I always tell the same story over and over about how my poetry writing and first poem came into existence. On February 14, 2007, I wrote my very first poem.
I woke up out of my sleep, with this poem swirling around in my head.
I got up out of the bed and quickly scribbled it down.
After that the poems just started to flow and flow . Many of my poems have come just as I am drifting off to sleep, waking up or in the middle of the night.
Early on, after the publishing of my first collection of poems, Reflections of a Mississippi Magnolia, I would often get an odd response ( I thought ) to me telling the story, in interviews. The "academic literary types" would tell me that I might not want to say that this was the way that my poems came about. They indicated that it might take away from the validity of my "craft". They said that it might somehow diminish the respect that people would have for my work. I thought it very odd because I was thinking ...What OTHER way could I or should I say that they came about ... other than the way they ACTUALLY DID come about ??!!! Were they suggesting that I make something up ??!!! To me that idea was totally absurd. I totally ignored that "marketing " advise and kept on telling my story...over and over and over again.
I am very proud to tell the story of how my poems come/came. Of course, there was/is no hiding it, anyway!
In the foreword of Reflections I wrote: I always hesitate to call myself a poet. I feel more like a vessel or conduit through which the poems flow. I never intentionally sat down to write any of them. They all came to be fully complete and neatly packaged, title and all. I just put them down on paper. (I consider them gifts from God )
Actually, as far as "creative dreaming" goes, I think that I am in very good company !
Consider this :
On May 7, 1965, in a motel room in Clearwater, Florida, a bleary-eyed Keith Richards awoke, grabbed a tape recorder and laid down one of the greatest pop hooks of all time: The opening riff of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." He then promptly ...fell back to sleep.
"When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out," Richards recalled many years later. "I put it back on, and there's this, maybe, 30 seconds of 'Satisfaction,' in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then it suddenly—the guitar goes 'CLANG," and then there's like 45 minutes of snoring." It wasn't much to go on, but he played it for Mick Jagger later that same day. "He only had the first bit, and then he had the riff," Jagger recalls. "It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar—it didn't sound like rock. But he didn't really like it, he thought it was a joke... He really didn't think it was single material, and we all said 'You're off your head.' Which he was, of course."
Yesterday was written by Paul McCartney. He says that he literally woke up out of a dream with the song in his head, and went right to the piano. The working title was "Scrambled Eggs", in G, until he came up with "Yesterday".
In 1965, Paul McCartney, famous singer/songwriter then with The Beatles, was staying at his parent’s home in London. McCartney stated:
"I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!"
The tune McCartney was speaking about was the arrangement to the gigantic hit “Yesterday” (from The Beatles album “Help!” (1965).
In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1999, the song was voted by BBC Radio 2 listeners as the best song of the 20th century.
In 2000, “Yesterday” was voted the number one pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone Magazine.
Furthermore, The Guinness Book of Records holds that “Yesterday” is the most covered song ever with over 3000 versions recorded, and Broadcast Music Incorporated asserts the song was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone... all from a dream.
MY VERY FIRST POEM
Written February 14, 2007
"When the mind rests, the subconscious whispers"
Interview information and more on amazing dreams here:
Famous Dreams - Paul McCartney
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