Dreaming with Langston: Contemporary Poetic Experiments in Co-Liberation

Dreaming with Langston: Contemporary Poetic Experiments in Co-Liberation

Beginning with responses from contemporary American poets to a question (How have things changed?) about a single work, Langston Hughes’ 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again,” the study explores Hughes’ dream poems as methods of integration. Close reading reveals how such integrations extend beyond the social, as in the integration of the unconscious and conscious, along with further desegregations of waking and dreaming life, individual and collective, rich and poor, there and here, then and now. Attention to the various types of dreams that comprise Hughes’ poems leads to further insights. Taking inspiration from Hughes’ invocation of dreams as mode of practical poetic social and moral engagement, the study then shifts its form of inquiry from close examination of poems to practical oneironautic experiment. Employing dream induction methods and approaches delineated by dream scholars such as Patricia Garfield, Robert Moss, and Deirdre Barrett, participants attempt to engage with Langston Hughes directly, asking the same question posed earlier to contemporary American poets and scholars, while recording and reflecting upon their efforts and encounters on a daily basis.