[In the following review of A Dream of Mind, Hirsch examines the development of Williams's poetic style and thematic concerns. ]

C. K. Williams is a poet of disquietudes, of the mind aggressively questioning and requestioning its own workings, brooding upon the fluctuating data of consciousness, quarreling with itself. No other contemporary poet, except perhaps John Ashbery, has given us a more textured or pressurized rendering of what it feels like to think—to try to think—through a situational or mental problem moment by moment: to bring the unconscious into the available light of language, to anatomize the psyche with a continual tally of internal and external evidence.

Behind the acute, painstaking self-consciousness of this work there is a sense that the burden of poetry is to discover the darkest inner truth, to confront the secret that can no longer be sublimated, that forces itself to be known. “The return of the repressed,” Williams names it in his poem “Child Psychology,” and the phrase reverberates throughout the rest of his new book. In A Dream of Mind he has taken his candid and inclusive poetry of agonistic consciousness even further in the direction of interiority and discursiveness, as if literalizing the dictum of the baroque Jesuit poet Tommaso Ceva that poetry is “a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.”

Williams has always been a poet of psychological extremes, the sorrows of a diligent, self-reflexive consciousness his initiating subject. In his first two books, Lies (1969) and I Am the Bitter Name (1971), however, he was less interested in exploring linkages and associations, the mind's obsessive thirst for connection, than in tracking what he has called “varieties of disjunctive consciousness.” His early work, influenced by Artaud and Vallejo, intentionally subverted logical connectives and struggled to enact the movement of the mind as it swoops, hovers, and starts in at least three different directions at once.

Unsparingly honest and violently self-divided (“I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces,” he wrote in “Halves”), his poems were also motivated by a furious political consciousness, almost breaking apart with frustration and rage over the outright lies of the social and political world. Some rail against a perversely absent God (“A Day for Anne Frank,” “The Next to the Last Poem about God”); others storm against government (“A Poem for the Governments,” “Another Dollar”). The furies peak in “In the Heart of the Beast,” a long unpunctuated poem that responded to May 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State) at the level of a howl. These single-minded assaults shouldn't be dismissed; they were biographically and historically necessary. Still, in retrospect Williams's poetry seems hampered by the protest mode, the uncapitalized directness (“this is fresh meat right mr. nixon?”) of the late’60s.

Throughout his new book, Williams uses with great effectiveness the flexible, rangy, and capacious long line that he first discovered in With Ignorance (1977), refined in Tar (1983), and adapted to a group of eight-line poems in Flesh and Blood (1987). If emotion, for the lyric poet, is necessarily predicated on technique, then the decisive moment in Williams's development was when he began to enlarge and to extend his lineation even further than Whitman's free verse line, to see how far he could push and shape that line before it faltered or became prose. By using the line as the largest possible rhythmic unit, he forced himself to put things into his poems rather than to leave them out, to break the abbreviated rhetorical code—the lyric shorthand for emotion—that seems to characterize so much of the poetry of any period. As if heeding Frost's directive to dramatize, Williams also became an insistent storyteller, burying his social message deeper in the substance and the political unconscious of his poems.

The fourteen poems in With Ignorance have a powerful narrative propulsion and velocity. They are raw, colloquial, out-sized. Here was a starkly confessional, democratic, ambitious lyric poet who had crossed William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell with Dostoevsky, whose poems had a streetwise urban intelligence—

If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit.

(“Bob”)

a canny psychological sense of other people—

I think most people are relieved the first time they actually know someone who goes crazy.

(“The Cave”)

and an outlandish, almost biblical sense of outrage—

It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.

(“Hog Heaven”)

One is keyed to the underlying existential quest and paradoxical nature of Williams's enterprise by the quotation from Kierkegaard that gives the book its title: “With ignorance begins a knowledge the first characteristic of which is ignorance.” There is a tremendous amount of social information in Williams's work, but it is animated and subsumed by the hungers of consciousness repeatedly circling back and striving to know itself.

In Tar, Williams refined his storytelling gift and perfected the long line he had invented in With Ignorance, transforming it into a more sinuous and symmetrical unit, an instrument for speeding up or slowing down narrative, for modulating, correcting, and intensifying thought. His music can be as supple as a needle pulling thread or as pounding as a hammer coming down on metal. Copiousness of detail, a commanding narrative scope and energy, and an unremitting psychological intensity characterize such poems as “From My Window,” “My Mother's Lips,” “On Learning of a Friend's Illness,” and “Combat.” These poems not only tell dramatic stories—seeing two Vietnam vets, one in a wheelchair, careening haphazardly down the street; remembering his mother mouthing his words even as he spoke them—but they also think critically about those stories, doggedly pursuing human motivation, implicating and convicting the self as both actor and narrator, transfiguring the anecdotal into the mythical and archetypal. Perhaps most telling for William's new work is the concluding twenty-five-part poem, “One of the Muses.” This highly abstract, non-narrative poem evokes and traces his tormenting struggle to conceptualize and to bring into language a presence who at one time visited him, an evasive, nameless, bodiless spirit, possibly an inner construction, an almost palpable figure, a Platonic muse, a dream of mind.

The 130 poems of Flesh and Blood have the feeling of a contemporary sonnet sequence. Like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's Notebooks, Williams's long-lined short poems are shapely and yet open-ended and self-generative, loosely improvisational though with an underlying formal necessity. Many present single extended moments intently observed: a girl with an artificial hand stepping onto the subway, a bum scribbling in a battered notebook in the public library. Others are miniature short stories, sudden fictions. Still others take meditative stabs at ideas of “nostalgia” or “the past” or “failure.” All of these poems present people in situations in which they are vulnerable, exposed, on the edge.

The poems in Flesh and Blood have a thick naturalistic surface and a fast narrative current. But a philosopher lurks behind the sociologist. The poems in the second section, for example, are structured as urban parables. They take a general idea—“reading” or “love” or “the good mother”—and yoke it to a specific story: a man fixing his car in bitter cold stops to read a newspaper or a bored couple “perversely” persist in kissing each other. In these poems, the general is exemplified by the particular and the individual vignette aspires to the exemplum. In the eighteen-part elegy that concludes the book, Williams not only eulogizes his friend Paul Zweig but also charts the contours of consciousness as it tries to hold onto a friend even as it must let him go.

A Dream of Mind is Williams's most varied and challenging work so far. It, too, is about “thinking thought,” thought it is also about the ways in which thought—or, more precisely, dream—thinks us, how a complex of unconscious desires, fantasies, and projections stream through and motivate our actions. One recurrent subject of this five-part book is how the psyche constitutes and reconstitutes itself—beset by a steady stream of impressions and mental images, obsessed by the wounds and fissures of memory, the tormenting routes of self-consciousness, the continual gap and flow we experience between our conceptions of ourselves and what we actually see and experience in the world. An old man badgers his family to help him commit suicide, but then asks not to be told when (“When”); the poet recalls the traumatic project of remaking himself as a writer during his 20s (“She, Though”); an aged Paris broods upon the dying Helen of Troy (“Helen”): the poems in this volume remind us how hard it is to remain one person, how painful it is to see ourselves and others clearly, how radically unstable and uncertain is our knowing.

Williams's poems are nothing if not extreme. Relentless, urban, invasive—like city life itself, they are not for the faint-hearted. One of his characteristic strategies is to dramatize the turbulence of the mind at work under terrific duress; that is, in the presence of others at moments of their greatest social weakness and vulnerability, moments when the fabric of daily life is torn open and someone is profoundly exposed. The speaker is an inadvertent voyeur—self-conscious, self-critical—who sees something suppressed or forbidden, often something offensive. He discovers another person simultaneously observing what he observes, ascertaining what he is avoiding or avoiding what he is compelled to acknowledge, and thereby sees his own reactions in an obverse mirror. He catches himself looking, looking away, knowing. Many of the poems are structured precisely around this process of perception, resistance and denial, and recognition.

The poem “Harm,” for example, recounts the memory of a local homeless person—familiar, usually inoffensive—who recently “stepped abruptly out between parked cars, / undid his pants, and, not even bothering to squat, sputtered out a noxious, almost liquid stream.” It is not only that the speaker must stare at the man's bony shanks, stained buttocks, and scarlet, diseased testicles, but also

that a slender adolescent girl from down the block happened by right then, and looked,
and looked away, and looked at me, and looked away again, and made me want to say to her,
because I imagined what she must have felt, It's not like this, really, it's not this,
but she was gone, so I could think, But isn't it like this, isn't this just what it is?

The burden of this poem is the knowledge of the soiled and sordid, the comprehension that cannot be evaded, rationalized, or denied.

One hears in these poems the inner voice of the mind not only lacerating itself but also coming up against the blunt reality of other people. Thus, in the emblematic encounter “Child Psychology,” the repressed returns in the form of a worker who had been mucking about in the sewer—“those viscous, unforgiving depths”—and fished out some keys that the speaker very much wanted to forget losing. The agent of his self-knowledge has arrived, his punishment postponed but now swift and inexorable. In such ways other people often become the external correlative for a demonic internal force, embodying the shunned or refused self. “No wonder my fascination turned to those as lost as me, the drugged, the drunk, the mad,” the poet writes in “The Loneliness”: “Like ancient wounds they were, punctured with their solitude and sorrow, suppurating, stinking: / I'd recoil from what the soul could come to, but I knew within my soul that they were me.”

A Dream of Mind is dominated by two complementary long poems. The fourteen-part sequence “Some of the Forms of Jealousy” both dramatizes and investigates the forms of consciousness obsessed by sexual betrayal. In a series of vignettes and meditations the poet painstakingly recreates the degrading miseries of jealousy, the cells of doubt that expand into full-fledged torments, the unrelenting anxiety that inevitably involves and implicates others, the “terrific agitation” and “scalding focus,” the “desperate single-mindedness” and “odious dependency” that takes over the jealous mind. “This is so exhausting: when will it relent?” the speaker asks in “The Silence,” and immediately answers his own question: “It seems never, not as long as consciousness exists.” Obsessive jealousy is consciousness run amok, the mind humiliating and annihilating itself, not knowing that “what we're living isn't ever what we think we are.”

The sequence “A Dream of Mind” also takes up the subject of “the mind in its endless war with itself,” but here it becomes an idea of poetic method, a struggle to illuminate the themes of being by clarifying various tremulous epistemological states, to solidify the fluidity of a self that at times seems no more than a field of interchanges. There is a nearly endless regress as the dreamer tries to know himself (“Always in the dream I seemed conscious of myself having the dream even as I dreamed it”), and the poet vigilantly tries to transcribe and shape the unconscious wave passing through him (“It almost seems that this is what dream is about, to think what's happening as it's happening”). “A Dream of Mind” is Williams at his most complex, abstract, and discursive, the poet “deciphering and encoding,” thinking through and being thought.

“Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by,” Williams wrote in his essay “Poetry and Consciousness,” and in A Dream of Mind he has voraciously struggled to clarify that sliding, to unmask what is most painful and hidden in our psyches, and to embody that unmasking in the processes of lyric.