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 100th 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…
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