Beginning

English majors have snippets of poetry fused into their neural networks. Some lines we all recognize instantly—“You do not do, you do not do”—“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”—“Because I could not stop for Death”—and we also have our own less prominently canonical lines creased into our nerves just as deeply, from those moments of intense reading or careful scrutiny of poetry that is part of the experience of studying literature. I have mine: “I imagine this midnight moment’s forest” (Hughes)—“Welling and sinking, an endless need to cry” (Rimbaud)—“Dreams of hangings while he puffs his pipe” (Baudelaire)—“You must change your life” (Rilke). These lines even now recall for me the rich melancholy and somber minor chords of my mid-twenties, when I was studying English literature at the University of Cincinnati. And then there’s this: “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn”. This is from John Berryman’s Dream Song #14. This is from #46:

I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.

People are blowing and beating each other without mercy.

Drinks are boiling. Iced

drinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse

treated he is. Fools elect fools.

The last line of #46 has become the single most important line of poetry I carry around, and it happens to be in Latin: “Do, ut des.” (I give so that you can give.)

Don Bogen, a poet and professor at UC, introduced me to the Dream Songs when I was an undergraduate. Les Chard, another influential teacher and friend at UC during the years of my doctoral studies there, wrote something to me once that has been knocking around in my mind for quite a few years now. He taught an 800-level seminar on Wordsworth, which I loved, and at my instigation, we organized another on Shelley the following quarter. Les wrote this in his summary comments on the journal assigned as part of our study of Shelley: “I hope some day you will consider writing/publishing not just critical pieces but personal meditations such as some of these on various poets/poems.” I grew much in the writing of those journals, using them to explore my way through the intricacies of Wordsworth and Shelley, and later again with Blake. Web logs didn’t exist then, but now a blog seems like an apt medium for this kind of project, the suggestion for which I haven’t let go of: journal-like but more public, yet as personal as one cares to make it. Anyone who cares to follow me can.

John Berryman’s collected Dream Songs are recognized as among the great literary achievements of the 20^th century. More important to me is that just a few of them are part of my first-rank personal canon, and I go back to them again and again. But I only know a handful of the Dream Songs well. The ones I do know have grown in my imagination like that expanding chemical foam contractors squirt into old, cold house walls for insulation. They fill the space available. I’ve long thought about undertaking the project of learning them all, because I know there is so much waiting there.

This project is to respond to all 385 of John Berryman’s Dreams Songs, one a day for a year and twenty days, and to post the responses on a blog site. I’ll be presenting a reading of some of the blog and a discussion of it at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Idaho in June (assuming the proposal is accepted—I expect it will). This is the proposal I submitted, which is part of a creative panel submission with three other writers:

This project is a critical/creative response to John Berryman's The Dream Songs. I will have begun a blog on Jan. 1, 2015, which will entail posting a response to the poems, which are numbered 1-385, each day of the year in 2015 and into 2016, responding in whatever way my mood for that day might dictate—an explication or analysis of these sometimes obscure or difficult poems, or a variety of creative responses: perhaps a poem in challenge or sympathy, a meditation, a lyrical flight, a reaction to the poem's humor (some can be quite funny), a dream song of my own, or even a rant. Despite their lyrical beauty and humor, Berryman's poems, written in the late 50s and early 60s, are essentially a poetry of anxiety, an anxiety stemming from many of the same power struggles still going on now, beneath the specter of the threat of nuclear annihilation. The blog will especially foreground our present-day threat of an environmental annihilation just as frightening, and that engenders a corresponding anxiety. The blog is intended as a self-examining and planet-examining project with my own environmentalist concerns in the face of rapacious power and the physical degradation of the natural world mirroring the personal anxieties and physical travails Berryman chronicled in his work. The blog is to collect responses to the poem of the day for the entire year, and the entries will remain alert to the resonances between now and the early years of the Cold War. And because Berryman was also a confessional poet, the blog does not shy away from personal anxieties and my own take on life and the political/social/psychological/environmental state of America and the world.

So: 1) Respond to one Dream Song a day, in whatever way seems appropriate to the poem and my mood. Jeff Hillard sees my responses to the poems mirroring the call-and-response motif between the characters of Henry and a respondent who refers to Henry as “Mr. Bones” that mark many of the Dream Songs. I like that. 2) When I fall behind due to busyness, travel, illness, fatigue, I’ll do two a day until I catch up. This is partly a challenge in simply showing up. 3) There will be this introductory entry posted on Dec. 31, and on January 21, 2016, I’ll post a reflection. Then I’ll end the blog. Perhaps I’ll try and publish it.

I’ll not be averse to dipping into the existing scholarship or visiting an online discussion, and it may prove necessary in order to uncover some of the idiosyncratic references, but that will not be the central concern, and if my response doesn’t fully address the poem’s embedded puzzles or Berryman’s self-absorbed quirks, I’m not overly concerned with that either. It’s my blog. This is a creative more than scholarly project. I don’t entertain any kind of obsession with Berryman himself. I’m most interested in letting the sparks of his work kindle fires. To that end, anything goes. I’ll feel free to invoke correspondences with the literature I’m familiar with, and to connections with the news and my understanding of the state of the world. Each post will be numbered, and of course the number will correspond to one of the numbered Dream Songs. Some are titled, and I’ll include the title if so. I’ll type out the Dream Song of the day only if it’s not instantly available online through a simple search, e.g. “dream song 3”—some are not. I’ll include the link if it takes any effort at all to find. Comments on the blog will be welcome, and I may respond to those if I’m so moved, but I don’t intend to get too caught up in that.

Here goes!