Where is the poet? followed by a reflection

For me, that makes total sense. Even if the dreamer has no associations, because they are in denial or scared or shut down (too depressed to care), the dream worker can discern the archetype and can make some educated guesses as to what is happening in the dream, and why it is meaningful for the dreamer and, possibly, the rest of us, in that order.

As for a poem, it turns out that everything I have said applies but tenuously. It isn't a perfect analogy, but yes, just as every dream is meaningful or means something and is not random, so is every poem, or even a failed poem (that ends up in the waste basket). But with writing poetry, the archetype may be harder to detect, and the content may be more personal, more subjective than the content in a dream. Sometimes. . . and this is where I am going . . . a poem might only mean something to the poet, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad poem. Stream of consciousness is a time-honored poetic.

For the French surrealists, you might say the archetype that was energising their work was the archetype of existential isolation. How can that be an archetype? What happened to human collective consciousness leading up to WW1 and between the World Wars was, meaning (the meaning of life itself), was disappearing into a giant energetic sinkhole. Meaning was all inward. Everything that was going on outside was becoming rigid and repressive, shifting toward the edge of chaos. Everything of value that made us human was internal, and, in fact, the archetypes were alive and well (albeit alive and well like magma in a soon to be active volcano!), so there was plenty to write poetry about, but reality was all inchoate and in pieces, it had to be reconstituted. So, the surrealists identified with the archetype of existential isolation (that is, cultural and spiritual isolation) and they served it well by showing how, even in those darkest of times, there was still meaning, but it was all in pieces. They each had fractal pieces that they began holding up and trading. All of the pieces were there. In fact they were numinous.

If you see what I'm saying about the surrealists, maybe you can also concur with me, that when a poet writes something, like "Where is the poet?" . . . "He is behind the barn / throwing a knife into a board", that can mean something . . . maybe even something important. Certainly to the poet but quite possibly to you too.

Poets these days can learn from the surrealists, even though a hundred years have passed. Existential isolation is no longer the powerful archetype it was for the first 40 years of the 20th century, but who would deny that we are facing our own existential crisis in the first decades of the 21st century.