Every once in a while a collection comes along that leaves its readers unraveling the pieces found within, asking more questions than finding answers. But in their guts, the reader can keenly feel the intentions behind each piece, and they delight in finding throughlines and themes that resonate quite deeply. Dreamboat by Jeffrey Skinner is one such work. It’s classified as a manuscript in progress, and the prose poems contained within guide the reader down a path of discovery. Or maybe the reading will result in a circuitous path leading absolutely nowhere. The speaker draws the reader into his dreamworld by sharing, “And, in any case, I am unaccountably sad, and have nothing to say.” The dreams presented within seem simultaneously prophetic and prescient, while also delving into nonsensical and fantastical realms all the same. It is up to the reader to decide how they choose to decipher and experience this work, and to likewise determine if there is anything to be gleaned from its pages.
One possible interpretation is to approach these poems as a “this is your life” style dream reflection of moments both ordinary and important to the speaker. After all “the powers that be are showing a compilation of short films” and “I know what will happen later, of course, and I could enter the film, and tell them.” And in these memories, the speaker is diving back into the past, to a time when his parents were reticent to share: “He would bring me to the edge of the lawn and push me out of the frame, out of the past, where I don’t belong.” Everyday snapshots and conversations dissolve one into the next, both disjointed and connected, as the dream-film camera’s shutter transitions to the next one.
In another prose poem, “The Gift,” the office setting lends itself to a satirical vision of daily life there. Bureaucracy is spotlighted and critiqued via the placement of the desk phone, with its short cord, and the immovable desk. The secretary in this scenario needs to deliver the messages from the phone to the worker. This is instantly recognizable to readers who have been sprung into similar situations in jobs where rigid structures defy all logic. The worker falls to his knees “in the buffeting winds passing through my office, winds that carry a billion dust motes, made from the cells of youth the living and the long dead.” This poem reinforces the thin lines that exist between the waking world and reality vs. the dream world and imagination. In this instance the commentary on work as a means to death are vivid. There is also the divide between concrete truth and the diaphanous present that people are free to create. Are all of these worlds and planes of existence all versions of the same truths? Or do their inhabitants conjure them up, creating their preferred connotations, and thereby their own commentaries?
As the reader travels further into the collection, they are forced to consider the question of truth, because while the poems appear to be mini memoirs, they also have surrealistic settings and characters. Skinner uses the language of physics and philosophy as a means of grounding some details of these prose poems, which prevents them from going too far down an imaginary pathway. These scientific details lend authority to the speaker, and allows him to pass along adages from time to time. “Hidden parts of the mind come up with ideas, decisions, daydreams, etc., long before they rise to conscious awareness. I had years to decide how the past would unfold.” These conclusions are drawn carefully and shared sporadically, never becoming saccharine or cliche. All manner of topics, like parenting, aging, downsizing, and even death, are covered in dreamlike, yet tangible, fashion. “There is something uncanny about drinking coffee while sitting in a diner booth upholstered in red vinyl...It’s like a rehearsal for eternity.” There is a friction that happens both within these poems and between them, as they each contain observations, and often contrasting, perceptions. The reader is lulled into deciding whether to viscerally feel the poems or to consciously decipher them. This is often hard to do when the speaker himself seems stuck somewhere along this pathway too, as his “memory comes in blank envelopes stuffed with disjointed images, like pieces from many different jigsaw puzzles, and it’s up to me, wakeful me, to pour the pieces out and put them back together...” However, “the pieces are mismatched and I cannot...discern the whole. Just isolate jagged vignettes.”
However, even within these “jagged vignettes” there is a fluidity that carries the reader through each scene, as a trip on the Rhine evaporates and a rental car appears. Then onto a restaurant, to inside jokes with his wife, who then disappears, prompting him to search for her, and then he finally arrives on a windmill-filled beach. Will these clips make more sense upon waking, or will they remain “jagged vignettes”? This ecstatic energy can turn melancholic one line later, and there is a nostalgic present that exists on each page. The speaker goes on to assert that old selves reside in close proximity to their present versions, which forces the reader to question whether this is the case for dreaming and waking selves too. What if these disparate selves could interact and connect? How much of daily life consists of fictional truths that people continuously tell themselves, in order to make reality more palpable? Do we even know the difference between fact and fiction anymore? Perhaps the answers will appear in our next stretches of unconsciousness, or maybe they’ve been there all along.