Sleeping in With Matthew Reed Corey

Sector 2337, of Green Lantern Press, hosts a conversation between Matthew Reed Corey and Jose-Luis Moctezuma about the politics of sleep and consciousness. Corey's latest project, Cream Rinse "investigates the architectures, grammars, and possibilities of sleep." We'll pick up at the beginning of their discussion.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma: Your current project, Cream Rinse, “investigates the architectures, grammars, and possibilities of sleep.” This is a wonderfully counter-intuitive approach to that frequent and yet oft-overlooked state in which one is, presumably, least active. How did you arrive at this fascination with sleep, and what lyrical methods or techniques do you use to capture and utilize sleep as a force in your writing?

Matthew Reed Corey: I swear to you that every written history is a history of consciousness, I promise you that poetry gives access to what might be otherwise unobtainable, and I assure you that lyric poetry is a technology that desires to divulge the interiority of its speaking subjects. When I look through a lyric representation of consciousness, I interpret the apparatuses that give shape to lyric, and I’m aware that lyric manifests through the paradoxes native to those structures. At the moment of my submersion into its representative space, I acknowledge that lyric will never apprehend its subject, making it seem that I’m there for something else, whether it’s to chase the fleeting speaker, or to chew on the left-behind textures of its diction. If unconsciousness and its sigil, sleep, can be investigated, I would leave it neither to the accountants of truth nor to the empiricists but to lyric poets, whose nation is the unification of opposites. This is what A. E. Waite and other occultists mean by “the open entrance to the closed palace of the king.”

Read more at Sector 2337.