In Their Own Words
Sara Gilmore on “[I don’t know how to dream]”
[I don’t know how to dream]
I don’t know how to dream
the medium to give in, swerve in thousands,
priorities how they drown clear in water
and this love standing outside of time and place.
Its rank is a delta and must quiet as a delta
loses distinction it got dark
so I could home it. Which strands
will take to its surface, I know
the words, aim, unassuming, it’s for you
and articulate
their rushing dark articulate is
west, their march is now, sleepless and replace:
let in scarcity everywhere.
Reprinted from The Green Lives (Fonograf Editions, 2025) with the permission of the publisher and author. All rights reserved.
On “[I don’t know how to dream]” from The Green Lives
These poems come from a crown of sonnets that appears in the middle of The Green Lives. Recently, I’ve been reading Ariana Reines’s Wave of Blood. At one point, she talks about an impossibility of speaking honestly in public, and she says, “There is a way of being honest and real and true about what life is actually like, but if you’re only doing that in diatribes and manifestos, language very quickly becomes a tool for foreclosing upon possibility and expansion.” That resonates with me. When I was writing these poems, I was afraid that I was driving too hard at ideas. Poetry often comes from a place of very strong feeling and conviction—and the strength of them can lend to language of hyperbole rather than close reflection and nuance. Living personal experiences that are deeply unjust, living in an era where authoritarianism and gaslighting are rampant, the outrage I feel, for me as a poet, can make it difficult to approach the urgency of reality in a way that attends to its gravity and also continues to open into possibility and expansion. The struggle of these sonnets was to convey a concrete idea, to use language’s property to communicate, to disclose my thoughts or thought processes closely without veering into diatribe and shutting down possible futures, possible presents. The miracle of the sonnet is the volta, the turn, which now I want to think about in terms of wrestling. Hopefully, when your opponent pins you to the mat, even in great physical struggle and defeat, you can look up and see the ceiling, the walls, the people around you, and everything will look different. This too is a form of resistance: allying yourself in a sort of the orientation of the messianic Fred Moten describes in The Undercommons, not “someday” in a coming world but in this world we have now: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in this world and I want to be in that.” That’s what I believe, too, and how I want to feel, and that’s how I felt with these poems: pinned to the mat by the writing, the world as it is still full of possibility.
