#31

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12833

A parnel is a priest’s mistress, and here’s something I dug up online about an “Egyptian black”: “How can a modern practitioner approach Egyptian prosperity magic? Simply put, light a black candle… For the ancient Egyptians, black symbolized fertility and abundance.” It had to do with the fertile strip of black soil along the Nile in the otherwise barren yellow desert.

One of the things that worldwide communication and trade has given us is exposure to worldwide culture. It broadens experience, but can also trivialize it. The mock-Russianized Henry “Hankovitch” with his Spanish guitar, sitting on a Japanese mat in the Tibetan Zen lotus position pulls an Egyptian candle out of his Italian leather case, lights it, all very spiritual and priestly, and gives his “parnel” a French kiss. It’s pretty funny. “Woofed” looks like an oblique reference to sex to me, and it’s all quite internationally playful and happy. But then the poem turns as it notes that the flame of the candle rises “like despair”—uh oh. World culture offers riches, but there are troubles in the world too—Pakistan and Sudan, for example. Then Henry, with his guitar, “did a praying mantis pray.” There’s this funny sort of half-pun at work. A mantis has “praying” in its name because of the way its front legs fold, as if praying. But of course it’s not praying, so for Henry to “praying mantis pray” is to pantomime prayer. That’s what has been happening all along anyway. It’s an odd turn toward the insect, but its name provides for it. It has been set up with the praying imagery from earlier, and it ends up cutting apart the images of prayer. They’re not just cute any more, they’ve shaded toward the ridiculous. Then the poem uses the mantis to move right into the political. Insects are mindless, and mantises are solitary anyway, so they would have no social organization at all like bees or ants, and the poem uses this to set up the real kicker line, the moment the poem has been aiming for: “who even more obviously than the increasingly fanatical Americans / cannot govern themselves.” So it’s all about a dig at American fanaticism, self-directed, foot-shooting McCarthyist aggression and bumbling political foolishness. The Swedes, world-renowned paragons, along with the other Scandinavians, of a peaceful, democratic sensibility, might as well not exist as far as world-culture models of decent behavior.

It’s almost a joke to compare the now to the then, except it’s not funny. There is fanaticism, paralysis, corruption, and cruelty infiltrating our governing system right now, especially in regards to addressing our most pressing worldwide threat. Here’s a response to that. Not a new sonnet of mine, but apropos to the sentiments of DS 31, I do believe:

Only One Word (An Apology)

I watch the great green mountains disappear.

Arctic wells nose down like roots, drilled
So tankers slide through melting ice, filled
With oil, and oil, and oil, and oil. I hear
The frackers’ injections, that crack shale
Till burning gasses rise like burning wind.
The green of hillside forest cut and skinned
Away, blasted, scraped, sickly, and pale.
Murder burns the language used to fit
My thoughts to word, when forms bubble like spit
From a dusty throat, like gas from shattered grounds,
And superegoistic caution sounds
Like shame: Puts finger to lips and warns me to quit…
Goes quiet...(…shush…)…but there’s only one word for…(…shhh…)…it…
 
KZ

#30

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_30_Collating_bones_I_would_have_liked_to_do_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

While Henry and John Berryman (both fictions to varying degrees) are two different entities, the line separating them is not fixed. “I missed his profession” completely blurs it—either “I missed my profession” or “he missed his profession” would be more correct, but of course the real point would be lost. Behind them both lurks the furtive John Smith. “Mindel-Würm” are two glaciated periods in Earth’s geological history.

“Hell talkt my brain awake.” In a different world, had things fallen out differently, he might well have become that archeologist—calmer, patiently building a scientific understanding, quietly taking satisfaction from the slow accretion of bones and facts, building them carefully into a system of understanding. Instead, he winds up a famous, prize-winning alcoholic, some manic tormented artist. He could have spent his career imagining the first wandering Asian peoples, clad in furs, superbly fit and culturally adapted to hunting, exploring southwards into a world utterly untouched by human beings, populated with mastodons, dire wolves, giant sloths, sabre tooth cats, and all the other magnificent beasts of the Americas that passed on long ago. The archeologist has one of the best-equipped minds to recreate that amazing moment. The poet and storyteller has another. I’ve never felt much of a philosophical difference between science and art. I studied them both, walking across campus from a microbiology lab, folding up my white lab coat on the way, and arriving at a poetry workshop. I’ll be thankful till the day I die that I did that. Scientists and poets are both explorers and reporters. I just didn’t immerse in the world, the modes and mechanisms, the details of the sciences in the long run, and I didn’t pursue that set of credentials. I like to think it’s latent in me, though, and I keep my awareness as sharp as I’m able.

B.’s not acknowledging the correspondences between art and science. It’s one or another, because rather than being a sleepy “respectful peaceful serious” scientist, he’s a crazed poet. Being in hell waked him up, he says, and got his pencil scratching, and that has made all the difference. But the implication that hovers around the poem is that the sensibilities of artist and scientist are kin. His style of poet generates more fire than his style of scientist, but the calm archeologist doesn’t burn up either. That’s the main difference. The warmth of his attention melts a path through glaciers, creating those open spaces where one can imagine his way, calmly, forward into a new continent in peace and wonder, like we’re supposed to. No world, to that person, is ever lost.

#29

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177879

Here is Berryman reciting his poem. It is brief, but it’s intense and maybe even a little bit  disturbing. It’s well worth a look, but be warned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGIr7fGdo6o

This is one of the best-known Dream Songs, and I think it has gained the attention because it turns in such a shocking direction in the last stanza. It’s not an easy poem to think about because it opens a difficult question. But it’s as representative as any poem I can imagine of what the “confessional” poets strived for, which was to mine personal experience and the psychological torments that are always an aspect of the human condition and expose them, with all their complications and contradictions, and then refine expression of that experience through poetic technique. In that process the poet can uncover strange and disturbing complexities. So Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” for example, the relentless attack on the father of the poet’s imagination—“Daddy, I have had to kill you”—“The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you”—is as much a love song as attack, and I’m not referring to “Every woman adores a Fascist.” The narrator’s image of the lost father is being destroyed, which implies the opportunity for the subsequent growth of a new, better image, with the whole process founded tragically on an absolutely unappeasable grief. He’s dead; he’s never coming back. It’s ever only this disturbing process of imaginative creation and demolition.

DS 29 starts with that same unappeasable grief that Plath built her famous poem on. B.’s father killed himself, and the references to the funeral are heartbreaking: “Henry could not make good. / Starts again always in Henry’s ears / the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.” Watching B. read this, you can almost see that his grief in adulthood is still right there. The loss he feels, though, is expressed in the poem not as an absence, but as a presence. It’s not about emptiness or lack or the space left by something missing; it’s about the imposition of something actual. The middle stanza makes an oblique reference to the face of Jesus, the human response of Jesus at his betrayal portrayed by some Medieval or Renaissance painter, and then the memory, I think, of finding his father’s body—I think the two images are kind of superimposed. Then the poem turns, maybe even courageously, toward something very difficult: “This is not for tears”, which is to say, nothing is ever going to appease the shock and the loss. What arrived as “loss” at that moment never goes away, and it’s permanent, and it’s terrible.

Then, the poem makes the plunge, and in B.’s reading, his demeanor totally changes. “But”—uttered with such emphasis, as if to say, get ready. The poem finishes with reference to several things. One is that B./Henry is aware of long stretches of total insensibility, and we know that he drank himself into oblivion routinely. This is how he tried to forget that “loss” so relentlessly present, that torments and that will not let up. There is no record, that I’m aware of, of actual instances of misogynistic violence, but there was intolerably crazy behavior, that got him fired on occasion. But the potential is there in the narrator, and there’s this sense of relief that he’s done a careful count of all his acquaintances, checked the news, and yep, it’s pretty apparent that no one has been hacked to pieces yet. No woman has been hacked to pieces. It’s not really necessary to point out that well-adjusted men don’t need to spend a lot of time on this kind of reckoning. But in B. there is an incredibly potent—but also latent—propensity for extreme violence, and it’s directed toward women. I do not understand it. I acknowledge where it came from, I grant that it’s there, I’m grateful that it remained latent all his life, I admire that he coped through art rather than physical violent action, but I do not understand why an unappeasable psychological wound—as hard and violent a wound as it was—urges to express itself through violence against women. And in no uncertain terms that is what he’s telling us it did to him, because it’s the thing he fears.

This matters because it is very common. Nearly 1 in 6 American women will be raped in their lifetimes. It is an astonishing fact, but there it is. Partly this is due to a tacit societal acceptance (at some level) of this kind of violence, but I’ve been convinced for a long time that broad societal patterns often have their origins in profound, personal psychological patterns that as human beings we share. The personal and the societal reinforce one another. Jian Gomeshi, the talented, sophisticated Canadian radio personality, has plummeted into disgrace because his uncontrolled violence toward women destroyed him once it became widely known. I have no idea what drove him, but a tendency toward self-destruction had to have been in the mix. For sure, any man who rapes risks destroying himself as well as the woman he attacks. I don’t mean to take the emphasis off of the plight of those 1 in 6 women (and all the rest who are forced to constantly be on guard) who bear the brunt of whatever is at work here. It’s only that the poem, with the wounded male psyche speaking and confessing to fantasies of violence, or a fear of the propensity toward violence, prompts this approach. We know that B. ran from self-destructive impulses, and eventually he destroyed himself outright. Before then, there were these struggles, and they’re appalling.

I’m wrestling right now with whether or not I think discussing this kind of thing in art is even healthy. I think it probably is, but I’m not very confident. So, I dropped this and ran to talk to a colleague about it, and she assures me that when art leads us into these disconcerting, uncomfortable spaces it is doing what it is supposed to be doing. Of course, she’s right. And as I wrote here a few days ago, it’s B.’s wrestling with the undeniable cultural racisms and misogynies that surface in him that makes The Dream Songs valuable and that rescues them. I’m thinking that the problem for me comes from a couple directions. For one—pin me down and tear my face off, and I’ll have to confess that I recognize the impulse. In me. It’s weak, it’s old, I outgrew it long ago, it doesn’t haunt me, but it was there, and it’s not because I was all that terribly wounded in my childhood, but because I believe it was a cultural and psychological bequest that I had to find, address, and only then was I empowered to reject it. But I still feel disconcerted if I return to it, and I think that’s probably a healthy thing at this point. The poem has prompted that return. Very early in my writing, still a youth, I wrote a story that ended with a symbolic image of violence involving red lipstick and a woman’s closed eyelids. I think I was heartbroken and angry over some girl and gave it form in a story. I sent the story to a former teacher, who wrote back and told me she thought it was weird and disturbing. Well—it was. And honestly, that was all it took and I was done with it. Last year, then, one of our latest crop of mass murderers left a note or a Facebook post or something, revealing how outraged he was that the women of his acquaintance wouldn’t sleep with him. Therefore, he killed as many of them as he could before shooting himself. Destroying himself was his ultimate aim, but along the way, there was collateral damage to be inflicted. So all I’m saying is that even healthy people have those impulses, sometime that are nothing more than a legacy. We don’t talk about them, and they don’t usually emerge into outright psychopathy. But they’re there. I’m not comfortable with that.

Does dragging this kind of thing into the light help heal it, or at least contain it? I think a therapist would wholeheartedly agree that it does. And I also think the therapist would agree that uncritically burying this kind of thing promotes its festering. I’ve seen much art that deals with violence from the victim’s perspective, sometimes in incredibly graphic detail. The ethics of that make sense: It invites empathy, which will ideally lessen this kind of impulse’s societal virulence. A novel like Lolita works because the sustained attention to the child rapist’s confessions and desires is shot through on every line with irony: We see Humbert as a monster, always, right from the novel’s infamous first line, because he freely accepts his criminal impulses. That he’s articulate and sophisticated only underscores the irony that he is still a monster. The problem with this DS 29? The criminally misogynistic impulse is simply a given, and we know why it’s there. Henry fears its consequences, but he is powerless to undermine it. I admit that I understand such things as a sometime given in the human psyche. That it threatens the consequences it does, and that it’s so entrenched and obstinate that it can’t be moved—that’s tough.

It’s all rescued in part by the recognition that the violent outrages that the narrator fears have actually never taken place. He’s guilty or terrified by something that remains potential. But it’s the potential that is appalling, not the acting out of the potential—which would simply mean game over, disaster for anyone touched by it. And also, it’s that the potential for violence is given its power in the first place by B./Henry’s descent into an altered consciousness unreachable to his healthier academic, artistic and sober self. God only knows what the oblivious, drunken Henry is capable of, because who knows if he’ll successfully resist that drive that can’t be shaken. So far, so good, he’s saying, but the thought of it is terrifying, and that’s what makes this poem great and so disturbing.

#28 Snow Line

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-28:-Snow-Line

I don’t have the critical apparatus in place to pry the references of this one open. That’s okay. I suspect this is set in the time when B. had just left India, was in the mountains of Spain before heading home to the US, looking back on what had turned out to be a very difficult experience—illness, condescension and cultural misunderstandings, shock at the extreme injustice of life for the poor in India. But I’m not sure. It’s just as well to read it as an ungrounded statement about loneliness and a kind of psycho-existential freeze, fogged with a general regret, but I don’t think anymore that B. does too much of that. He’s more often grounded in personal events. Perhaps it’s merely from a dream. No matter. Here’s a poem about snow and regret on this clear and sunny, cold, uneventful January day.

Snow Cold

Nothing should ever happen

On a gray afternoon in January
When distant traffic is muffled
By hillocks of round snow
The air crowded
With chaotic snowfall’s
Quiet filigree,
When overhead, a crow hunches
Like a gargoyle in towers
Of imbricated branches
Watching
High over the creeks
Which flow silently wavering
Beneath unbroken crusts
Of fanciful ice.
Ask me on days
Like this what I regret.
Snow cold never arrives
Like that chill rain
That fell last week
Whose wet digits crept
Up your cringing spine
Or like the sharp transparency
Of those ringing nights
When points of starlight
Seemed to needle your coat.
Snow cold warms
And that hunger
For solace, and forgiveness
That hunger for another go
Is like the patient hunger
Of a watching crow
Which pulses like curled regret
Beneath dark feathers
Beneath still white
That waits for a chance to hunt.
 
KZ

#27

http://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/dream-song-27-%255Cthe-greens-of-the-ganges-delta-foliate%255C-john-berryman-poems/

 “Brownies”? “Little people”? Sounds like a touch of that racial superiority, that settles so easily onto a colonialist mindset. Filipinos were our “little brown brothers” as we drove out their Spanish colonizers so that we Americans could colonize them better instead. Here, the “Brownies” are Indians, and this poem refers again to B.’s experiences in India, a reflection as the narrator is flying away. Aside from that, it’s a pretty interesting poem, beginning Section II of The Dream Songs, and beginning with a plea to the people he’s encountered, uneducated and condescendingly brown and innocent, “made late aware” of the complications that an education brings, to not let the arrogant power he represents close their ears to the songs of the green wood they spring from—like, one imagines, so many prelapsarian naifs splashing exuberantly naked and joyously savage through their great river deltas and uncharted forests. The voice embodies a fairly standard, sort of exhausted colonialist arrogance, but I think it’s also so self-aware and self-critical, and sad, that the narrator is trying to undermine that arrogance with an implied lament at his own and his culture’s discontent, from which he can’t escape and to which he must return; and his sadness as well comes from his students’ irreversible entry into the world of Western sophistication and its attendant malaise. Whether this works or not is probably open to question, but I’m going to give the poet credit for an attempt at wrestling with his bigotry.

Since thoughts of spring have been summoned—on this frigid January day, with a big nor’easter snowstorm in New England dominating the news—I think it’s time for a sonnet:

The blithe spring air softens like kissed lips,

And don’t we all attend that season’s gift
Of growth and warmth, when April’s showers lift
Bedraggled faces to a dancing sky that slips
In soft cascades, and all those pink and bright
Flowers jump like puppies in our laps
And birdies singy-sing, and mushroom caps
Like pink umbrellas shelter fucking elves?
Oh. It seems I lost composure. I’m tired.
Oh, I yearn like everybody else
For springtime’s lilting step and always try
To hope the new green rave leaves me inspired.
But winter melts, as all the planet melts,
While good Spring returns with a dance and a sigh.

KZ

#26

http://lumpy-pudding.tumblr.com/post/222253848/john-berryman-dream-song-26-the-glories-of-the

This is not a difficult poem to follow, but I find it a difficult poem to entirely like. DS 26 ends the first section of The Dream Songs, so I’ll take this is an opportunity for a moment of reflection.

Friend and colleague, Jeff, sent me an article which was waiting for me in a manila envelope in the office this morning. It’s from the latest issue of Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2015. The title is “The Art of Reading John Berryman.” I found out that B.’s 100^th birthday last year prompted a couple of academic conferences devoted to him. This article is hardly the first of this kind of retrospective/reflection on the poet, his work and his legacy. I was utterly ignorant of all this back in December when I committed to this blog, which had been circulating as a possibility with me for a number of years. It reinforces exactly what I had figured, that the scholarship on B. is so extensive and so in-depth that to try and extend it would be a task not worth pursuing for me. I knew that The Dream Songs were confrontational, byzantine, refractory, prickly, obscure, and that they were intensely confessional, and that they and B. had attained sufficient stature that a flock of scholars and biographers would have been following them, gulls behind a shrimp boat. They have done a fine and thorough job. This all convinces me to stay spontaneous and freewheeling in my responses and shy away from scholarly pretense. I have no goals here except to show up, and ultimately to learn more about what it means to be a writer, both by studying a great one and of course, by writing. This is not the only project I’m engaged with.

But the article does say something important about reading The Dream Songs. “The Dream Songs can’t be considered in the dark.” I found that out in my response to DS 24, which I consider already in retrospect a gaffe. The references are so specific, and actually so well-known to anyone who has any familiarity at all with B.’s biography (I’m just starting it…), that to not take into account his teaching experience in India and his impressions on visiting a leper colony is to render any response to the poem nearly meaningless. If you’re coming at it as a scholar, that is. If you’re not, if the poem is merely some sort of free-floating trigger, then something else, like my cavalier, transcendental flight on the spirituality of teaching, is probably okay. I’ve beaten myself up over it enough already. That will most certainly not be the last time I fail to connect a Dream Song with the biographical event that prompted its writing.

The article also addresses something obvious about B. and The Dream Songs. They wrestle with some very incendiary concepts. Occasionally they do it from an ethical standpoint I can find difficult to admire. To me, they’re most dated and least interesting (so far, anyway) in the way they address sex and women. This one for example, 26, has this line: “Stupor. Knees, dear. Pray.” which comes immediately after that backhanded, ironic, but still pretty offensive brag about Henry’s “loins” as the “scene of stupendous achievement.” Ugh. Well, there’s nothing new about it I suppose. B. kept a list, to himself, where he lists the names of the 60+ women he slept with. I don’t want to know that, and I don’t especially care. It’s that image, though, very compressed, of a woman (“dear”) on her knees, in front of him, being exhorted to pray. The narcissism and flat-out misogyny of that moment is not something I’m tolerating very well. I wasn’t expecting that, to be honest. It occurs to me that one might argue that the intent is to exhort her to kneel with me, as we engage in something holy. But—nah—I doubt it. I’ll probably gloss over this most of the time and try to chalk it up to changing attitudes. I know it’s not, though. It’s rather an honest pronouncement of a male misogynistic tendency that right now is under more scrutiny in our culture than ever before, to pretty universal condemnation. (Bill Cosby, the NFL, lots more…) In the end it’s about a woefully insecure impulse to dominate and punish that which causes the insecurity in the first place, and basically I find it repugnant. But, points for candor, I guess. It would be silly to deny it’s there in us as a culture, and thus it can show up in an individual in all sorts of sneaky, particular ways. This article claims that, “Berryman, deservedly, gets a bad rap these days—misogynist, racist—and he surely was those things if we hold him to our present-say standards. But the beauty of Berryman, his humanity, and wisdom, even, is that he actively wrestles with his misogyny, his racism.” For just the moment, okay, if you say so. It’s early. I’ll grant that exposing misogyny is a prelude to wrestling with it. But if the wrestling doesn’t follow up, then it’s more like exhibitionism, a naked Beethoven at his window shaking his fist at the passersby who stop to gawk at this bizarre spectacle. Honestly—I’m serious—I’m one who would have kept walking.

These Dream Songs also take on Death, Race, and Power. Nothing about the environment, but I knew that going in. I’ll engage with that on my own when it gets triggered. Power and the environment connect, so there’s plenty of opportunity to come. The article has a lot to say about the unnamed respondent who calls the first/second/third-person Henry/Berryman “Mr. Bones.” B. hinted somewhere, and some attentive budding critic finally caught it, that B. considered this person to be the voice of Death personified. That he speaks in minstrel dialect is important, and it underscores something that much of America still has trouble acknowledging: That racism—an institutionalized, profound and brutal racism—is fundamental to an American identity. In that case I say, by all means, drag it out and talk to it. Talk it out. Make mistakes, too, but do it.

Death, the minstrel, the poet, they’re not other; they’re a part of the self. That is the saving grace. That’s what keeps The Dream Songs, and Berryman, from bigotry. There is a black minstrel in all of us Americans, Berryman seems to be saying. Those who refuse, or repress, this aspect of the American self are the most likely to act out of bigotry. In this way Berryman confronts one of the most difficult concerns facing the American writer: To write honestly about America, you must write about racism.

(And by the way, if you have any doubt about the workings of racism and denial, look at how the Roberts-led Supreme Court just recently gutted the Voting Rights Act, by claiming that the racism that prompted the act had been rectified by it, so there was no longer any need for it. The most racially hurtful decision by the Court in recent memory was justified by claiming that racism was no longer the pressing concern it used to be. Which is pure, racist hooey.) B.’s ethics regarding race seem more defensible. His Death as minstrel is odd and edgy, and may yet step over the edge, but I think I get it. DS 10 is crushing and incredibly effective, and its statement is clear. It would be much—much—more problematic if the “he” in the poem were hinted to be Henry, but I don’t think it is. It’s not intellectually challenging to condemn a lynching. The problem is that lynching involves so little of intellectual substance that it’s irrelevant to the mob in the photos. This too is a genuine aspect of American life, though. Unfortunately. Yep. It’s down there, a cultural bequest for too many of us. You have to drag it up into the light to excise it. The Dream Songs often give you this tightly woven linguistic fabric that lets no light through. Then you start to pull at the words, and it begins to unravel, and—oh, crap!—this is what you find. My first casual glance at DS 10 made me think it dealt somehow with a drive-in movie! (No idea why.) That didn’t last long, obviously, but if you’re not persistent, you don’t get down to the subject. A subject that’s not always happy.

Death, a crippling psychological wound, and suicide run all through these poems (this long aggregate poem) as well. That’s what B. carried around all his life, and the biography makes it plain right up front that he knew very well it would catch up to him eventually and destroy him. He ran from it brilliantly for a long time, and he lived loudly while he lived. Not elegantly, often, but with the volume turned up. This colors the whole project, and perhaps offers a means of forgiveness for its political missteps. If there is humor, it always has a dark side. If there is political offense, it masks pathos. I’ll keep that in mind, with the understanding that this is just not me. I’ll still simply respond as I’m moved. A good friend observed once that I radiate an aura of mental health. Sounds excellent, except all that really means is that my collection of psychological scars are from wounds that didn’t completely gut me. I’ve been fortunate that way. But I will bear in mind that I don’t want to come off as frivolous—unless that’s my intent. (See #8!)

These thoughts on race, sex, death, and frivolity, will play out further. That’s enough for today. On a personal level, blogging The Dream Songs has not been a chore whatsoever so far. (Ask me again in August.) It has rather been energizing. Even on days when I have no idea how to respond, something always shows. It’s kind of amazing, really. The end of this project is a full year away, but I already know that I’ll be sad to see it end. In the meantime…

#25

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3558

This poem tells about a lie, then curls up in a ball, assumes the fetal position, and begins the shrinking away: When the tide rises, the island is isolate. I had a professor once who told the class that once a semester it’s okay to stay in bed until 4:00 in the afternoon.

Five Haiku in Retreat

Violets spring violet

Dark in shade, happiest when
Sun leaves them alone.

         Bluegills rise to a

         Struggling fly, sink away from
         Memories of hooks.

   Mole turns from light through

   A hole in his hole, embraces
   The comforting dirt.

Scarlet of maples
Exhausts the forest, burden

Of color fallen.

          Breathing of a frog

          Unnecessary beneath
          The pond’s hard blanket.

KZ

#24

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/poem-10622.html

A lovely transcendental Dream Song about the experience of being a teacher. I’m not quite sure what the abbreviation “p.a.” stands for, but from the way it’s used I can only surmise the “a” is assistant, and most people who have been through college at a big university have experience with Indian teaching assistants, or from Japan, China, Africa, etc. That they’re a kind of weapon against the birds—you go in to teach every day, like going into battle again and again, against the vast, implacable birdshit tide of innocent ignorance your students drag into the room with them. But the burden of battle changes to something different and better when a classroom starts clicking.

A “ghat” is a series of steps that leads down to water, like the holy Ganges. A “saddhu” is a holy person, and an online source tells us that, “The term ‘Mahamudra’ is Sanskrit. ‘Maha’ means ‘great’ and refers to great bliss, and ‘mudra’ means ‘non-deceptive’ and refers to emptiness.” The invocation of maha mudra is meant to do more than invoke images of India, through the person of the p.a. The holiness of the reference keeps ringing in the poem and it sets up the last two lines, “smiles & a passion of their & his eyes flew / in feelings not ever accorded solely to oneself.” That’s the point of it: When teaching is going well, when all your training and passion are brought to bear and the students are responding, your ego steps out of the way. You are “beside yourself.” You’ve tapped into the flow and joy of learning that stretches back for thousands and thousands of unbroken years. That is the ideal. It doesn’t always happen. On those rare days when it does, you do indeed (ideally) become empty of ego and all that mean desire for attention. You’re an instrument. Teaching is an art, and artists know that the best moments are when you become a conduit for something bigger that has arrived—the Muses pay a visit, you hear voices in your head and let them speak, your fingers play the music by themselves, you become the character, the brush moves of its own accord. This is what it means to become a transparent eyeball. And when you come to a resting place you look up at the canvas in wonder and ask where in the world did that come from? How did that happen? Did I do that? And the answer to that question is, no, but you still get credit for it! Because your discipline and passion have facilitated that passage, and isn’t it wonderful? You and your students have together been offered a gift: community with the spirit of the ages.

(My gratitude to Mr. Emerson this morning.)

[Addendum, next day: I'll do this just once. Reading B.'s biography this morning, I suddenly find that he taught in India, and DS 24 chronicles his experiences there. Oh... Teaching over the calls of raucous crows, visiting a leper colony, the "p.a."s a "public address" aid to overcome the crows' noise, his being "summed up" and dismissed by his Indian professor colleagues, who could not entertain the notion that America had a literature worth considering. It's all very specific. There is much of autobiography in the Dream Songs. If I miss something, from now on, I'll let it slide. I still like my exuberant response, flailing as it does through a fog of innocent ignorance. There is always so much to learn!]

#23 The Lay of Ike

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-23:-The-Lay-of-Ike

When we gauge the current political scene, Dwight Eisenhower seems a pretty reasonable Republican in retrospect, even to decidedly liberal sensibilities. It’s hard not to look back on him as a solid, level-headed leader. He saw Joseph McCarthy for the tinhorn thug he was and worked to undermine McCarthyism, the hysterical scourge of the 1950s that ruined so many lives and careers. He established the Interstate highway system, and while the effects of that haven’t necessarily been all positive, contributing to the rise of a costly car culture, with all the pollution, sprawl and urban decay that followed, it’s hard to blame him for that. The Interstates from the beginning have been a tremendous economic engine, and it was Ike’s vision that got them rolling. He started NASA, a magnificent legacy. His final warning against the military-industrial complex (his term, that stuck) was dead-on, though we haven’t listened. This Dream Song is grounded in its moment and comments on Eisenhower’s career. It’s more critical of him than not.

Ike was the first TV president. When reading this poem you have to imagine the small, fuzzy screen of a 50s-era black and white television set, signal zoning in and out, picture rolling up or down and you can’t get it to hold still, the diagonal adjustment flipping out so that the picture is suddenly jagged black and white lines from corner to corner. You adjust the rabbit-ear antennae, maybe hang strips of aluminum foil on them, slap the side of the wooden cabinet, and carefully turn four different dials to try and clear up the picture, but it fades into static and back again. You get up to adjust the controls but your body affects the signal, so when you sit back down, it all reverts to noise. (Anyone under 40 probably has no idea what I’m talking about.) The poem’s “ech” and “awk” and “bang” and “er—er” break things up and set the whole shebang down smack in the static-filled TV age.

B.’s not as happy with Ike as I think most people ought to be with his legacy. I suspect Ike understood his strategy in World War II war better than B. gives him credit for, and I don’t think his grin was that empty. Adlai Stevenson was the end of the line for the New Deal, and there’s a lament for that. It’s all about the 50s, and no Happy Days or Back to the Future. Cool.

And then there’s this: I was born in ’58, and I have to say it, while the ’56 and ’57 Ford Thunderbirds are some of the coolest, most gorgeous damn cars ever to cruise the wide-open American road, the ’58 T-bird is awkward and weird and signaled the end of a great era in automotive design. So there’s that about the 1950s. Made in the shade, Daddy-O.

#22 Of 1826

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_22_Of_1826_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

It’s one of those uncanny details of history that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day, July 4, 1826. “Founding Fathers” both, and ideological rivals (Jefferson had defeated the incumbent Adams in the presidential election), John Adams’s last words were “Jefferson still lives,” a lament that he hadn’t outlived his rival. (Jefferson had actually died earlier that day, but Adams didn’t know it.) Historians no longer attribute the rancor between the two that they once did, having studied their correspondence and recognized the grudging respect and friendship they developed. But the relationship between the two was always challenging and prickly, and for a long time stood as demonstrative of the dislikes and even hatred underlying America from the beginning. (There is no doubt that Adams and Alexander Hamilton openly despised each other. Of course Hamilton despised Aaron Burr too, and look where that got him.)

Dream Song #22 is a rage, against the idiocy, hypocrisy, hatreds, foolishness, and anti-intellectualism B. and other post-war intellectuals saw in American society. Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” is this poem’s ideological companion, and I would think B. was at least drawing from it or even re-expressing Ginsberg’s sentiments in the highly compressed form of a Dream Song. “In vain, in vain, in vain” is such a clear statement: Is this what Adams’s and Jefferson’s dreams all came to? Really? This? Think of Mario Salvo’s pronouncement from the steps of the Berkeley administration building: “The operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart” and you’ve got the gist of this one. Henry, on the other hand, is too weak to resist: “Henry Pussy-cat. My whiskers fly.” He’s outta here, Jackson. This stuff is way too upsetting, for the likes of a Henry.

And all I can say is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Shall I go line-by-line over the lists of the first two stanzas? (You do it…)

#21

Some good people, daring & subtle voices
and their tense faces, as I think of it
I see sank underground.
I see. My radar digs. I do not dig.
Cool their flushing blood, them eyes is shut—
eyes?

Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded.

Without exception! All.
ALL.
The senior population     waits. Come down! come down!
A ghastly & flashing pause, clothed,
life called; us do.

In a madhouse heard I an ancient man

tube-fed who had not said for fifteen years
(they said) one canny word,
senile forever, who a heart might pierce,
mutter, ‘O come on down. O come on down.’
Clear whom he meant.

This is how I read a Dream Song:

There are all these good people, often with voices both “daring & subtle”, and for whatever reason, they always end up eventually dying. They are “sank underground” here: Buried in a graveyard. “I see. My radar digs.” “My radar” I read simply as imagination, as in, I imagine them down there. “I do not dig.”: There’s a complex pun here on “dig”—literally digging in the dirt for the buried bodies, but also, in early 60s parlance, “dig” means simply to “like,” and it also means to “understand.” (Can you dig it?) So: “I do not dig”: I’m of course not literally digging them up to see them, (I only imagine them with my “radar”), but I also don’t like the thought of them down there, and furthermore, I don’t really understand why they’re there anyway. “Cool their flushing blood”—when bodies die, they go cool, and when they die their eyes shut. Except, in that last line, Henry realizes they have no eyes now either. Think of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull—“here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” Dead flesh decays away, including the beautiful lips and the marvelous, miraculous eyes—and it’s an appalling thought if you find yourself dwelling on it. B. was a Shakespearean scholar before he ever started writing poetry, I believe, so it’s hard to even imagine that this image hasn’t grown directly from that scene in Hamlet, one of world literature’s great meditations on death and decay. Henry is finding himself appalled by the thought of the dead, and while that may seem odd, it’s actually not. We all do it, and we’ve all woken up at 4 AM and thought to ourselves, one day you [your name here] are going to die. It’s an appalling moment. Henry broods over it, and he is appalled by all of the dead around him. “Without exception! All. ALL.” This repetition is partly to make sure we don’t miss the point that Henry is brooding over the fact of death, aided by the exclamation point and the capitals, but more to the point, the repetition has a comic overstatement to it. B. is both snickering at Henry and totally sympathizing with him at the same time. And note the switch from “I” to “Henry”, from first to third person. This happens so seamlessly that we don’t even notice anymore, but whether the narrator is referring to himself, or Henry is talking, or something else, it all flickers in and out. We’re used to this by now.

The poem shifts to the “senior population” as the segment of us beginning to really face the fact of death, and the implication is unstated that kids through thirty-somethings don’t need to bother yet, outside of tragedy. The seniors do. The 4 spaces before “waits” is a nice, quick touch of visual accentuation, and of course the onset of death is the thing the seniors are waiting for. “Come down! Come down!”: On its own, especially in the context of meditations on death that the poem has already well established, we can reasonably surmise that God or Jesus is being addressed, since this is common in cultures worldwide to call to God up in heaven as a way of easing the unsettling and terrifying thought that as ego we will exist no longer, but there is something else there as well, a double meaning that is resonating with the more serious address to God. Game shows were well established on TV by the early sixties. “Come on down!” was a refrain in more than one of them, for audience members lucky enough to be called for a game in the spotlight in front of millions. The poem’s use of it has a kind of bitter overtone, that we trivialize death as another way of easing it. The poem then makes a quick switch to a characterization of life as “ghastly & flashing pause, clothed.” We’re born naked, and clothing means nothing to us dead, so the interval described as “clothed” works, but more interesting is the characterization of life as a “flashing pause.” It’s an instance of poetic compression that is really effective, and the four words together are a brilliant, sardonic commentary on all the potential, excitement and horror that life generally brings to us, yet it's muffled and covered by clothing, keeping things in balance. And there’s always that inference too that it’s also a big joke on us, a cosmic game show. But its being a “pause” is also very serious, with spiritual overtones: Our true life is with God in eternity, and we’re asked to take time out from that to engage in all this crazy life for a time, just a pause from what matters. “us do”: another quick example of babytalk or blackface patter, meaning something like “this is what we all encounter.”

In the third stanza, the poem lets up on all the typical fragmented Dream Song compression and lays out a straightforward story, easy to follow, about a dying, physically and mentally incapacitated patient, who at the moment of his death calls out “O come on down! O come on down!” I’m quite certain the reference to Let’s Make a Deal is deliberate (the game show premiered in 1963, a year or less before the poem was written), with the same double meaning as before, but the “O” in front of the refrain puts a plaintive spin on it now, and the call is less comic or contemptible, and much more serious, and actually quite moving. We may “game show” and commercialize our lives as much as want, but in the end something else will have the last say, and that something is very serious. The poem ends with saying as much: “Clear whom he meant”: God doesn’t need to be named here. We get the reference.

So in the end, the poem is very spiritual in character, with a commentary on death, what we do with our lives, and how we face the frightening fact of our death.

This is how I read a Dream Song.

#20 The Secret of the Wisdom

http://www.eliteskills.com/c/19451

I know that the day’s temper will likely always affect the reading of these Dream Songs—they’re so fragmented, sometimes they reflect what you bring to them like shards of broken mirrors. But something graceful is surely shining out of this one. Yes, we get hurt, and yes we stupidly strike out, and for sure we screw up all the time (Henry), but despair needn’t be the only reaction to our failures, and we needn’t loose “a pelican of lies.” We have not listened! The poem is a plea. And so: a villanelle. Beginning with Dream Song 20’s ending. Same title. The final lines tend toward an aphoristic pronouncement, which the iconic “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” villanelle, by Dylan Thomas, also does, and which the villanelle form seems to lend itself to. So. This is for the Sisters of Charity, whom this Dream Song has put me in mind of today:

The Secret of the Wisdom

We hear the more that sin has increast

The more grace has been caused to abound
We circle together our passage in feast

With daylight arising clear in the east

Struggle is marked by broadcast sound
We hear the more that sin has increast

It weighs on all, the great to the least

So we work a commitment to gather around
And circle together our passage in feast

Whether through crying heart’s pain is decreased

We trust at our table that grace is found
Yet still hear the more that sin has increast

Believing full well the wage of the beast

Grace is to motion for lives on the ground
Circling together our passage in feast

And may a day come when trouble has ceased

The more grace has been caused to abound
Hearing no more that sin has increased
We’ll circle together our passage in feast

KZ

#19

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-19

There's a story here. A momentary triumph, and some measure of financial success. Henry gets a check. That's far enough for today. 

"John Berryman," was actually the alter-ego/pen-name of John Allyn Smith, who changed his name after his father's suicide. His mother had been having an affair, his father found out, and coupled with financial trouble, this prompted the father to take his life. He shot himself outside of his son's window. This devastating psychological shock led the boy eventually to a career of major literary achievement and much other trouble--constant affairs, serious alcoholism, erratic bahavior, depression, eventually suicide. He was by all accounts an amazing, inspiring teacher. Still, it's not a happy story. I got interested because some of the Dream Songs truly grabbed me, and because I was sure there are parallels between the psychological anxieties of 60 years ago and today. In casting about through the criticism on B. this morning, looking for a way into #19, which will yield some meaning without a background story, but not enough to satisfy me, I ran into this, by the critic Adam Beadsworth: "They [The Dream Songs] bear witness to the latent psychological damage caused by the combination of repressive state policies and the epistemological uncertainty that plummeted into American consciousness with the detonation of nuclear weapons in Japan. The instability of his gnarled syntax and ruptured grammaticisms, combined with the anxiety, avarice, guilt, and depression endured by his protagonist Henry, allow Berryman to forge a metacommentary on 1950s and 1960s political and cultural ideology that testifies to the latent pathologies of containment culture without naming the names of its promoters or exposing its author as seditious." Well, I had figured as much. It's satisfying to see my conviction validated in critical terminology. (This is fairly light as far as that stuff goes.) The idea is that societal pressures on the individual prompt a resultant, tormented syntax in response. John Berryman, actually, is as much a fiction as Henry House. They flicker into one another in the poems, their faces exchange, they're mixed up in a complex, half-mirrored funhouse, and behind the whole scene is the real man, who doesn't show himself directly, but glimpses flit in an out. This all strikes me as a tormented but sophisticated and literate response, and it fits its time. John Barth's short story, "Lost in the Funhouse," is offering me some metaphoric guidance here. It also uses the funhouse as a model for the mid-century's existential predicament, and it proposes as well that flatfooted earnestness will always lose its way through the bewildering complications of the postmodern condition. There's nothing flat-footed about the Dream Songs. But I cling for now to the hope that something genuine--earnest--will be revealed. It's always there, actually. But I've heard already from a couple of close friends following the blog here, that they don't really like the poems--too opaque, too difficult, and when some meaning does finally glimmer through the tormented syntax, it's not very interesting. (Others, to be fair, are totally fascinated.) My defensive response to those who don't like the Dream Songs--it's not about Berryman or the Dream Songs, really. It's all about what I do in response to them. And what you do. They're triggers. Some days will be better than others. Today, I'm just feeling reflective because the poem itself leaves me cold. This is going to happen now and again.

Nature writing, the branch of literary study that caught me from the very beginning of my study of literature, can be lots of things--earnest, furious, frightened, dreamy, and plenty more. But it doesn't seem to have to deal so directly with accusations of sedition, and that permits it to speak more directly. (Whether anyone listens is a different matter.) I think that's because the issues of power that it critiques, and the arrangement of the adversaries, offer it a way of stepping aside. The Cold War didn't offer that. In the immortal words of George W. Bush--not a sophisticated nor elegant thinker on his best of days--regarding a subsequent world-encompassing conflict: "You're either with us or you're against us." That doesn't leave you an out. Critique the dominant power and you're automatically the enemy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, of the literary or any other kind, is always about engaging with or protecting the ecological systems that support everything else, including ones enemies and including the power that is devouring those systems. Environmentalists have been successfully marginalized and branded as kooks, and while still a potent force, for every victory you can name off, five or fifty defeats undermine their victories, many of them completely out of the public consciousness. It's a difficult time. I'm only interested in the Dream Songs insofar as they tell me something universal about the human condition--they're doing that--or can shed a light on our particular moment, now. That's really why we study history in the end. Just some wanderings here today. Plus, my computer is going haywire and will need to be reimaged. I'm writing this in an email to myself, in a ridiculous tiny font. 

If you have any thoughts, let's have them! Tomorrow's Dream Song looks like a good one.

#18 A Strut for Roethke

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-18:-A-Strut-for-Roethke

The poet Theodore Roethke died in 1963. Like so many of those mid-century poets, it seems, he was a hard drinker, suffered serious mental health issues, and never made it to old age. Roethke had a heart attack while swimming and died in the pool. He was 53. #18 is Berryman's tribute. Rather than analyze the poem, I've reread Roethke this morning, a poet I'm not very familiar with. He was known in part for his series of the so-called "Greenhouse Poems," reflections on his early years, with plants and nature taking on symbolic significance. (His father owned a large nursery, so plants, trees, flowers, and greenhouses were important aspects of Roethke's upbringing.) Here, then, is a poem about death and life, extinction, and the emerald ash borer.

                                                 Ashes

Beetles green, an ecstasy
Of worming, barking
Through great ashes.

Insect blossoms
Orgasming inflorescence
Of woodsing grubs.

A forest of holes
Cracking fissures skying
Hard open blue.

Wet trunks punking
Woodpeckering
Manure the floor.

Dry trunks dustify
Debarking and burning
Ashes to ashes.

A forest of holes
(                    )
Ashes to ashes.

KZ

#17

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3550

My friend and colleague, Father John, explained to me once (I’ll paraphrase) that sin is simply the absence of progress or motion. We were working on a project together about the French philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the universe unfolding in a continual process of evolutionary becoming, with the far-distant future Omega Point waiting as an inevitable cosmic outcome, where it all will come together in a holy and grand spiritual apotheosis. The Big Bang’s spiritual end-of-the-line, the Big Holy Implosion, you might call it, The Big Godly Bam-Bam. The development of conscious intelligence in creatures like elephants, whales and of course, us, on Earth, was a major step forward along the way, according to Teilhard, and the “noosphere,” the enveloping layer of all the thoughts, emotions, knowledge, and communication generated by the biosphere, has recently emerged from that and is comprising another critical step forward. The Internet is likely on the verge of taking on a role as meta-planetary über-consciousness, another step forward which is right in line with Teilhard’s predictions. So turns out we’re fortunate enough to be living in a critical and momentous moment in terms of the evolution of the cosmos. Henry’s psychological stasis from this point of view amounts to sin. Stuck, in retreat even, he hinders in his small way the Teilhardian evolutionary unfolding, and thus in #17 Lucifer perks up and finds this all quite interesting. Henry futilely tries to rationalize this as something positive in the first stanza: “my madnesses have cease” and Henry is “the steadiest man on the block.” Keep talking, fella. The Emissary of the Nether Regions smells you for you his own.

Berryman was a deeply religious person, who believed at the time of the writing of the Dream Songs in a God that was all-encompassing, transcendental, omnipresent, and all of that, but also abstract, and more theoretical than actual. By the time he was finished with this epic project, or soon after, he had grown into a belief in a personal and immediately present God who sometimes directly affects the lives of people by interceding in their particular affairs. I’ve already become impatient with Henry’s stasis and retreat, his becoming “wicked & away” as he’s described back in #1—which suddenly now resonates in a brand new way: “away” is right absolutely in step with “wicked”; they’re holding hands. But it’s very early. Here in #17, we get the first real invocation of the religious and spiritual implications of Henry and his embodiment of the broader human condition, and the way toward redemption is pointed out. Henry’s not ready to step through that door yet. If you’re not moving forward actively and spiritually into life, Berryman seems to be saying, then Lucifer may quite understandably stop by for a chat. And as that suave Personification of Stasis tells Henry, “tho’ hard,” what he’s been tossed for his lot so far is small potatoes. Henry has those “busy teeth” gnashing away anyway (I love that phrase), and is mired for the moment in a motionless self-loathing. When confronted with the support and spiritual sustenance offered by a list of prophets and teachers, he dives under their “oaken arms” for now, shirking their guidance. Laziness is a sin too, and so is cowardice, and so is willful ignorance, and these are all conditions that Henry is fervently embracing in his psychic desperation. Okay, Henry, if you must, but when we slide into that, we are hindering the progress of the evolving cosmos. We sin.

#16

http://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-2594

At first I read this as another statement of the Everyman crushed by a privileged elite. (I suppose I may have a Marxist streak.) The reference to Sealdah Station, in Calcutta, and the “possessionless / children survive to die” encourages that reading right off. But “they” hang Henry’s pelt on the wall—he’s desired, a trophy, so probably this is about a different kind of possession, about hanging onto or hanging out with persons of celebrity and fame. Henry, the character, is never going to encounter the kinds of personal complications that celebrity brings, but Berryman himself did. Prestigious teaching positions, travel to high profile readings for real money, television interviews, drinking with the likes of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, and other high powered literary personalities. All this came even before his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. The line between Berryman and his character is so fluid that you have to stay alert to who’s who and when.

I’ve seen the barracudas he mentions, gathered in some art gallery drinking daiquiris. Daiquiris! This sooo dates the poem! It’s wine or cosmopolitans or fruity martinis these days, I suppose, although I’m hardly a barracuda myself nor do I attend their feeding frenzies that often anymore. I’ve only ever skulked around the edges of a few. The scenes I tend to frequent these days are hot, humid and green and feature genuine water-breathing bass and catfish rather than metaphoric barracudas. But I digress.

It’s the issue with fame: the making of image can take over. That’s sort of the issue with lying too, so there is a similar kind of ontological intricacy to both concepts, and Berryman mentions them in the same poem for a good reason. Celebrity is a public mask and while a mask may project something legit, it can also deceive. Really, you win literary fame by writing your tail off, and that’s all that’s supposed to matter. There can be a healthy correspondence between public persona and private substance. Mentally healthy people negotiate that all the time. But if the persona outstrips the writer, then it all devolves to bunk pretty fast. A book on Hemingway I read once (don’t remember which one) had a scene where someone points out James Joyce at a table in a café, alone, and H. thinks immediately that he’s coasting off the heights of past glory and responds with contempt. I’m allergic to glamor anyway, but if literary fame should ever come (not holding my breath, here), I’ll go to the soirées and try to act charming. I think you just write and questions of truth, image and honesty will take care of themselves if they ever have to. The only reason I’m taking this on in the first place is because the poem does. It makes me nervous. So, fine. Celebrity poet. My pelt hasn't grown much gold yet, so nobody's setting traps for it.

#15

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3548

We learn in Berryman’s biography, Dream Song, that this poem comes from a story told to B. by Saul Bellow years before he wrote the poem, about a “Polack” woman in a Chicago bar who told some guy to flake off. Bellow’s take on this moment was that women were better, braver than men. B. figured they understood loss better than Henry, who drank to deal with whatever trouble came, or retreated into the past, or simply shunned the human race. It’s all right there on the surface in the poem.

Maybe so. I don’t care. I just find myself glad the pejorative “Polack” has faded away. I remember nonstop, endless Polack jokes in school when I was a kid in Toledo. My dad and my uncle had a store of them that they told over and over (and over—same ones) and that were consistently hilarious, apparently. Even as a little kid, I thought Polack jokes were embarrassing. Lech Wałęsa’s heroism once and for all put a stop to that, seems to me. But in Midwestern cities like Toledo and Chicago, immigrants from Eastern Europe had to endure a generation of marginalization, prejudice and ignorant jokes before their children were fully acculturated. So it goes.

A “foehn” is a warm, dry wind that rolls off the lee side of a mountain range. (It’s of German origin, with a pronunciation halfway between “phone” and “fern”.) The foehn is much more interesting to me this evening than anything else in the whole poem.

The Foehn

His teacup rattled in its dish.
The paper rustled. “They claim no rain
Has crossed the mountains yet,” he said.
“We’ll have to spray or else the foehn
Will turn the wheat to dust again.”
He leaves the table. “Guess I’ll learn
To let them driest fields alone.”
She clears the plates and rubs her head,
Hangs her apron on a hook.
Dinner later, of beef and grits,
That Edna recommends. “I wish”—
She turns— “that ornery sun would look
Another way. I wish to see
Them mountains break to awful bits
And then the rabbits gnaw the parts.”
He cocks his brow and smiles a touch.
“Guard your strength my dear. Our hearts
Are God’s, and all this land is God’s.
He’ll blow His weather as He will.”
“Lord knows that we don’t ask for much.
All I know’s I wish to be
At rest in shade when done’s this life.
Hell is got a burnin’ breeze,
And so’s this ranch, with dust to fill
Our silos more than wheat.” He nods.
What’s a man without his wife?
He thinks. He needs her strong, like trees
That bear the beat of time. He fits
His cap, and turns to take his leave,
Then stops. “I hope you never will
Decide you might go weak on me.”
She gains the porch then bends and sits,
Her sewing draped across her knee.
She sets herself a time to grieve
The girl who grew, then hoped, then aged,
Who thought herself alive and free
Then ended in a farmhouse, caged—
Strength evolving in her breast
The best to serve her needing men
Waiting later for her rest,
To finally sleep ‘neath dreams of when
The dustwinds swirl around and 'round
While the burning foehn pours down.

KZ

#14

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Berryman.14.html

Pretty much every modern poetry anthology from the last 50 years has this poem in it, so if anyone is bored with Dream Song 14, I sympathize. Sometimes I worry that “Life, friends, is boring” might be going the way of “Then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.” I’ve taken on the challenge of discussing that poem with 19-year-old guys, lined up along the back row with their ball caps low over their eyes, arms crossed, daring me to call on them. My approach was generally along the lines of, we’re talkin’ daffodils today, fellas. But yeah, it does take a committed Romantic sensibility anymore not to roll your eyes at Wordsworth’s old-fashioned couplet. But 14 avoids weary Romantic earnestness—quite the opposite—and I probably needn’t worry.

This poem captured me as an undergrad, and as I mentioned in the introductory post on this blog, it remains a go-to standard for me to this day. I have it memorized. At first I just thought it was funny, and I figure most teens or twenty-somethings can relate to the comic invocation of boredom. The presence of Henry’s mother carping at him, and his smart-alec response, appealed to my newly post-adolescent sensibility as well. What has kept me interested technically is the repetition of “bored” and “boring” and “bores”, seven times to be exact, along with “a drag” thrown in for variety, and the dismissive, push-away hand-wave and eye-roll you can’t miss with “the mountains or sea or sky”. There are other repetitions, “literature”, “flash & yearn”, “people(s)”, “Inner Resources” (capitalized, which is funny). Here’s a poem I wrote way back in ’97 and published in ISLE, only the second thing I ever published. It has nothing in common thematically with 14 at all, but the repetition of “green” was in my mind all the way and grew straight out of my familiarity with 14 and “bores”, which sort of afforded me the permission:

              Burial Mound

Where the path loops around that sycamore,

near the soggy creek that feeds the river,
you might find it if you don't look
too hard. Damp leaves of fringed phacelia and water-
leaf wash over a vague mound, green waves that lap
against the hump of a dreaming whale. Damselflies
tremble black and green through the humid air.
In the office up the hill an archeologist
says a woman lies buried here, bones on a bed
of flagstones. He uncovered her himself and left
her undisturbed: a necklace of drilled shells
around her neck, fish-bone needles,
a stone awl, beads, a green copper
pendant in a pouch by her right hand. 

But for some fat raindrops that slap the dark

greenery around, it's as quiet here now
as that pause when you let slip a secret you've cherished,
and your friend's eyes—her humid green
eyes—open in wonder and she peers
into the bare center of your only face,
saying, I had no clue. What will you do?
You shrug and know the thing you will do is re-cover
that little mystery with the dark loam
of the forest floor. Nettles and jewelweed
will fill the hollow, and the roots of box elders
will fix it under the leaves and humus,
and the secret flesh inside will fade and molder
alone, leaching out to the black, dank earth
that feeds this lush growth of inscrutable trees.

So, artful repetition is something I absorbed through 14. But I’m most attuned now to the way the poem effaces the speaker. Life, the tranquil hills, we’re told by our mothers and endless other droning authorities who repeat the same goddam platitudes over and over, is filled with peace and beauty and wonders, yadda, yadda. Screw that and your Inner Resources. Tell me that, he’s saying, and I’ll tell you how bored I am with it all. Henry, middle-aged adult, is reverting to simple adolescent rebellion in this movement. His being bored is one thing, his being told not to admit he’s bored bores him and makes his boredom worse, and this pushes him backward past adolescence toward diminishment. The full effacement comes to fruition in that odd last stanza. A dog has gone off into all that (boring) damn natural wonderment Wordsworth and his happy ilk do so go on about, and the speaker is reduced by it at the end to mere physiology—heart pumping (ho hum), brain churning (big deal), wag. In the end, what really bores Henry is not the world. He’s bored with himself, but more than that, he’s bored with his boredom. That’s the real problem.

The French poet, Baudelaire, took on the more sophisticated but related concept of “ennui” in Les Fleurs du Mal—The Flowers of Evil. Ennui becomes a symbol for a kind of Modernist damnation. Wordsworth, in his day, was already worried about the effect industrialism was having on the human spirit, which is partly why he and the other Romantics were compelled to write against it, asserting most fervently how his heart fills with pleasure at the memory of a field of daffodils. In other poems, like “Resolution and Independence,” he questions that approach. “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Baudelaire sixty, seventy years later takes that same despondency and madness and runs with it. Hardly in wondrous tune with all the wondrous wonders anymore, he’s left bored, bored with himself, filled with ennui over the world and the condition of the world, and his boredom with his boredom, his ennui with his own ennui—his Modernist rejection of the spiritual wealth of the world—spirals in on itself and leads into a metaphoric damnation. The thing about Baudelaire’s persona is if he’s damned, then by God he’s damned proudly. Henry, like his contemporary, The Incredible Shrinking Man, just diminishes until he's gone: Wag. (But I still think the poem’s funny.)

 

#13

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-13-annotated

My doctoral dissertation included an analysis of Peter Matthiessen’s intense and necessary novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. He is my favorite writer. In that novel, Martin Quarrier is an Evangelical Protestant missionary who travels to the depths of the Amazon to try and convert the warlike Niaruna to Christianity. When he and his wife, Hazel, step off the plane, she proclaims to the few gathered stragglers welcoming them and to the thousand miles of unexplored rainforest before them, “The Mart Quarriers have arrived and they mean business!” As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that business is exactly what she means. The missionaries themselves are out to make a profit in souls, and while Martin himself is not aware of it, they were also invited there by Peruvian officials to tame the “savage” Niaruna in order to clear the way for timber and mineral extraction on the Niaruna lands. Religion, government and business link up to achieve a common purpose, and that is partly responsible for the eventual destruction of the tribe.

“God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business.” Riiight… The thing about religion, as opposed to spirituality, is that it’s at least partly a human political construct. It follows then that it’s sometimes pretty screwed up. God, it should be clear, is not Henry’s enemy. Religion is the enemy, and more specifically, the authoritarian impulse in religious institutions. The poem from yesterday (#12) is about that—its presence haunts and watches. Here, it gets linked with commerce, which exerts a tyranny. (I love the double meaning in that phrase “a cornering”: It refers to both an existential entrapment, but also the aggrandizing of commercial control.) Let’s see, do we see still see religious precepts linked up with business and politics, ever? Of course we do! All you have to do is listen to contemporary conservative rhetoric where Christianist fundamentalism covers for corporate influence almost constantly. Rick Santorum is one obnoxious example. The crusader for values also advocates that we “cut the corporate tax rate for domestic manufacturers from 35 percent to zero”, and I do not believe that he has the welfare of workers in mind. But there are hundreds more. John Kasich was sworn in yesterday for his second term as Ohio’s governor. It’s not too much of a partisan political stretch to observe that he has been stridently anti-labor and anti-environment in his policies (he intended to open Ohio’s state parks to fracking until the general outcry forced him to pause). The Toledo Blade from this morning reports that, “The inaugural address that launched Gov. John Kasich’s second term on Monday leaned more on moral, even spiritual, precepts than on the presentation of a detailed policy agenda.” My point: The undoubted integrity of concepts like “spiritual values” and “faith” get coopted as rhetorical tools that further a radical conservative political agenda, and that’s all about “economic growth” and an upward redistribution of wealth. In short, it’s still all about power.

One of the many reasons I’ve taken on this project of responding to the Dream Songs is that they, and Berryman’s political undertones, resonate so loudly with this  political moment 60+ years down the line. I want to understand the immediate now, because I’ve been having trouble with it; I want to try and find a way of coping intellectually and spiritually with the injustice that is so nakedly apparent right now. Mario Salvio, in his famous speech on the Berkeley campus in 1964, proclaimed, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” This was Berryman’s moment too, 1964, and while as a personality I tend to suspect he was probably a bit too self-involved, his Henry is emerging as the illustration of what happens when the machine isn’t resisted, or more likely, as Dream Song #13 claims, when it simply overwhelms. When you’re not free. The poet asserts that Henry tried. Now he is Berryman’s passive, victimized alter-ego, what might have become of him had the writer chosen to not fight back—to write back. To illustrate and to witness. Broadly, I get the point of Henry already, and I have some 370 more Dream Songs to go to drive it home if I haven’t. But, the ins and out, the details, are fascinating—and it’s still very early. If there is redemption to come, thank you. If there isn’t redemption, then I intend to more fully grapple with why not. As Thoreau told us, if life turns out to be mean, then he would publish its meanness to the world. There is at least a measure of redemption in that.

#12 Sabbath

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-12-sabbath-annotated

About the pressure of religion on the poet, with a creepy, haunted, midnight tone throughout. The first stanza, skulking about, being followed. “Tes yeux bizarres me suivent”—your strange eyes follow me. There is the isolation and fear that comes from being an outsider. Watched. The second stanza, the famous poets, Coleridge Rilke Poe, absurdly shouting unheard commands down the centuries. Instead, “toddlers are taking over.” The direction of adults, passed along through their literature, falls on unprepared ears. In the third stanza, “snoods converge”—snoods are hair coverings in general, and are associated with married Jewish women as well, and there is the movement through the graveyard by the “kirk”, a Scottish word for church, so Christian and Jew are invoked equally and exert similar pressures on the “weary-daring” man. I suspect most sensitive, artistic poet-types understand “weary-daring”—it takes verve and energy to resist the weight of the dominant culture’s crush, but that energy comes in waves, in moments of inspiration or fury. In between, there are more moments of exhaustion to endure. Resist the religious press and you risk a branding as witch. But, just watch. (I really like this one.)

Word of the World

Why venture
Out at night?
Voles creep through a dry lot and gather
Stacking coarse grasses
Near the throats of their burrows
An oily rat arranges soggy turns
Of cardboard and plastic bags
Just so, just so—there now, there now
Just so, so
In a corrupt alley
The brown shards of beer
Bottles, and the razor bright pull-tabs
Never cut his fastidious feet
Glinting under rich sodium pink
And arabesques of scarlet neon
Glare and broken
Sparkles offer shifting
Cover from the piercing
Murder of felines and owls
Whose standard bright eyes
Shine with the radiation
Of incandescent power
Quiet, alone, careful
Alley dwellers push and pile
Verses of dried grass
Rats stack trash stanzas
The garbage men rumble by
Their brooms and their trucks
The diesel fumes that settle on lots
That send mindless electric roaches
Scuttling to their cracks
Voles gather weeds
That grew and grew
And died and died
And rubbish blows
Like leaves fallen
From the tall city’s forest
Into abandoned corners
Where word of the world builds.

KZ

#11

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3546

Access to the universe of information available on the Internet helps with interpreting Berryman’s references. This poem uses as a metaphor the balloon voyage and famous turn-of-the-century disappearance of Saloman August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, three Swedish explorers who attempted a journey to the North Pole in a balloon in 1897. Their system of drag ropes and sails for steering the balloon were totally ineffective, and they were at the mercy of wind, frost, and a sinking balloon. They landed on pack ice, made their way through great hardship to a deserted island, and ultimately died there. They subsisted on the supplies they salvaged from the foundered balloon and the polar bears that stalked them constantly, several of which they were able to shoot. When their bodies were discovered by walrus hunters 30 years after they disappeared, their diary and the photos they took were remarkably preserved, and their fate became known. Strindberg was likely killed by a polar bear, and he seems to have gone down shooting. The other two died side by side under a tent made from their balloon, possibly from exposure and exhaustion, more likely from the massive vitamin A overdose that comes from eating polar bear liver, and also from trichinosis they contracted by eating undercooked or raw bear meat. It is also quite possible that they deliberately overdosed together on opium to end their extreme suffering. The bodies of all three were devoured by polar bears once they finally died, so in that way did things come full ecological circle.

The poem tells us that we are born into the safe beds of our mothers but that doesn’t last. Our hearts break, we are tormented by the various incarnations of bullies, monsters and blockheads out there waiting for us, and in the midst of it we dream of flying away to some kind of patriotic fame. Sometimes it happens, much more often the bears are waiting. “Up in pairs / we go not, but we have a good bed.” The would-be heroes lie together in a final tormented iteration of the first bed they were born into, but they still die alone.

This poem is supposed to be depressing, but nah, you don’t get to ruin every day this year, Mr. Berryman. A balloon voyage to the North Pole was incredibly foolish. The bears were hungry. Lighten up. I have said what I have to say.