While Sleeping

Overview

Poetry.

"Poetry and sleep have always been related to me. What do we seek when we lie down to rest but a pleasant landscape of language? inaudible rehearsals of the auditory, invisible practice of the visual.It is possible of course to be asleep and awake at the same time, indeed we are mostly, examples: driving the freeway and missing the exit engrossed in meditation, orbetter the ineluctable state of napping in my chair, when I leave me there and go out for closer observation, hearing even seeing everything that goes on around but not noticing my own snores" (from the Introduction by the Author).

Author Biography

Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and publisher living in New Orleans.

He is the author of 14 books, including the innovative verse memoir, Memory Wing (Black Widow, 2011), surrealism (and bi-lingual Spanish edition, surrealismo), and, in 2019, My ID, from BlazeVOX. Three Novellas: Q, Little A, The Private I was released by Spuyten Duyvil in early 2020. Poems and essays have appeared recently in Southern Review, Xavier Review, Hurricane Review. Scholarly theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.

He is the publisher at Lavender Ink / Diálogos Books (lavenderink.org) and the co-founder, with Megan Burns, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival (nolapoetry.com).