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Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll
Second Edition
Published: 1998
By: Jim Carroll
Publisher: Penguin Books
Length: 113 pages
Cover design: Gail Belenson
Cover painting: Paul Klee, Picture Album, 1937
Fear of Dreaming collects all of Carroll’s poems from Living at the Movies and most of The Book of Nods. While some of the poems originally published in The Book of Nods are not included in Fear of Dreaming, one of the “New York City Variations” originally left out of The Book of Nods can be found on page 191 of Fear of Dreaming; this piece was originally published in Paris Review in 1985. In addition, the final section of the book, “New Work 1989-1993,” offers fifteen previously unpublished poems and prose works. Among these are the short story “Curtis’s Charm” (which first appeared in Paris Review in 1993 and was adapted to film in 1996 by Canadian director John L’Ecuyer), and the poems “Fear of Dreaming,” “Praying Mantis,” and “To the National Endowment for the Arts.”
Fear of Dreaming does not collect the poems from Carroll’s first book, Organic Trains, and it also excludes the following from The Book of Nods:
Excluded from “California Variations”
- Works from pages 91 and 93-111
(Note: Three “California Variations” are included included in the “New York City Variations” section of Fear of Dreaming; these are on pages 192-194.)
Excluded from “Poems 1973-1985”
- “Wedding in White” (BN 126)
- “Ghost Town” (BN 128)
- “Bad Signs” (BN 130)
- “Poem” (BN 132)
- “Rites of Arctic Passage” (BN 135)
- “Suspicions” (BN 139)
- “Sophia” (BN 142)
- “Borders” (BN 149)
- “The Novena Tide” (BN 150)
- “Letter to Sister” (BN 153)
- “This Spanish Town” (BN 159)
Unique to the Second Edition
The second edition of Fear of Dreaming contains substantive changes and corrections to “Curtis’s Charm.” In the first edition, an overzealous editor changed the term psycho-noetic to psycho-poetic (p. 253); this has been corrected in the second edition. In the second edition, Carroll has also deleted the last sentence of the paragraph at the top of page 254: “If I did have a staff, however, I would neither break nor bury it, and as for the Magus books, I had no intention of drowning them.”