Away from my Dream Desk

Peter Ramos:
This began as an experiment I learned from poet Carmen Giménez Smith in which one takes an existing poem and transcribes it in reverse order. She got this from a letter of Emily Dickinson’s in which she mentions reading a poem in reverse (from the bottom up) to a different but equally enjoyable thrill. I tried several Dream Song poems by Berryman, but none seemed to work as a prompt for my own poem. But somehow, after revising and combing and then switching out all the words and then starting again, I got this very Berryman-esque Berryman tribute (“…Dream Desk,” etc.) poem. In it I tried to invoke or perform the Berryman “self” which, as I take it, works wonderfully for this kind of tongue-in-cheek confessional in which a number of plastic comedic and neurotic selves, slightly cartoonish yet no less “real” than any other self, vie for visibility.