A poem in babytalk—“wif”—or
in a parody of blackface patter—“sats in de bar”. “His wife is a complete
nothing” is not about any wife of Henry, of course, it’s his life that is a complete nothing, but the
pun on “wife” still has to be dealt with. The flat but devastating declarative
statement, with that one babytalk pun—his “wife” is a complete nothing because:
His life is a complete nothing and he
has no wife in it either. Women in our lives can be bad or good or both—cold,
nagging, petty, manipulative—but also, and more often, supportive, warm,
caring, fun, stimulating. Henry, alone, looking at his reflection in the mirror
behind the bar, is simply and devastatingly alone, with none of the complications,
good and bad, a relationship with another person brings. The last three Dream
Songs, 2, 3 and 4, have been about sad, misplaced yearnings and pathetic
attempts to connect with women. That’s already over, and while I actually found
myself impatient for the last three days with the whole movement in this
unfolding drama, it actually comes and goes pretty quickly. He’s just alone.
The language comments on something else, also, Henry’s emasculation. Reduced
and faceless, he’s babified and marginalized, disempowered and rendered
meaningless. At odds wif de world & its god, and despite the invoking of
St. Stephen, there’s nothing spiritual about this god. The god in question is
the looming god of sexualized capital and power, the force that deforests and
rapes, that lays off en masse and removes mountaintops, that creates adjuncts
and 40-hour work weeks that starve, children chained to coal cars and textile
mills, and it is the force that will murder union organizers, that invents the
term “human resources”, and then pays CEOs hundreds of millions in benefits
packages. These poems are about humanizing the long unfolding catastrophe’s
aftermath, and they’re disturbing. They insist—or I’m insisting—that human-rendered
disasters have human consequences on human beings, and the poems intend to look
those consequences in the face. The thing that hurts? “It’s the thought they
thought they could do it.” It's a key line from the first poem.
On the plane, in the second
stanza, his vision of the Virgin descending from a cloud onto a mountaintop
sets the plane turbulently bucking—such things are not allowed. We are mostly all
Mr Heartbreak, the New Man. We are born into this state, into this crazy land. George
Carlin, in one of his most bitter comedy routines (all over the Internet), rails
against the power I’m speaking of and tells the audience, “It’s a big club—and you’re
not in it.” “The 1%” is a term we’re all familiar with, and we’re familiar with
the implications. Henry represents the 99%. The particular ramifications of
that status vary infinitely because we’re all infinitely unique. Life is never
simple, and the countermeasures, rewards, fulfillments are also real and have
their own power and they matter, but the consequences of the predations of
power in the end are of a familiar pattern, pushing on us anxiety,
powerlessness, and isolation that would drag us to a dead stop. In the mirror
behind the bar, asking our reflections, WTF?
There are three "Dream Songs" that I have read and studied more than any of the others. This is the first. In fact, if memory serves (and too frequently these days it does not), I wrote an explication of this poem as an undergraduate. I wish I could access a copy of that paper, but those were the days of typewriters and single copies, and if a copy still exists it is buried in a folder inside a box filled with dozens of folders filled with single copies of other typewritten papers. Other than verify a memory, I wish I could find a copy of that paper because I want to understand this poem and, apparently, there was a time when I thought I did. Reading this "Song" again, I immediately began wondering: "What the hell would I say about this poem today? It's so opaque to me right now." Though I don't know what I'd write today, or remember what I wrote years ago, I do know why I chose to explicate this poem: those last two lines:
ReplyDeletean image of the dead on the fingernail
of a newborn child.
When I was first introduced to Berryman and his "Dream Songs," I didn't know much about poetry and hadn't read many poems, but those two lines struck me then as being the best two lines I had ever read, or maybe would ever read. I still think they're pretty damn good, and I'm grateful for the chance to get reacquainted.
To me, it's a statement of futile hopelessness that things for the newborn would be different. Coming as it does at the end of that really incredible, compressed last stanza, where he's caught in the net and the brainfever bird did scales--an image of him being caught in power's plots and strategies, with the brainfever bird almost circling his head like cartoon tweety birds after a good bonk on the head, and then that invocation of Mr. Heartbreak, the New Man--all of us--come to farm a crazy land. Jeez, just watch the news! So, after all of that, the last lines, which imply that the newborn has no way out of this overbearing madness. I don't think it's necessarily so in life, but for sure the challenge of rising above the traps that have been laid--consumerism, credit scores, the expectation of servile acquiescence in our jobs, our politics, our churches--that can be very tough to overcome. You don't expect it of an innocent newborn. I could have written five times more about this one, but I think I should keep a lid on it. I do plan to unlimber when I get to #46 in February, among the greatest poems ever, I think. But #5 is one of the great Dream Songs.
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