As I began compiling and editing poems about insomnia for the collection that became Acquainted With the Night, I was a little apprehensive about confronting my dark subject. But perhaps comforted by the lovely word “anthology” -- its Greek roots evoking a garland of flowers -- I grew to feel that I was engaging in a time-honored, even noble, venture.
The experience was akin to throwing a dinner party, and as my potential guest list of poems about sleeplessness grew, I took pleasure in plotting not only who might be invited, but also who should be seated next to whom. The gritty-eyed wakefulness of “On Reading The Book of Odes,” by the 19th-century Vietnamese poet and revolutionary Cao Bá Quát -- “The self must hide from wind and dust --/the door is always tightly shut” -- resonated, for example, with Debra Nystrom’s “Insomnia": “It’s the ceaseless wind/off the prairie, blasting/grit into the window casings. ...”
Here, I thought to myself, I’ll seat the clamorous humor of Cornelius Eady’s “Insomnia,” in which noisily confessing cars and trains
... want more Than to be in Your dreams.
They want to tell you A story.
They yammer all night and then The birds take over, Jeering as only The well-rested can.
And next to Eady’s smirking prognosis, I considered, I’ll put the desolate aural acuity of Dana Gioia’s “Insomnia": “Now you hear what the house has to say./Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,/the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort.” Together at the table, Eady and Gioia can confide to each other the mutterings of their torturous muses.
Vladimir Nabokov called sleep the “most moronic fraternity in the world. ... [a] nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” My party, then -- my “Congress of the Insomniacs,” to borrow Charles Simic’s phrase -- would be an assembly of the vigilant, who, though often wretched in their portrayal of wakefulness, also often possess a secret identification with it.
As the project grew in scope, however, forcing me to make complex editorial decisions, my genial dinner party began to feel to me more like a wedding, with all of its attendant compromises and tensions. At the effort’s most taxing and difficult times, it even seemed a tad funereal, with witty, sharp-nerved, and restless guests mourning the loss of sleep, the common object of their ambivalent love.
The richest surprise of the whole endeavor, however, was that despite occasional personal chagrin and frustration over the mechanics of putting the book together -- tracking down permissions, for example, from the deceased executors and far-flung heirs of dead translators, or cutting beloved poems from the final manuscript -- I never, no irony intended, grew tired of the poems themselves. As poems about sleeplessness poured in from colleagues and friends, or as I came upon them in my own research, I was discovering that there was something intense, even universal, about the chord between insomnia and poetry, something that might distinguish this anthology from, say, a bouquet of cat verses or of poems about New Jersey. There was a period, well into the process of assembling the book, during which I encountered an insomnia poem every few days, and, in fact, a spate of weeks in which every poem I read seemed like an insomnia poem. As I immersed myself more and more in the culture of insomnia poems, I grew excited about the degree to which the two worlds -- poetry and sleeplessness -- exchanged their secrets, illuminating each other in ways meaningful to both the sleepless and the poet.
Perhaps because I am a poet, my own bouts of sleeplessness made me alert over the years to many fine and startling poems about insomnia -- Elizabeth Bishop’s and Philip Larkin’s modern ur-poems on the subject, Plath’s and Dickinson’s nocturnal musings, all those Petrarchan descendants and heirs burning and freezing by moonlight in unrequited desire. What fun, I considered, to bring some of these poems into concert in a bedside fetish, a night-table reader for the wakeful -- something small enough to tuck under one’s pillow or tote along in hand or pocket on nocturnal perambulations. A midnight book about the sleepless for the sleepless, and compact enough not to knock an insomniac awake should he or she be lucky -- or unlucky -- enough to doze off while reading it.
An initial weekend’s rambling through my own bookcases yielded more than 30 poems, ranging from Sappho (“Tonight I’ve watched/The moon and then/the Pleiades/go down”) to a thrilling Inuit poem whose speaker, a hunter lost on an ice floe, chants fatalistically, even talismanically, “When I tire of being awake/I begin to wake./It gives me joy.”
Subsequent reading and research confirmed what that early garnering suggested: I was going to find a larger, more eclectic and international group of poems on the subject of insomnia than I had originally imagined -- works from those two societies Wordsworth named the “noble Living and the noble Dead,” and from a broad range of cultures. I found insomniac jewels in Italian, Romanian, Swedish, Vietnamese, Russian, Tamil, Yiddish, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages. And, despite a prevalent misconception that insomnia is a modern malady -- aggravated by the advent of the light bulb (Edison called his team of inventors the “insomnia squad”) and by today’s ever-awake technical and virtual world -- I found many ancient poems about insomnia that were as fresh as offerings from recent periodicals.
The story of Job, “full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day,” is based on a Semitic folktale composed as early as 2100 B.C. to 1550 B.C. The poet Patumnar, some time between 100 B.C. and A.D. 250, the flourishing period of Tamil literature, wrote with existential anguish (the translation is by A.K. Ramanujan):
The still drone of the time past midnight. All words put out, men are sunk into the sweetness of sleep. Even the far-flung world has put aside its rages for sleep.
Only I am awake.
In the book’s first section, “Solitude and Vigil,” I tethered together poems -- often full of mirrors and exaggerated noises -- whose speakers’ insomnias set them apart from the rest of the world. At times that aloneness strikes the reader as a source of pleasure or mettle. Writes Donald Justice in “The Insomnia of Tremayne": “He likes, he really likes the little hum,/Which is the last sound of all nightsounds to decay.” But at other times, the sleeplessness is morbidly funny. Jane Kenyon, in “Insomnia at the Solstice,” writes, “Washing up, I say/to the face in the mirror,/'You’re still here! How you bored me/all night, and now I’ll have/to entertain you all day. ...’”
Often insomnia is purely terrifying, as in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Insomnia":
Lie down in sleep but suddenly this windowless bathroom? ... and the perfect pool of the toilet bowl in which a single eyeball floats? and the mirror so polished there’s nothing beyond the surface not even you?
Still other insomnia poets are walkers, "[l]onesome among the sleepers,” to quote the 20th-century Swede Gunnar Ekelf. He, along with Walt Whitman, Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, and Robert Frost, are all poets whose speakers’ acquaintance with, or special knowledge of, the night involves a pantheistic sympathy with the sleeping they wander restlessly among. The impoverished Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), in her “Insomnia,” is “alone in the night,/ a homeless and sleepless nun!/Tonight I hold all the keys to this/the only capital city/and lack of sleep guides me on my path.”
How like the experience of being a poet, I mused, is this state of being the one awake while others sleep -- the designated watcher, so to speak -- a willing or unwilling witness to what Adrien Stoutenburg calls, in “Midnight Saving Time,” “the pitch and pall of night.” If, as Weldon Kees despairs, “The heroes perish/Miles from here. Their blood runs heavy in the grass” (“If This Room Is Our World”), then perhaps it is the poet -- kindred spirit to the insomniac -- whose plight and privilege it must be to imagine and speak for those relentless motions of the world, “that devouring flood/That I await, that I must perish by.”
Poets in the middle section, “Anguish and Longing,” pass dark nights of the soul. Whether abandoned by love, God, meaning, the self -- whether rent by desire or grief -- these speakers awaken, as Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoans, “and feel the fell of dark, not day.” Here is Philip Larkin in “Aubade” -- and one can just imagine him up all night, with his martinis and jazz LP’s -- confronting what is at the heart, for many, of both insomnia and of poetry:
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.In time the curtain-edges will grow light.Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now. ...
Surely that awareness of death’s inevitable big sleep is what causes many of us to charge each night’s little sleep with acute associations of mortality, guilt, shame, and yearning. It is also what drives many of us to write. Eros and Thanatos -- major themes of poetry -- are often those reasons we find ourselves unable to sleep, “looking,” as Shakespeare says, “on darkness which the blind do see.”
Perhaps most intriguing, however, are the poems that form the book’s third section, “Epiphany and Vision.” These poets court sleeplessness as a way of entering a threshold state between sleep and waking, where the veils of established ways of seeing fall away, and the speaker is permitted a glimpse of another world, as in this beautiful, brief poem by the 13th-century Vietnamese poet and king Trn Thái-Tng (translated by Huynh Sanh Thng):
Wind-swung, pine-shaded gate and moonlit court -- cool, pristine landscape after your own heart. There lies a joy that no one else suspects: the mountain hermit feasts on it till dawn.
Parallels exist between the injunctions against sleep of mystic and monastic orders -- with their call to “watch for the morning” -- and the wish of the poet to reach a heightened physical, spiritual, or artistic awareness. For some -- like Emily Bront -- night was a muse. “Let me sleep through [the sun’s] blinding reign,” she writes in “Stars,” “And only wake with you!” In “Bright Star,” Keats takes his identification with night’s special vision even further, intrepidly petitioning not only to watch, like a star, “with eternal lids apart,” but to fall, like the star’s light, “upon my fair love’s ripening breast,/To feel forever its soft fall and swell,/Awake forever in a sweet unrest. ...”
Implausible as the wooing of insomnia might be to the miserably sleepless, such poems suggest that, for some, insomnia represents an essential, poetic vision, serving as a source of inspiration and even as an optimal occasion for writing.
The Italian poet Umberto Saba describes himself as “sick with insomnia,/a religious pleasure,” and Stéphane Mallarmé spends an ecstatic (and envious?) night creating a poem while his wife gives birth to a flesh-and-blood child. In “Night-Time: Starting to Write,” the often-overlooked English poet Bernard Spencer acknowledges how he must, “for some bare bones/of motive, strange perhaps to beast or traveller,/with all I am and all that I have been/sweat the night into words, as who cracks stones.”
Interestingly, I slept well while working on this book. In his 1922 treatise On English Poetry, Robert Graves writes that "[a] well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.” Perhaps the realization that my own insomnia was related to certain poetic claims and conditions released me from some of the anxiety that had attended my sleeplessness in the past. And on those occasions when I did pass a wakeful night, it was comforting to follow the examples of Osip Mandelstam, Gregory Orr, and others, and read a good, heavy book -- or even a handful of insomnia poems -- reminding myself that in spite of how desperate I may feel when I have insomnia, I am not alone in “pondering,” as Whitman puts it, “the themes thou lovest best,/Night, sleep, death and the stars.”
Are poets more insomniac than other people? Probably not. But we may be more likely to turn the experience into an opportunity to write about the big human questions, all of which are magnified when we are up late, thinking. The insomniac poet invites us all -- sleepless or not -- to appreciate insomnia’s particular gestalt of vigil, pain, and vision. As Charles Simic puts it, “Sleeplessness is like metaphysics./Be there.”
Lisa Russ Spaar is a poet and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Virginia. Acquainted with the Night was published last year by Columbia University Press.
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