While Sleeping

by Bill Lavender

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).

120 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

About the author

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and a novel trilogy, Three Letters. He is also a publisher. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.

His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of the surreal world of the future, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 by Lavender Ink. His Amazon author page lists most of his books.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Reviews

[Michael Edgerton]

A fruitful investigation in and through process in the tradition of Bernadette Mayer's /Midwinter's Day/ and A. R. Ammons's /Tape for the Turn/. A poetic meditation well-worth reading, ranging from prose to visual poems.