Reginald Gibbons: In the Silence of the Night: On Unconscious Deliberateness (January 1999)

What is the process of discovery we refer to when we talk about writing? How does our search through language uncover something about the world, some knowledge usually hidden from us?  Reginald Gibbons considers how the unconscious manifests in our daily lives and in our writing processes; through close readings of poems by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, he suggests ways we can attend to the unconscious in our drafts more fully, yielding insight into “who we are and who we might become.”