment. It was our second year in the Writers’ Workshop and David’s editing saved me from embarrassment when my poems came up in class. But more important he modeled the craft of revision for me. By watching him work, I was eventually able to internalize his techniques and even now when I look at a student poem or rethink one of my own, I fall back on his critical symbols and categories. As he overhauled one of my drafts, he’d mutter to himself “bullshit…irrelevant…not clear…cliché…nonsense,” while on the flip side, his few chary adjectives of praise—“interesting,” “moody,” or, much more rarely, “cool”—suggested that I was on to something.

In those days, I wrote catch-as-catch-can, but mostly late in the evening, as consciousness loosened its grip and images floated up from the day. But Schloss’s creative process was very different. He explained that only by sleeping late could he gain access to deeper layers of thought. He kept a notebook and pencil beside his bed and when he woke from a dream, he’d scribble down whatever phrases came into his head. He took dictation from his dream-life, he said, because, when fully awake, his mind tended to operate in critical mode. As a result his poems had a quirky, surreal edge to them, but just what they were about was frequently in question. When they came up in workshop the students and often even the instructor seemed baffled.

One day a poem of his with the seductive title “The Dolphins of Atlantis” appeared on the worksheet, and when the discussion bogged down, feeling a debt of gratitude to my friend and editor, I jumped in and defended it with a careful line-by-line reading. In the rancorous debate that followed, I may have won a few converts, but after the session, David shook his head and told me that my interpretation had nothing to do with what he’d been thinking about when he wrote the piece.

Having been duped by my own ingenuity, I was dumbfounded. But then I had a great idea. Would he mind if I borrowed his title and wrote the poem I’d just described myself? David hesitated, running his fingertips over his temple as he thought. That catchy title was the best thing about his poem, but since I’d just shown my loyalty, if not my critical insight, he shrugged, and said, sure, go ahead.

THE DOLPHINS OF ATLANTIS

As the town walls fell apart
a particle at a time, their arms
contracted, their human contours

sleekened, sinuously, like a shark’s.
The face went last, long after
they were swimming in and out of doors.

Their paved streets, water polished,
shine like cast-off necklaces, exciting
fatal plunges from the decks of yachts.

They breathe another logic, simply
understanding that for them, it was easy.
“The final evolution we have become:

loss of feet, of names,” a legend
inscribed minutely in the deep
foreheads of those who might remember.

“The Dolphins of Atlantis” turned a corner for my work, stepping away from the clever Ashberyan cut-ups I’d been experimenting with to a more approachable, more lyrical style, and a more inward content. In a way, the dolphins embodied my new aesthetic—alluring, dream-like, a little dangerous—and their mysterious underwater world symbolized the artistic community my friends and I were forming. In that sense, the poem describes our progression from student-poets to the real thing, while transferring our casual coterie from landlocked Iowa City to the mythical ocean deeps.

*

Here's a poem by David Schloss that I often assign when I’m teaching a workshop:

                         A BUS

Consider the world around me:
Why do I take busses, for example?
Their routes are complex and arbitrary….
I hold a door open for a young lady.
The bus pulls away with her hanging on
And me in the dust. A bit farther down the road
She jumps off, running a way beside.
I run too and soon we are together.

I smile over. We both complain of the heat.
Soon another bus comes along, and on it we talk:
“Do you ever drive?” she asks. “Yes, I think I’m good,
But some people think I go too fast.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says,
Truly worried about my dangerous driving.

Later she tells me how, back at some stone wall,
Her lover was shot, no warning given—
And then, how her love ended:
The short conversation that morning,
The bored telephone call—the resentment at last
Of the constant intrusions into her life.

I find myself winding my watch, slowly,
Gravely, as she continues to speak:
She appears to me then, at a distance,
Deliberately cool and abstract.
And it is a reaction, I think, to something
I may have accidentally said or done.

But her anger, driven by the dying out of love,
Fails, leaving only passion—an emotion which,
Arrived at finally in her words,
Embarrasses us both, making us pause….

Now I don’t want to add to the number
Of things I already have to contend with:
It’s difficult enough without the sense
Of fear she causes every few moments
Whenever she speaks. And the cost is tremendous:
Just look at what her anger has done.

Besides, now she seems almost happy:
She will go back to live with her father
Over the store on the main street of some town.
And I am looking, sadly, deliberately,
Out the window again: the bus is running
Between the dark houses extremely, terribly close.

So much about the poem seems improbable, irrational, and yet right from the first line the voice is so authoritative that we’re immersed in its very ordinary, very strange world in the way dreams can take us in. The poem is full of emotions—worry, anger, nervous boredom, embarrassment, passion, all the way through to the young lady’s near happiness toward the end. And how strange that ending is, when her future is foreseen—something the narrator couldn’t possibly know in the poem’s present time?

David tells me that it doesn’t record an actual dream, but was written just after waking in a half-asleep state. Still, clearly it was by paying careful attention to his dream-life and keeping pencil and paper by his bed that he fostered the part of his imagination that led to this poem. Not every dream is this vivid, of course. And we’ve all been bored by people telling us dreams that makes no emotional sense. But following David’s example, I often write up my dreams, and some of them turn into poems. Dreams can give us insights into our hidden inner lives, but, Freud aside, they’re a great source of mysterious and surprising narratives and, as with “The Bus,” can make for absorbing poems.