The Dreamer and the Dreamed is an evocative collection of poems that delve into themes of queer love, memory, and self-discovery. You share your personal story with readers in this collection; how hard was it to put this out in the world for people to read?

At the end of the collection I include a Postscript with the poem “Juncture.” The final lines of the poem read: “…And all those keepsake odes,/Their golden locks and keys—/Worn smooth as ancient river/Stones: the hard-earned remains/From the art of a nameless dying.” So in answer to your question: Yes, it was both hard, and a hard-earned completion of poems in the making that I’d been living with for decades. In terms of the personal aspect of many of the poems, my hope (as in the words of the psychotherapist and author Carl Rogers: “What is most personal is most universal.”), is that the stories they tell resonate as universal.

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this collection?

The title of the collection: The Dreamer and the Dreamed, a line taken from the centrepiece poem of the “Young Joseph’s Dream” section of the book, in many ways runs through the entirety of the collection as it explores the interaction between dream consciousness and reality-based time & space consciousness.
Many of the poems concern themselves with experiences of grief and loss. I include a poem titled “In Memoriam” which chronicles a springtime experience of coming to terms with my mother’s death. I summarise this experience with the inclusion of these two lines: “The day you mourned her passing/Is the day the world was reborn.” These lines, and what they suggest in the context of the poem and the universal experience of human suffering, share a kinship with this declaration from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Oh, tell us, poet, what do you do/—I praise./ But those dark, deadly, devastating ways, how do bear them, suffer them?/—I praise…” It is significant that my experiences of grief of loss, having found their way into my poetry making, also bring with them a transformative sense of praise.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your poetry?

I’m going to again reference R. M. Rilke who says a work of art is the product of having gone to the very end of an experience; that it should spring from necessity and be judged by its origins. Borrowing from this insight, I would hope that whomever finds their way to Young Joseph’s Dream gives their experience of my work a favourable judgement.

Can you tell us about the second volume of poems, and when it will be available for fans to purchase?

Poetry making has its own timetable — at times the ground is fertile, at other times, definitely not. That being said, if you go to www.joeleahey.com and check out some of the material in Joe’s Poems, therein lies clues as to what Vol. 2 of The Dreamer and the Dreamed might eventually look like.

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