Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)

Michael Ruby / Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep

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47

...of fate [state?] last night

It had all those provisions [precisions?]

Improvident nightfalls

And save up on a CD recorder

We want to exhaust the possibilities

Just like he's off of

Only small amounts of it

....is languishing, is uncalled for

Free has it for a million
We haven't seen the presidential library

Pathetic!

Then it was the NFL passing
For girls—

They took off kindergarten

Snyder
Snyder
Snyder
Snyder
After that
Nine months

Absolutely
Which I think I will
And I won't

Surely wanted to be a backstroker

Get 'em cheerful
'eerful [Earful?]

Get his hands on it
Pretty soon, that's what he wants to do

Nasty common ground
So what you're missing—is—this recording

If it doesn't, he was just ignoring altered states of being

Get the hunger pieces on the air
Let's do that

I'm not asking where this is going to go

My student went right to Shearson
Stick around for George Pierson

It looks more stuffy in here

High basketball seasons
To be associated with this

Who thought he was going to be tough?
Is that who the lawyer thought he would be?

But widening the colors

They were getting serious up there
Are some of these people in their—

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Author's Note

I first became aware of “inner voices” in college, around the time I took a Freud course and starting writing down dreams. Sometimes at night, as I was falling asleep, I would briefly hear sentences spoken by different voices, a few of which I recognized, such as my own or my mother’s. A few years later, when I was alone in Providence one winter writing “experimental poems” for the first time, I learned how to hear the inner voices at will. Lying on the couch, with a view of the Narragansett Electric plant through the bare trees, I would clear my mind of all thoughts and listen for the sound of sand being poured on sand (which I now think of as high-frequency static). The voices would begin as soon as I heard that sound. I found that after two or three voices, I would invariably fall asleep. To transcribe them, I had to pull myself back from sleep continuously. These are the first voices I transcribed:

How hard for it to be done
Oh, I see
7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
It’s the way he’s doing that
…take Angela
There’s no room for a boundary—do you know?
You sound optimistic to me, David

After that winter, I tried to transcribe inner voices at least once a year, and always included them among my poems. Then, in 1999, I thought that it might be worthwhile to transcribe a whole book of inner voices, taking dictation over an extended period of time. I came to view this book as forming the third part of a trilogy in prose and poetry with Dreams of the 1990s and Fleeting Memories, documenting “varieties of unconscious experience.”

All through the years, I’ve tended to assume that inner voices are radio waves that I’m somehow picking up, perhaps through the fillings in my teeth, as one of my mentors, the mad 1950s novelist H.L. “Doc” Humes, used to teach long before the triumph of wireless. Or perhaps it’s people I’ve overheard in the course of my life—though I doubt that. Or perhaps my brain somehow creates this chatter, just as it creates dreams. I’ve been most interested by the idea that we have this continuous stream of voices speaking within us throughout our lives, rarely if ever heard. In truth, each transcription should begin and end with ellipses, a tiny segment of an endless conversation. Perhaps more important from the point of view of poetry, the voices almost always speak a sentence or a phrase—a line! If the line is the unit of inner voices, then inner voices are one of the psychic underpinnings of poetry as a form of expression. Another way the form of poetry is embedded within us. We have this continuous multivocal poem being taking place within us, only audible in the briefly inhabitable borderland between waking life and sleep.