From John Donne to Walt Whitman, dreams have always proved a ripe source of inspiration for poetry. Lost to history is whether those poets bore their works out of the kind of "today's the test but I didn't study" anxiety dreams we all fall victim to.
Claudia Keelan, though, used her own wake-up-sweating inspiration as she crafted a piece for UNLV's Class of 2020.
"I was at my graduate school, University of Iowa Writer's Workshop instead of UNLV, and I was supposed to be at the graduation and I realized that I wasn't in the right place," said Keelan, an English professor at UNLV since 1996 and author of eight collections of poetry. "I didn't have a poem with me. I didn't have anything with me. I walked around and saw some people in there and they said, 'You can do it. Just get up there and speak.'
“So that's what I did. And I looked out into the crowd and said something and everybody cheered. And that was it. I woke up and thought, ‘Oh God, I have to write that poem down.’"
The result is "To Begin," a poem celebrating this particular class and the unprecedented circumstances under which they finished their degrees. UNLV’s content team asked Keelan to compose the poem and recite excerpts for a video released May 16, the day UNLV would have held 2020 spring commencement. The university has postponed the ceremony due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“As we started working on this project, we realized that this needed to be unlike our past celebration videos for commencement,” said video designer Benjamin Richards. “The poem, particularly because it comes from within the faculty itself, has more authenticity. It comes from a shared experience of UNLV and what it’s like to be here at this moment.”
Her family's unofficial eulogist, Keelan was readily familiar with writing poetry to mark occasions. But she'd never specifically crafted one for a commencement.
She looked at the poetry surrounding other commencements and other, less formal, beginnings, and settled on Whitman, the towering figure of American poetry. But it wasn't his "I Dreamed in a Dream" that Keelan connected with her nocturnal inspiration.
"After I had my dream, I looked to Walt Whitman's, 'Song of the Open Road,' which is a beautiful poem," Keelan said. "It's not a commencement poem, of course, but it's about getting ready to go forward in your life.”
She drew on Whitman, but also her students, and in the subtle ways the pandemic has evoked a new spirit of gratitude.
"I was actually thinking of the kids I'm just finishing teaching right now — my online 400-level English class,” she said. “I've never seen their faces. I can imagine them because I've read what they've written all semester, and I feel like I know them. And especially because of the uncertainty and fear of this semester, and what everyone felt. Their anxiety was palpable. It made me really grateful for the virus in that sense. It made me thankful for the things that I take for granted so much in my life. My family. Just being able to see my friends, you know, to be able to touch somebody on the shoulder. It's really heightened my sense of what's important."
[2020 Spring Commencement College Videos]
To Begin
What always ends is the end and you begin there,
in a world made by the becoming of others.
They began as you, nearly a child no longer
And still the child they were lives,
as in your pocket you carry your keys,
notes from home or from friends, perhaps
a pen, any of the simple things
you’ll need to open the door,
to feel safe, to write the next page
now that you’ve arrived in the place
where the future opens, as the waiting for you
is ended. Who are you, beautiful in the clothes
laid out for years as you prepared
for this day? Just as you were dreaming
of this arrival while you worked towards it,
so the arrival dreamed of you, as I dreamed
of you, last night, and of the poem I was to write
to send you on your way. It was the day of graduation
and I was not prepared, having written nothing I felt
could prepare you for what was to come.
Like you, like your professors, your family,
friends and neighbors, like your country
and the better part of the whole world,
for weeks, I have sat alone in my home,
witness to an illness that demanded
our distance from each other.
And yet, I have never felt closer to you,
to all of us, each showing our regard for the others
in how separate we became.
These times in our shared experience,
those that strike at the heart
of what is that makes a people
a “we”—We have been here before,
have we not, my friends?
When, on a lovely day in October
a perfect Las Vegas day
when the sun had let go of its fierceness,
and the light became gentle filling
the day with promise of more--
When, on this perfect day,
a man for no known reason,
opened fire on a group of us
gathered to listen to music
in round after round
killing many and wounding
even more, before he turned
the gun on himself?
We were afraid then,
In our loss, in our own city,
of the “we” the shooter
had tried to take from us,
though he failed.
For what is born from fear
dies itself when met with courage,
which is as old and eternal
as life itself, and our human spirit.
We went on.
We go on, #VegasStrong,
as I continued in my dream,
never finding a pen or paper,
somehow, as it always is in dreams,
at the wrong university, though I knew
somehow it was ours—
When, ascending to the podium
with no words prepared,
I looked out at all of you gathered there,
I looked into each of your faces
full of the work you had done
to become you, faces full of the future
of your own lives and the life
of the world to which we belong,
and then I opened my mouth and spoke.
Just as you were dreaming
of this arrival while you worked towards it,
so the arrival dreamed of you, as I dreamed
of you, last night, and of the poem I was to write
to send you on your way, which is this one,
so you will go on
as nothing can diminish the effort
you devoted to becoming you.
Not the world, itself bound
to the certainty of change, as it is changed now,
nor your fear of what you’ll need to learn
entering the ever-transforming world,
as you will continue to grow into
the courage to create a self,
already living inside you,
who is prepared to meet the new world
you find waiting.
I awoke from my dream and wrote
this poem for you, the one
with all you need in your pocket,
look, there’s the key,
all you have to do
is turn it, open the door,
feel safe, and begin
writing the next page.
