Transom:
In this poem, your speaker wrestles with
a nameless, increasingly powerful "he" inside a quickly disintegrating
dreamscape. Is the fluidity of dream something that informs or inspires
your work? If so, what does dreaming allow you to do in
poems that a "waking voice" could not do?
Rossouw:
My desire as a poet is surprise. So,
yes, the fluidity of dream totally informs my work, as it so often
leads to surprise, especially if the poem gives us a sense of being
inside a dream rather than trying to represent it from the outside. As
much as I love cinema, it often fails to represent dreams visually
because it tries too hard to be dreamlike. When you're actually
dreaming it isn't dreamlike--it's excruciatingly real! Often as I am
writing I have the sense that I am chasing a dream that I can't quite
remember. I'm thinking here of the speaker in one of Rimbaud's
Illuminations who chases a personified dawn, a beautiful instance of
writing from inside the dream. Rimbaud's landscapes are so true to
dream in that their simultaneous contradictions and visual surprises
can't be fully resolved in waking life. Some of his imagery moves so
fast it is impossible to visualize, only to experience it. This is
dream. In the same way, if things are going well, the ending of a poem
is as much a surprise for me as it is for the reader. That said, I very
seldom write about dreams I've actually had. Mostly I see dream as an
approach. In the case of "Liquid Epaulet," however, the sense of
wrestling with a nameless "he" is very much from a dream I had, and it
was a terrifying experience. The dream wouldn't leave me and the poem
became my response. I guess I like the result because not even I could
tell you exactly who that "he" is. Where the speaker and the "he"
finally end up--a metaphoric Leningrad--didn't stem from my dream, but
spontaneously emerged as I wrote. Another surprise.