This year I have been traveling back and forth between Manhattan, Kansas, where I live, and Manhattan in New York City for my role as the Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.
In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says homes are a nest for dreaming, but I want all places to be a space of dreaming, of making, of being.
Walking up the Guggenheim’s rotunda is like rising out of the layers of a dream.
For my programming at the museum, one of the projects has been to create and curate a series of Dream Walks where poets serve as Dream Shepherds and wander the museum with patrons.
Dream Shepherds read poems made of questions as a way to enter their own wonder. Offering a set of questions helps a wonderer and writer enter the dream space where making so often happens. I believe people come to poems looking for wisdom, but poets are often living the questions, which is a far better lantern in the darkness.
I have been taking the lines and images from museum patron’s dreams that they have left behind in a Dream Nest and crafted collaborative poems. I read what people shared and try to weave together a collective sense of dreaming from everything I’ve been given.
Although it is not the same as hearing one another’s voices and using poetry to create a conversation in a space, I still feel connected to the strangers who leave their dreams for me. When the image is new, the world is new. We often dream something before it is true, but in our consciousness we must stay in our unknowing a little while longer, to dwell in doubt and remain curious about that doubt, to stay in the dream until we are ready to startle awake with our knowing.
Toi Derricotte said that “a poem is always there; you just have to hold up a net to catch it.” It’s a way to shape the relationship between yourself and the world that sometimes seems invisible. But draped in the fabric of language, we see the connections between the worlds within ourselves and beyond ourselves. There’s no place like home for dreaming, but hopefully poetry helps us see the homes we can create wherever we are because we find our connections to those people, those places, those dreams that answer the questions we have not yet found a way to ask.
— Traci Brimhall, University Distinguished Professor, Poet Laureate of Kansas, and 2025 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence / excerpt from “The House of Being: Poetry and Places of Community” in the 2025 Fall/Winter issue of American Poets
K-State English 