Mick's Summer-Night Dream

Well. This is my first ever blog post. Allow me to introduce myself.

I’m Rick Hale, a junior English major who is subconcentrating on creative writing. I enjoy playing music and frisbee very much, and I also like to read. I do that often. My favorite writers are Jack Kerouac, Gabriel García Márquez, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and William S. Burroughs. I will not label Hermann Hesse a favorite because doing so (to me) would be on par with saying that Radiohead is “a good band,” or that Oscar Peterson “can tickle them ivories.” Anything would be unfitting, would only cheapen the thing itself. Read “The Glass Bead Game” if you want to believe me about Hesse.

But why, you ask, should you listen to my unripe, collegiate and possibly jaded opinion? Well – since you countless readers want to know so badly – simply put, written words are my thing. I love them the way you love good beer. And I regard overemotional, mawkish writing with an attitude that I normally reserve only for cheap vodka: The easiest way is very rarely the best way.

I hope you truly enjoy my first choice from this week’s batch of submissions. It’s top-shelf.

“Mick’s Summer-Night Dream”
by Carl Thompson

Between my head and pillow
a Chevrolet sits up on blocks
     bones on display
     yellow sundress
     canned nagiri and lettuce.
That night we wrecked a table
     because it got in our way
     kicked at it
     smashed its wood against it
     tossed it over a fence
     threw bottles to the floor
and marveled in the shimmering
     patchwork, shards of glass.
That night blood and beer looked
     just the same and we ran
     together
     like the waves that carried us
     over long before we ever
     filled our children’s shoes.
Reds, whites, greens, orange,
     Blues,
     St Andrew
     St Patrick
     St Stephen
“And we danced to the music
and we dance.”

Here, dear readers, I invite you to stop reading and draw some of your own conclusions before going on to mine. Both of you.

Fine. Don’t.

Initially, I winced at the Shakespearian-ish title of this poem. I made several assumptions that were eventually proven completely invalid by its content. But I now propose that the Irish references with which the poem is riddled, combined with the revelatory function of the entire piece as a dream sequence, give its title more-than-solid ground.

The first line sets the dream-tone of the poem in a pleasantly oblique way. During the hazy moments immediately before sleep the idea that my thought-pictures are occurring somewhere in the space between my head and pillow would make complete sense. The subsequent images, which seem haphazard upon first reading, quite obviously trigger in the dreamer vivid memories of the broken wood, beer and running that come afterward.

The poem’s ability to utilize the “mashability” of dreams in this way will speak to many people; everyone has dreams that depend heavily on psychologically associative images. The piece starts with a small sequence of these images, then allows the dreamer-narrator to become, in a way, cognizant. Beginning with the line, “That night we wrecked a table,” the narrator begins to recognize his dreams for what they are, and does so to such an extent that he is able to explain – coherently and vividly — exactly what happened on that specific night.

I want to pause to examine one line of this “normal” section, in particular. The way the speaker-dreamer “marveled in the shimmering / patchwork” instead of “at” it conjures a comparatively more powerful image: rather than see a person staring down at broken glass, the reader himself gets to stand in front of the glass and see in it his own reflection. This simple sleight-of-hand on the part of the writer brings the reader into the poem in a physical and very literal way. The understatement involved made it one of my favorite lines.

A word on the line breaks. They work in a very specific way that reminds me — dare I say — more than a little of Ginsberg; when each stanza is read in one breath, the rhythm of the poem creates structure for its flow of images but doesn’t become brash or distracting. Whether these line breaks were intended to work this way must be left to conjecture, but when dealing with words I don’t think intention is nearly as important as reception. I am willing to give Mr. Thompson the benefit of my doubt.

To return. “Reds, whites, greens, orange, / Blues” is where the magic starts to happen. Preceded by the temporal jump to birth and children’s shoes, the reference to color signifies the sleeper’s loss of the dream-awareness he’d earlier attained in the sixth line; he is again submerged and must experience images without consciously thinking about them. This shift completes the poem by connecting its end to its beginning. I won’t pretend to understand the personal associative images that are here returned to; I went to Catholic school for 13 years but admittedly am only familiar with Saints Patrick and Stephen and their own respective Irish significances. But the incantatory nods to Catholicism of those three lines on the part of the poet, combined with the beer, blood-shedding and bottle-throwing of the rest of the poem, convince me that this dream-poem is rooted in Ireland. The name “Mick” also helps.

And the reference to the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing” in the last two lines, eased into by the musical meaning of the stand-alone word “Blues,” is the icing on the cake. The delicious rum cake.

Stay tuned.

Rick Hale
halerich@msu.edu