A Dream of Mind

by C.K. Williams

The poetry of C. K. Williams has won an essential place in contemporary American poetry. The long lines that have characterized his style since the mid-seventies have allowed him to make ever more radical forays into what Edward Hirsch, writing in The New York Times Book Review , has called "a unique and inclusive poetry of consciousness." A Dream of Mind (1992) is dominated by the long title poem, which explores the materials and qualities of our states of consciousness with enormous flexibility and suppleness. Other poems make similar investigations into jealousy, family life, and psychological and intellectual constructs. Passionate, truculent, humorous, and always questioning, Williams's poetry is, in more than one sense, the poetry of contemporary experience. This challenging, exhilarating book marks a new stage in a truly groundbreaking writer's constantly evolving work.

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

C.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa.

His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014.

He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williams's is a poetics of small observations. Even his longer poems can be traced back to a small observation that has grown... no, not grown, but has been magnified by the poet for all to see.

Williams's poems, often narrative based, are primarily written in the poet's voice or from the poet's perspective. There are exceptions. In this collection, the poems written in other voices have been formatted always italics

You know, I know you know: there's an ache in you, you want to make it stop, that awful flurrying;
you can't get back to where you used to like to be, everything is out of balance in you,
and you realize, even if you'd rather not, that the only way is with this other person...
- from Pillow Talk (pg. 33)


I just don't want to feel put down; if she decides she wants to sleep with someone, listen,
great, go ahead, but I want to know about it and I want the other guy to know I know;
I don't want some mother sliming in her sack, using her and thinking he's one up me.
- from The Idyll (pg. 41)

In my reading of Williams, I haven't encounter many longer poems. In the first five collections, I can recall one, maybe two longer poems. A Dream of Mind, however contains two longer poems: "She, Though", taking as its inspiration an incident from the poet's formative years, an encounter in which the poet indirectly spurned a young artist, who later exacted what the poet interprets to have been revenge, the incident and the narrative serve as a pretense for the poet to reflect on poetry and how he developed into the poet he is today (not "today", but 1992 when the collection was published); and "Helen", about a husband's observations of his wife's decline, from sickness unto death, and the process by which he comes to terms with the loss...

Everything I'd learned in college seemed garbled and absurd: I knew nothing about anything.
All I understood was that I wasn't ready for this yet, that I'd have to reach some higher stage
before I'd have the right to even think that I was someone who could call himself a poet.
We must have all felt more or less like that, though it seemed important never to admit it.
"Morally perfect yourself, then you'll write a poem," I read somewhere not long ago: is it true?
- from She, Though (pg. 51)


More voice was in her cough tonight: its first harsh, stripping sound would weaken abruptly,
and he's hear the voice again, not hers, unrecognizable, its notes from somewhere else,
someone saying something they didn't seem to want to say, in a tongue they hadn't mastered,
or a singer, diffident and hesitating, searching for a place to start an unfamiliar melody.

Its pitch was gentle, almost an interrogation, intimate, a plea, a moan, almost sexual,
but he could hear assertion, too, a straining from beneath, a forcing at the withheld consonant,
and he realized that she was holding back, trying with great effort not to cough again,
to change the spasm to a tone instead and so avert the pain that lurked out at the stress.

Then he heard her lose her almost-word, almost-song: it became a groan, the groan a gasp,
the gasp a sigh of desperation, then the cough rasped everything away, everything was cough now,
he could hear shuddering, the voice that for a moment seemed the gentlest part of her,
choked down, effaced, abraded, taken back, as all of her was being taken from him now.
- Helen, 1 (pg. 93)

Favourite passages...

"No, last summer in Cleveland I didn't have a lover, I have never been to Cleveland, I love you.
There is no Cleveland, I adore you, and, as you'll remember, there was no last summer:
the world last summer didn't yet exist, last summer still was universal darkness, chaos, pain."
- from The Question (pg. 29)


He can's look into the mirror, either, that dark, malicious void: who knows what he might see?
- from The Mirror (pg. 36)


I have escaped in the dream; I was in danger, at peril, at immediate, furious, frightening risk,
but I deftly evaded the risk, eluded the danger, I conned peril to think I'd gone that way,
then I went this, then this way again, over the bridges of innocence, into the haven of sorrow.
I was so shrewd in my moment of risk, so cool: I was as guileful as though I were guilty,
sly, devious, cunning, though I'd done nothing in truth but be who I was where I was
when the dream conceived me as a threat I wasn't, possessed of a power I'd never had,
though I had found enough strength to flee and the guileful wherewithal to elude and be free.
I have escaped and survived, but as soon as I think it it starts again, I'm hounded again:
no innocence now, no unlikeliest way, only this frenzied combing of the countries of mind
where I always believe I'd find safety and solace but where now are confusion and fear
and a turmoil so total that all I have known or might know drags me with it towards chaos.
- from History (pg. 77)


Such longing, such urging, such warmth towards, such force towards, so much ardor and desire;
to touch, touch into, hold, hold against, to feel, feel against and long towards again,
as though the longing, urge, and warmth were ends in themselves, the increase of themselves,
the force towards, the ardor and desire, focused, increased, the incarnation of themselves.
- from You (pg. 84)

[Holly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Consider this passage, chosen at random, from "Vocations":

The problem is that trying to make the recalcitrant segments of the dream cohere is distracting;
my mind is always half following what happens while it's half involved in this other procedure.
Also, my ideas about meaning keep sending directives into the dream's already crowded circuits,
and soon I'm hard put keeping the whole intractable mechanism moving along smoothly enough to allow me to believe that at least I'm making a not overly wasteful use of my raw materials.

That's not poetry--it's just prose with line breaks.

Then there's this, from "Helen":

She'd known how much he needed beauty, how much presumed it as an element of desire.
The loveliness that illuminated her had been an engrossing narrative his spirit fed on;
he entered it and flowed out again renewed for having touched within and been a part of it.
In his meditation on her, he'd become more complicated, fuller, more essential to himself.

It was to her beauty he'd made love at first, she was there within its captivating light,
but almost secondary, as though she was just the instance of some overwhelming generality.
She herself was shy before it; she, too, as unassumingly as possible was testing the abstraction
which had taken both of them into its sphere, rendering both subservient to its serene enormity.

As their experience grew franker, and as she learned to move more confidently towards her core,
became more overtly active in elaborating needs and urges, her beauty came first....

She'd been grateful to him, and that gratitude became in turn another fact of his desire....

How childishly frightened he'd always been by beauty's absence, by its destruction or perversity.
For so long he let himself be tormented by what he knew would have to happen to her.
He'd seem the old women as their thighs and buttocks bloated, then withered and went slack,
as their dugs dried, skin dried, legs were sausaged with the veins that rose like kelp.

He'd tried to overcome himself, to feel compassion towards them, but, perhaps because of her,
he'd felt only a shameful irritation, as though they were colluding in their loss.
Whether they accepted what befell them, even, he would think, gladly acquiescing to it,
or fought it, with all their sad and valiant unguents, dyes, and ointments, was equally degrading.

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?

It goes on and on, for eight pages, and it's like a caricature of pompous misogyny, male hypocrisy, and the male gaze.
He could only get it up for super hot chicks? Wow! How enlightened of him! What a nobility of spirit that reveals!
Fucking a really hot chick made him "more complicated, fuller, more essential to himself"? That's really good to know! I bet all the other dudebros in his frat totally respected him more for banging a really hot chick too!
He made love to her beauty, and SHE was secondary? Oh really! I guess that's what true love really is!
He hated and resented ugly old women, and worried that he couldn't still love this woman when she got old and ugly? Well, I guess we know now why some cultures burn widows on their dead husbands' funeral pyres or expect them to commit suicide the moment their husband dies: because women's value is predicated entirely on their fuckability, and if no one is around to fuck them, they need to just die.
He'd never cared about his looks, but so what? Why should he? He's a guy and didn't need to be attractive; he needed to be attracted? You don't say.
Also, the word "enormity" doesn't refer simply to size. It means "the great or extreme scale, seriousness, or extent of something perceived as bad or morally wrong." A better choice would have been "magnificence" or one of its synonyms.

As I read this book, noting how pleased and impressed it is with itself, I kept thinking of a bit of advice sometimes given to women: "Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." Only a white guy could win accolades for writing this badly. This collection is the mediocre expression of mediocre ideas, and it's valued and praised by people who mistake abstraction for profundity.

[Bradley William Holder · Rating 3 out of 5]

C.K. Williams's "On the Metro" is, from my criminally limited vantage point, one of the best poems written in the last 50 years. (Thank you Charles! But this princess is in another castle!) Having been interested in reading more of the man's work, I decided to read A Dream of Mind - somewhat at random, somewhat because the title suggested a thematic overlap with my own "academic" interests (or at least what they used to be) - hoping for more of the same. Of course, to expect such a degree of similitude between one poem and another, even of two poems by the same author, is not only foolish but, what's worse, indicative of an embarrassing lack of self-awareness. After all, the worst albums are those on which every song sounds the same - to say nothing of an artist's entire catalog.

As far as poets go, Williams is unique, especially when juxtapositioned with the monosyllabic, one-or-two-word-per-line content creators of today (who, while nevertheless rejected by "serious" readers and writers, never seem all that starved for a following either - come to thank of it, the other Williams might be to blame for that). What first attracted me to C.K., all those years ago, were his experiments with lineation, arguably his most distinctive feature, and his treatments of loneliness and the life of the artist. A Dream of Mind contains both; however, on the whole, the collection lacks a certain cohesiveness, even though it does make a half-assed attempt at one. (I mean, everything relates to every other thing in some way, right?) Sadly, the titular section is also the book's weakest. Excited as I was to see questions of consciousness - of phenomenology - treated poetically, something about it seemed forced, naive, and ultimately unconvincing. In this highly specialized professional space, poets have about as much business doing philosophy as philosophers have doing poetry. As someone who's still trying to do both, this doesn't bode well for me.

And yet, I'm torn - as I often am when considering the general quality of a collection, be it short stories, poems, essays, what have you. Some of the poems in A Dream of Mind are damn-near masterpieces: "When," "The Insult," "Chapter Eleven," "The Loneliness," "Meditation," "Politics," "Soliloquies," and "She, Though" are all five-star poems - especially the last one. Others are not. Williams, perhaps like all poets, is at his best when he's putting the particular, as opposed to the universal, under the microscope. And his diction, sense of rhythm, and candor give it a vividness and color that together tell us more about the mind and the dream than any of his more "direct" efforts. In this way, I suppose, the title is fitting; and that elusive cohesiveness mentioned above isn't as elusive as it seemed initially. Either way, the old wisdom rings true: Don't tell me; show me.

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The section-length poem titled "She, Though," an elegiac, brutally honest portrait of the poet's early bohemian community, is a highlight of this collection and of Williams' body of work as a whole. The sequence titled "A Dream of Mind" moves into non-concrete territory skillfully, maintaining momentum while abandoning image for pure abstraction. Many of the poems essay what Williams called in an earlier book "the horrible unfairness of having to die," and are unflinchingly patient in examining the cerebral process of coming to grips with this inevitability.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual Rating: 4.5 of 5 thorns

A quote from "The Solid," which I felt encompassed the tone, themes, and goals of this book: "At other, nearly simultaneous moments, I feel signals sent, intentionally or not, I can't tell, / which arrive to my consciousness as an irritation, almost an abrasion of the material of thought. / In some far corner of dream, someone wants, needs, with such vehement, unreasonable fervor, / that even from here I'm afflicted with what I can only believe is an equivalent chagrin. / I try to think of ways to send back if not reassurance then an acknowledgement of my concern, / but I realize this would require not only energy and determination but a discernment, a delicacy, / the mere thought of which intimidates me, reinforcing the sense I have of my ineffectiveness."

An insightful meditation on art, humanity, the depths of dreams, and emotions, like jealousy and loneliness.

Well written, but not imagistic. The poems are longer in line and length, and the book is split into five sections. The sounds & syntax are enchanting.

My reason for the .5 rating: This collection started and ended strongly, with some brilliant poems in the middle, but I had a difficult time making it through the poems and the lack of imagery made it difficult to stay grounded, which maybe was the point, based on the name of the book.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsettling, both in subject matter, as well as in the ways it forces me to expand my definition of "what is poetry." I never want to write like this. But worth reading.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 W7221d 1992