Blake Lynch appeared in the thirty-eighth issue with A Dream in Which I Share a Danish with Walter Grimley, a poem that treats dream logic as a form of geographical and emotional montage. Paris, Minneapolis, Morocco, Lake Harriet, a submarine, a harbor, television, cigarettes, paintings, dolphins, and snow enter the same imaginative field. The poem moves with the confidence of memory while continually changing the world in which that memory seems to occur.
Dream geography
The opening places the speaker and Walter at the end of a Paris cul-de-sac, then quickly introduces Minneapolis cold, Edith Piaf, Morocco, and later Lake Harriet. These locations accumulate without requiring realistic travel between them. Dream structure allows one place to carry the emotional weather of another.
This mobile geography creates a map of association. A French street can contain Midwestern winter; a matchbook portrait can lead toward Morocco; a domestic television routine can open onto submarine warfare and a harbor. Space behaves like memory, organized by emotional connection and sudden resemblance.
Walter Grimley
Walter functions as a conversational center. He eats a cheese Danish, recalls abandonment, speaks about a portrait, waits for television, and tells stories whose details keep multiplying. His voice gives the poem a human scale even as the surrounding reality becomes unstable.
Food plays an important role in that intimacy. Sharing a Danish creates an ordinary social ritual, and the modest act of eating becomes a frame for stories about love, art, cigarettes, war, and loss. The title preserves that domestic scale even while the poem expands far beyond it.
Portraits and art
A portrait on a soldier’s matchbook introduces another chain of transformations. A woman dances the Charleston in a beret, meets a painter tending bar in Morocco, and becomes the subject of an image the painter struggles to render. Gin and tonics, black-market shoes, clothing, body, and shadow all enter the problem of representation.
The painter’s difficulty echoes the poem’s own method. Memory offers vivid fragments while refusing a stable whole. This concern links Lynch naturally with experimental poetry, where discontinuity can become an organizing principle.
Television, war, and domestic time
The later section brings Jeopardy into a room that also contains the imagined impact of a torpedo. Everyday routine and wartime danger occupy the same sequence. Chairs acquire grooves through repetition while the submarine image introduces pressure, confinement, and threat.
This collision gives the poem a dreamlike temporal density. Several kinds of past seem active at once: personal memory, popular culture, military imagery, old photographs, television habits, and lost relationships.
Lake Harriet and the harbor
The closing movement gathers Lake Harriet, dolphins caught in plastic rings, falling snow, bodily exhaustion, and gas lights across a harbor. The images widen and cool the poem. Water returns in different forms, from lake to harbor, while snow alters the visual field.
These final details also reinforce the importance of juxtaposition within modern poetry. Images can carry emotional continuity even when narrative continuity remains fluid.
Reading Blake Lynch
Lynch’s poem works through accumulation, drift, and return. Dream logic permits distant cities, historical textures, personal anecdotes, food, television, art, and violence to coexist without flattening their differences. The speaker’s relationship with Walter gives that shifting world warmth and conversational gravity.
Within contemporary poetry, the poem offers a vivid example of narrative built through associative montage. Readers exploring poetic forms and poetry through dream, memory, collage, place, and cultural reference can approach Lynch’s work as a compact study in how unstable geography can produce emotional coherence.