Margaret Ronda is the author of Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End (Stanford University Press, 2018), and two volumes of poetry. She is an associate professor of English at the University of California-Davis, where she teaches environmental humanities, poetry and poetics.
Authors | Margaret Ronda
Articles on Amodern by Margaret Ronda
SPELL AND SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES
Dreams as Procedure in Lyn Hejinian and Jackie Wang’s Poetry
This essay turns to two contemporary poetic texts, Lyn Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012) and Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void (Nightboat, 2020), that turn to the unconscious processes of the mind at rest and the forms of materialist attention that they generate. These texts attend to the terrain of work and social reproduction as reflected and refracted in the realm of dream. I argue that rather than framing sleep and dream as interior spaces where solitary fantasies and attachments play out, these books insist on the active interplay between the social and the dreamworld and the material action of dream and sleep.