#10

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-10

This one is serious, and I’m not in a good mood over it, but I think this has to be one of the great, terrible Dream Songs. Not so dreamy. You can’t go to that first line without thinking of this one, and it’s clear Berryman’s reference is deliberate:  “Southern trees bear a strange fruit.” (If you’re not familiar with the great, gutsy, terrible song of Billie Holiday, here’s a link. Listen to the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs ).

I think the line “the administration of rhetoric” is such a bitter and brilliant moment. [Note: All the online versions of DS 10 have an error in lines 7-9. The correct version is: "It is in the administration of rhetoric, / on these occasions--not the fathomless heart-- / the thinky death consists."] No point in detailing the “rhetoric” here—in brief: whips, fire, all of that—but to call such a thing rhetoric is to understand that it was always—and still always is—about message-sending, a communication, a certain mode of atavistic language meant to broadcast meaning far beyond the focused gathering and the soul at its center. (That’s exactly why so many photos survive.) Berryman simply nails the problem with that: “However things hurt, men hurt worse.” These things are driven, at least in part, by broad sociological (sociopathological) currents of rage, pain, despondency. But as bad and infuriating as this might be—however broadly and unfairly things hurt—it’s not as bad, it’s never as bad, as the man’s suffering at the gathering’s focus. Choose to ignore that he’s a man, then a mob can justify its “rhetoric”—and that’s the sin.

We do still see it around us. Shootings of young black men all over the country, all over the news, Parisian cartoonists gunned down just a few days ago by analogous promptings. A student, an African American woman, once told me a story of a prof at another school who told her to her face how much he was thrilled to see black girls like her making something of themselves. She left that school as soon as she could. She asked to talk about it because she didn’t fully understand what had happened and why she felt she had to leave. I think we worked out some understanding of it. My student taught me something about how stereotypes work and the damage they do, and I’m grateful to her for it.

So, yeah. And I have to say, as hard as the subject matter can be, there’s a grainy beauty when a poem prompts a moment of understanding, like Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” or Wilfred Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”—there are more, these come to me now—which Dream Song 10 is kin to. These are not poems you love. But I’m grateful for them.