I love this book. It was the first poetry book that I ever bought that made me start reading poetry to people I met on the street, to girls I liked, and to classrooms full of students who have never stopped giving me a look of, “What? Hmm…. Maybe that’s kind of cool.”

What I mean is, Fear of Dreaming was how I fell in love with poetry. But before you think that sounds corny, wait until you hear how I came across the book in the first place. I watched the movie Basketball Diaries- you know, the one with Leonardo diCaprio in it. It was pre-Titanic, so you may not have heard of it. Regardless, in it there’s this line: “Children shoot marbles/ where branches break the sun./ I just want to be pure.” And that did it for me. I had to go out and see what else this guy had written- that’s the kind of imagery I was really into as a teenager, and I wanted more. It turns out that Fear of Dreaming spoke in the same way as those three lines, but for 270 pages or so. I loved it.

Jim Carroll is not the ultra-original poet I thought he was when I was 15. He owes a significant debt to French poets like Rimbaud, and he owes a whole lot to the aesthetic of the Beats, and he even owes a large nod to the attitude of the punk movement. But that doesn’t change that he was a master at channeling the experience, that he could convey at his best the image or gesture that revealed the moment that couldn’t even show up on a video. He could put emotion in the order of words, which is a true gift. And he gave it to me.

I ramble. Fear of Dreaming is a collection of his poetry, edited to include the best. And it does. Much of his early poetry and ultra-short stories are contained in the first ¾ of the book, and much of the time he was doing his share of heroin. The last ¼ of the book is post-heroin poetry, and while it is good, it has neither the insistence nor the laser-precision that makes his earlier work undeniably gorgeous, and honest to boot.

You’re growing up/ and rain sort of remains/ on the branches of a tree/ that will someday rule the earth./ and that’s good/ that there’s rain/ it  clears the month/ of your sorry rainbow expressions/ and clears the streets/ of the silent armies…/ so we can dance

That was his page 66 “Little Ode on St. Anne’s Day.” It starts with growth, pivots on rain and cleansing, and ends with dance. And that’s pretty much the storyline that Carroll lived and wrote within. His Catholic upbringing was a source of rebelliousness, but he also retained the theme of cleansing and rebirth- it’s in everything he wrote, and while he may have feared his dreams, he wrote them all fearlessly, and I loved them all.  

Photo Credit: catholicboy