#59 Henry's Meditation in the Kremlin

http://www.litera.co.uk/author/john_berryman/

It’s really interesting to read this one. Dread of Soviet Communism is now pretty much a thing of the past, though there is the ridiculous, tragic pantomime of it still operating in North Korea, and China has some kind of Communist governance in place, which at this point in history really only means that an oligarchical dictatorship is calling the shots there. To meditate on the Kremlin somewhere in the early 60s when this poem was written, the height of the Cold War, puts this poem in a stark historical context. B. never visited the Soviet Union, but to meditate on Communism and its symbol, the Kremlin, is plenty understandable, and it’s a relief for me from the previous section of The Dream Songs. János Kádár is mentioned in the poem, “for Christ knows / poor evil Kadar, cut, is back in power.” It’s easy enough to call János Kádár evil from B.’s American perspective, conventionally pro-Western here. Kádár had been courageous in the Hungarian anti-Nazi resistance during the war, in a country that historically aligns with Germany whenever trouble breaks out. He successfully navigated the deadly landscape of Communist politics after the war, though not without making enemies and likely being tortured in prison. But he got out and rose to power again when the Hungarian Revolution was crushed, and he stayed there. Hungary became known as “the best barracks in camp” under his leadership, which somewhat relaxed the kind of oppression East Germany and Czechoslovakia had to endure and raised the standard of living. Hungarians realize that while he was a Stalinist, he also seemed to be a solid leader, and under the circumstances tried to do well for his country. At the very least, not a total villain, which is remarkable enough. There is a monument right in front of the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest, which commemorates the firing-squad execution of a group of revolutionaries on that spot, and it proclaims flatly that Communism was a failure in every way imaginable. In a poll taken a few years ago, Hungarians still voted János Kádár as one of their most capable leaders ever, in recognition for what he managed to accomplish under that otherwise despised system.

This was all very fresh, as were the presence of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev in the Kremlin, where it seemed at the time the latter would be enshrined along with his predecessors. It didn’t quite work out that way, as the whole Soviet system rotted and collapsed some 25 or 30 years later.

My wife and I spent six months in Budapest in 90-91, and we got a feel for what that side of the Iron Curtain had been like through some of the lingering after-effects. I find this all interesting enough, and it motivated me to look into János Kádár more than might seem usual for anyone outside of a hopeless history geek. Budapest, when we first got there, reminded me in an unusual way of what an American city might have felt like 50 years before. The country seemed to be in a moment of stunned stasis when we arrived, and then it started changing. It was a different place by the time we left. I’ve been back twice recently, and it’s now a full-fledged modern European capital, and a truly great and beautiful city. We wanted to visit Russia, but were warned against it in no uncertain terms by the Russians we met there. While Hungary and Czechoslovakia were still and gathering themselves, Russia was in chaos, and it was a dangerous place for travelers. We did visit Prague—the giant red stars just taken down, a new coat of paint, gorgeous almost beyond comprehension. At that moment a flood tide of Westernism was clearly on its way, but it was still just a shallow overlay on top of a motionless, stunned country. That changed quickly too, but that was my impression. I haven’t been back since, but I hear the West took over in Prague—noisy and touristy.

The Kremlin’s St. Basil’s cathedral and its bells are world-renowned icons symbolic of one of the world’s great cultures. It’s easy to see from here, but we now know that the soul of Russia that the domes symbolize runs far deeper than the Soviet structures erected on top of it. But the structures of Communism, the figurative “bell, book & candle” (the Medieval rite of excommunication from the Church and from the possibility of salvation) had ascendency then. The “moujik”, the Russian peasantry, were forced to kneel & vote for it. You couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel from B.’s moment. Khrushchev would be enshrined forever, and the rites of Orthodox religion even would be co-opted to anoint the political system and force it into a perverse holiness. Such it was, all backed by phalanxes of rockets loaded with H-bombs, pointed straight at our heads.

#58

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3590

Self-absorbed again, although I like this one. “The splendour and the lose grew all the same.” This distance between lack of wellness on one hand, and fame on the other—one grows, the “splendour,” while at the same time, the “lose”, the alcohol, illness, shame, insecurity, also grow, so the distance between good and bad in the person stretch him toward opposite poles. The personal hell of not being whole, well, or fulfilled. The answer: “Sire, damp me down.” More comfortable as a loser, at least at this moment. Robert Lowell had just called him the greatest American poet, his fame was spreading overseas. The whole first collection of The Dream Songs hadn’t been put together yet (the first 77), but they were coming out all over in various literary journals and getting a lot of attention. But B. was still Henry deep down.

There is something here about ambition, lying, falsity. Freddie Prinze was a TV star from the 70s who ended his own life while his popularity on TV was at its peak. Obviously depression was a problem, and there were marital issues, and some genuine irregular behavior. I remember this incident, and a report I read about the suicide note he left, where he told everyone that he simply felt like a failure. His fame was false and he couldn’t stand the pressure of it. I remember Suzanne Somers, another TV star from the same time, saying that she felt so bad, because if he had just hung on for awhile, he would have grown into his fame and found out that he could handle it. It wouldn’t have stretched him so far.

The anxiety attendant to fame has never been a personal issue I’ve had to deal with. Not very likely I ever will, either. But it’s an interesting phenomenon that B. is touching on here. The image of something (not you) gets put out there, and the pressure to now become that thing that you’ve created, or more likely has been created for you, apparently gets pretty weird. Leonard Nimoy died today, a much more stable, grounded and centered personality than Freddie Prinze or John Berryman ever were, and he had to deal with it as well. His first autobiography was titled, I Am not Spock. He came to terms with it, though, and his second was titled I Am Spock. Inhabiting one’s fame and inhabiting one’s on-screen character are a bit different, but they’re both about the pressure of image. That’s what lying does as well: You put forth a face that is not yours. Some people are better at fame than others, and some, so I’ve heard, are lost behind it. The poet couldn’t become lost, because I don’t see how you can fake literature. You can fake verse and fiction, but I like to think there are too many sensitive and sophisticated readers ready to call you to task if you pose as an artist and are faking it. Eventually, you will fold. I don’t think B. faked it—he’s the real deal. I lost a bit of patience with what he did give, the shame, self-pity, anxiety, etc. But, it’s much, much better than a phony pose, so okay. I’m on board still. The poems veer away from this tack tomorrow anyway.

And by the way, if I ever become a household name myself, I’ll have more to say on the matter…

#57

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_57_In_a_state_of_chortle_sin_once_he_reflected_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

The Dream Songs are all written in a strict form. Three stanzas of six lines each. In each stanza, lines 1, 2 and 4, 5 have five stresses, and lines 3 and 6 have three stresses.  This is fairly consistent. The rhymes vary, but the basic scheme is ABCABC—almost never consistently followed. They can be full rhymes (need/treed), half rhymes or near rhymes (bed/seed), sight rhymes (bough/rough), or just assonant (mercy/worst). In the 2^nd stanza of #46, you get law/saw, shopkeepers/er, and vision/glasses—not a rhyme, but the words are linked through their meaning, which is clever.

I’ve been blown away by some of these poems. But I’m impatient with the poet this week, with his insecurities and addictions, the repetition of the same themes (erasure, anxiety, shame), the self absorption. So today I write a Dream Song of my own as a cleansing, so I can move on. It has been dawning on me this week that this is a much stranger project than I had understood going in. I’ve always done that—jump into something and then spontaneously deal with whatever unknown shows. Lewis and Clark had no idea what was waiting beyond the Mississippi—what they found were endless dry hills, endless expanses of featureless prairie they had to traverse, trudging forward through wind and dust and heat. But this kind of nightmare was studded with magnificent mountains and rivers, magnificent Indian cultures. So journeys are about wonder and tedium both.

Dream Song #1

The blue is melting. Piled the whispering snow,

crusted. K droved his car home, gassing
bodies of swamp-old trees—
and Texas wilts and California glows
a killer fiery orange. The deep floods pass
From memory. Does he see,

the Concordian, pond-side prescient dork?

Made the fulsome earth with hoe say “beans”—
my life mean and sneaking.
Tumbling as a landed pike in’s grave, his work
come to this. Start, say it means
what it seems: breaking

to quivering bits the round continents'

relentless turning ‘round their core—my love
a petroleumed pelican.
You had it, Henry—coalesced a limpid sense
out the pond’s pellucid deep. Thunk of
‘midst K’s remnant span.

KZ

#56

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_56_Hell_is_empty_O_that_has_come_to_pass_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Written in celebration of B.’s marriage to Kathleen Ann Donahue in September, 1961, who was beautiful, Irish, and 21 to his 47. He had met her in March, and he had actually checked himself out of the hospital to go on their first date. Kate was good for him for a long time in his life, and it was with her assistance that he was able to put the first volume of The Dream Songs together in the first place. I have to confess that I don’t understand why a young woman like that would find a hospitalized alcoholic more than twice her age that attractive, except that he was a professor and a poet, at the time of only modest repute, but not famous like he would be later. Oh well.

The “Alexandrian” refers to Origen of Alexandria, an early Christian theologian who argued that no one is so removed from God that he can never find his way back to salvation, not even the residents of Hell. A tinchel is a circle of hunters closing in on their quarry—kind of a terrifying image.

So, if Hell is empty, then the last devil in line has found his way out, back to salvation. The death of guilt. Life had been closing in, in the second stanza, and just before the tinchel closed in on the doomed, cloven-hoofed narrator, why—

—his father makes an appearance, watching his son and his new wife in a crystal ball. It’s quite an image, and probably it’s a moment in The Dream Songs where we can find a measure of peace and forgiveness. I think getting married to a beautiful woman can have that effect on one. It gets phrased in pretty grandiose terms, “What roar solved once the dilemma of the Ancient of Days, / what sigh borrowed his mercy?” I think the dilemma of the Ancient of Days (Is the holy holy because it is loved by God, or does He love it because it is holy?) is solved by a roar, and in the end the mercy is only borrowed.

The happiness here is real, but it seems there are qualifications buried in the images. 

[It took some research to puzzle something out of this one, on and off in spare moments all day. It wasn’t at all unpleasant. But I didn’t feel inspired by anything—his marriage, his image of his father, all that—and something is happening that I don’t really want, as odd as it may sound: I’m interested in the poet in a cool, distant sort of way, but I don’t want an emotional attachment, and I’m not remotely interested in an obsession. I’ve felt a touch of “icky, icky” the last couple days. Tomorrow, I’m going to write my own Dream Song in response to whatever awaits, and I’ll do it as an emotional purge. Then I’ll get happily on with things.]

#55

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3587

On a day like today, tasked to respond to Dream Song 55, it helps to remember this, from Mr. B. himself in DS 366: “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” And yeah, there’s a bit of terror at work in this one—not much comfort, though. Someone else (Stephen Akey) wrote that The Dream Songs are unique in their hilarity and despair, and he also claims that “The overall tenor of the book might be roughly stated as follows: Just because we’re buffoons, it doesn’t mean our lives aren’t tragic.” The Dream Songs’ wallowing in self-pity turn out to be one of their glories. Unlike Flannery O’Connor, in Akey’s estimation a pretty cruel and pitiless writer, who never indulged in self-pity even given the loneliness and the terrible disease that eventually did her in, B. wailed out loud. As to O’Connor: “What was wrong with this woman?” Sometimes self-pity is the appropriate response, stoicism be damned. Akey’s essay turns out to be comforting today.

There is an element of questioning in 55, wondering what the heck went wrong. The details of the interview are out of my reach—new job interview? after B. screaming at his landlord and (unforgivably) defecating on his front porch? It was that last part, especially, that likely got him fired, I’m thinking. This is conjecture. Allen Tate helped get him a job soon after at the U. of Minnesota, but perhaps there were those days between the disaster/humiliation and the academic rebirth, where you have to sit in an interview and try to put on a brave face. Hire me. Hire me! Affirm how worthwhile I am. Despair covers it, though I understand you’re supposed to rise to the occasion and take control and make it yours, yadda yadda. Not if you’ve got such a humiliation tugging at you. I sympathize.

Berryman claimed in an interview that DS 55 is similar to the graveyard scene in Joyce’s Ulysses: “The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.” None of this Lazarus business, in other words. The graveyard is full of worms and maggots, and that kind of thing is pretty final. Well, that fits. In the poem, “I feel my application     failing. It's growing dark, / some other sound is overcoming. His last words are: / ‘We betrayed me.’”

Who’s the “we” here? It’s that composite Henry/B. both, I think, screwed up royal this time. None of that Lazarus stuff here either. Self-pity looks appropriate, but there’s more as well—self-disgust. Sorrow. That age-old question, “What have I done?”

#54

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/dream_song_54_039no_visitors039_i_thumb_the_roller_to.html

Kobayashi Issa is recognized one of the four great Japanese haiku masters. B. refers to his account of the death of his father, Last Days of Issa’s Father, which recounts the poet’s father falling ill with a fever, and of the son’s intense emotional impressions of family conflict, everyday occurrences, and the decline and death of his father. It’s a classic in Japanese literature.

B. had been drinking heavily and writing the Dream Songs obsessively, the two activities linked for him. He wrote DS 54 from the hospital, having been admitted due to severe alcohol poisoning which very nearly killed him. The details are reflective of his stay, including the “nitid” feeling of sparkling or brightness brought on by the drugs the medical staff administered. He forced himself to slow down because the writing, connected absolutely with drinking, was getting to be too much to handle.

Obsessiveness and alcoholism, real things, still lead toward a reflection on Issa and B.’s father. Here are five winter haiku, in honor of Issa:

 

Winter Haiku

Crows raucous by day

Owl proclaims the trees at night
Forest’s pendulum.

            Tracks of hungry deer

            Broken crusts of icy snow
            Green a memory.
 
Black-capped chickadee
Scolding the snowy feeder
Hot in annoyance.

            Cold wind bites my ear

            Ear responds with heat and blood
            Challenging winter.
 
Points of sharp sunshine
In icicles remind me
How cold is the sun.

KZ

 

#53

 http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-53:-He-lay-in-the-middle-of-the-world,-and-twicht

Sparine is a drug once used to treat schizophrenia and as a tranquilizer, no longer available in the US except for veterinary use. Pelides is another name for Achilles, Greek warrior hero with a vulnerable heel. In The Iliad, he was one of the leaders of the siege of Troy. I think “Tiny Hardy” must refer to Thomas Hardy, one of my favorite writers, an early modernist who wrote of the “growing sense of the disparity between the enormous universe and tiny man.”

Scene from college days: Student drops coins in vending machine, presses buttons, his yellow bag of M&Ms gets hung up in the machine’s workings. He swears, swats the thing a couple times, shakes it, stalks away, out of luck, grumbling and humiliated. Two professors observed the whole scene. One remarks to the other, “Can you imagine what Achilles or Odysseus would have done in a situation like this?” I take comfort in that remark to this day whenever a vending machine rips me off. Achilles would have run a javelin through the glass front, put his foot on the dead thing as he pulled the spear out, and then passed out the spoils to his troops, and most importantly, he would not have had a moment’s hesitation and the thought that he had might have done something wrong would not for a flickering instant have crossed his mind.

This is not a world that privileges the warrior/hero mode of Achilles so directly, unless you count victories in how many billions of dollars you can amass, and then we’re full-go with our Greek warriors, except that most of us find the whole notion despicable because we’re not all on the same side any longer. For a Greek, the enemy was over there. For most of us now, he’s up there, unless we’ve bought the “over there” propaganda that turns us.

 Honorable Possum Henry, the antithesis of anything resembling a hero, except ironically as the alter-ego of a hero poet, prefers to stay home because the stimulation of a movie is enervating. Even the newspapers ask too much.

Thomas Hardy said that the response he received from his last novel, Jude the Obscure, was such that it cured him of the desire to ever write another novel. He wrote, in the preface to the second edition, “After these verdicts from the press its [Jude the Obscure’s] next misfortune was to be burned by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me.” In other words, it’s getting too dangerous sticking your head out. Achilles had the cultural prerogative to pretty much run a spear through anybody who crossed him. Try that today and there’s a whole system poised and eager to crush you. Our systems are stronger than our heroes, which convinced Hardy to keep quiet eventually. To his credit, he had his say.

Berryman strikes an interesting pose: Henry, the poet’s alter ego, crawls away, cowers, shrinks, diminishes to nearly nothing, and even dies a couple times through The Dream Songs, but it’s all a ruse. Through him the writer has his say, quite compelling and clear: The systems are brutish, punishing and inhuman all right, but by showing them for what they are, you gain a measure of power over them. The problem with reading the papers, I think B. is saying, is that they teach you the injustice at the same time they’re teaching you to shut up, because you learn that you can’t win. Once we see we’re papering our hovels with our own skin, we can stop it. Turns out that’s easier said than done.

#52 Silent Song

 http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_52_Silent_Song_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

This is the first poem of Book III. A record of a stay in the hospital and a turning point, a beginning. “The thing took hold” has such an ominous tone that I have no intention of exploring any notions of B.’s self-dramatization for a while. That’s unfair anyway, but with only second-hand access to the relentless sourcing of pain, isolation, etc. that the poet experienced, and that prompts so many of these poems, it can start feeling that way. It was the wellspring that never stopped flowing. As mere drinker, one can feel sated. Not so much for the poet who needed to do something with this stuff—bottle it and sell it I guess. What “the thing” is that takes hold in the poem, we’ll see. Here’s a poem playing off of that:

 

The Thing Taking Hold

Before it arrives, we’ll hide

In our locked basements
Booby-trapped doors
Set to keep intruders

At bay, or worse, against

The shots and booms, the hurling
Knives, cocked and spring-
Launched through thieves’ hearts.

We’ll chew our dried rations

Grow soft, pale fungi
In pots of dirty water
By the low battery lights

Hunt centipedes

For the yellow crunch
Between our remnant teeth
Gather chewy earthworms
 
Tell odd tales of sunshine
Bauble-bright birdsongs
Air so clear you could breathe
It cool, straight to your lungs.

Our children will laugh

At us and roll innocent
Eyes, not even caring
Amid the low blue hum

Of electric filters, the red

Of blood that still oozes
When our pale skin is cut
On the lids of old cans

That green is a color too

That you had smelled in forests
Fields of mown grass, and ponds.
And why should they believe?

Books with stories old as war—

Hunting parties, and loggers—
Turkeys—and fairy-bugs that blink—
Stories in crumbling books

And their grandpa’s crumbling

Memory, of the green world
He inhaled, and kept eating,
And drank like strong wine.

KZ

 

#51

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3583
 

Gosh. If the poet’s wounds are slow to heal, he asks that we “do not hold it, please, / for a putting of man down.” Sometimes man deserves it, but all right. I remember once, as a small child, getting bullied on the playground, crying, and an older girl tried to comfort me. I pushed her away, because she was the one in reach. (I try not to do things like that any longer.) She was a bit peeved. “I was just trying to help.” I like to think that I let her know I was sorry. (It’s possible I did, but probably not. Another item in our long, sad litany of regrets.) We coons, you know, being set against the Ol’ Marster and all, will strike out—including the poet who oddly uses his own name this time, which somehow raises the pathos level a bit further than usual as he asks for a break.

Death: Are you radioactive pal?

Henry: Pal, radioactive.
D: Does this resonate in a sad, geopolitical way with the terrifying state of the world you live in, pal?
H: Pal, it do.
D: Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?
H: Pal, I do.
D: Does you drink too much so’s to forget your troubles, pal? And mos’ important, do it do the job? Do it do it?
H: Pal, yes & for brief comfortin’ spells.
D: Did your gal leave you?
H: What do you think, pal?
D: I think she in the next county, still runnin’.
H: I think yo’ insight sharp.
D: Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?
H: Yes, pal.
D: Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?
H: It’s my face, for which I take full responsibility. The nose, least of my problems, which leads like a cart horse drab the progress down and sends as well smells of flowers, the remorseless seas, and the perfume of an infant’s scalp to my brain, which ignores them. My eyes, the windows to my soul, are blinkered with the shades pulled. My mouth, fumbling a few spoken words, and which will run at opportune or inopportune moments, depending. Trust my fingers dexterous with pencil should you wish to hear me speak.
D: Eventual, expect an accuse of drama, if you don’t stop it. For this now, Henry gets a pass. It’s a tough life for him too.

#50

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3582

Science fiction tropes were well established in the 50s and 60s, and this poem begins with them. The “anthrax-ray” is funny. Whether this scene arises from a dream or not isn’t clear, but it seems likely. The only complicating thing in the first half of the poem is that the speaker’s pencils are sharp. This might be a take on “the pen[-cil] is mightier than the sword”, or the pen is mightier than the anthrax-ray. I doubt the sharpened pencil functions as a weapon itself, which would be silly out at the edge of the galaxy. They’re a means of prosecuting the fight, though. Perhaps the pencils are for recording dreams? When a student in poetry workshops way back when, I used to keep a pen and notebook by my bed to record my dreams. I never got too much usable material from them, but it was interesting to wake up and see the notes recorded in half-sleep about dreams I had already forgotten.  Surrealist artists in all sorts of mediums draw on this realm of the imagination.

The admonishment of Mr. Bones’s conscience reminds Henry that there’s a green world right here in front of us, both the artistic renditions of it and the “greennesses” of ours, which are real enough. One could extrapolate: Dreams of an intergalactic sentry are symbolic of Henry’s disemplaced anxieties. Bring it back down to Earth, son, is what he’s told. The waters here are so full of living substance that they need some attending to. No “pleasing ladies” around to do any pleasing if the greennesses aren’t nurtured and the spring waters aren’t kept flowing.

So, do extended cultural anxieties, which emanate from the collective wounded psyches of everyone, cause us to turn from the green world, our home? Sure they do. And we’ll nuke it to smithereens too, or burn it up, if we think some other wounded psyche gets something we would like to be ours. But more likely this poem is just about the neglect that arises from depression.  Look—the battle may be waging all around, but when you’re shot in the belly, then you curl up and focus on your personal hurt. It’s understandable. Until that moment, we’re in the fight. The thing about Henry, as the voice tells him: “You is bad powers.” Not necessarily on the side of good and righteousness. So when it becomes clear you’re one of the bad guys, do you stop and repent? Rationalize? Or proceed in sneering acceptance of bad motives? Like—screw you, you’re the wrong color and I want your land, and when I get it I trust that fact will somehow justify my wanting it. If not, I’ll live with the hollowness of my plunder, but it’ll be my plunder, and by the way—screw you.

I’m riffing, extending thought-tendrils like an octopus. This poem would be an easy one to gloss over. In sum: Imagining a distant fight, Henry is admonished to look around, homeward. That’s enough, but Henry has some trouble with that kind of thing. His heart-gnawing is a subset of a broader problem Earth’s human species struggles with.

 

Out my window the sky is clear, bright blue, it’s about -10°F because the circumpolar jet stream is wobbling again, and the maple trees were running sap full bore last week, but now they’re surely frozen up again. No syrup likely again this year. Mid-February is when I typically go visit a conservatory, starved as I am for some green humidity, the smells of plants and earth, and a flower or two.

#49 Blind

 http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_49_Blind_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Henry has called himself or been called “Pussy-cat” before, so that’s him. And poor Pussy’s not in very good shape today, is he? I have a memory from college days of the morning after my 21^st birthday. The night before, a group of friends had been profligate with their wallets and took some kind of malicious glee in pouring me a wide variety of pretty serious drink. (This beer tastes funny—oh there’s two shots of whiskey in it. Huh. I’ve never had a martini before. My dad used to drink those. What’s the difference between Scotch, Irish, Canadian, Kentuckian—let’s find out! I have a snapshot memory of having climbed up the ladder of a fire-escape and someone helping me down. That kind of night.) Next morning, looking in the mirror, miserable hung-over, asking my reflection: Is this what you want? Fool. This is what it’s going to be? Poisoned, sick, an odd pale grayish-green color? Eyes like a cross section of smoked kielbasa and sauerkraut? Head a red and white Cote d’Ivoire bongo of pain? The answer was a fairly sick nope—puke—ugh—then back to bed to sleep it off. Day wasted. I suppose there’s nothing extraordinary or all that shameful about an isolated occasion like that. I give that guy a pass because he was young and stupid, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that as long as you don’t kill yourself or anybody else, and if you eventually outgrow it. I hate the feeling of hang-over (“waking like death”) so badly that I’ve only ever had a few of those mornings of ill, alcohol-triggered soul searching. And I’m not so enamored of the drunk itself that it’s even much of a temptation. I don’t mean to brag. Whoever my demons might be, alcohol isn’t a member of that contingent. But that memory helps with this poem, a description of the severe alcoholic in action.

It reminds me how blasé we can be in health. Something (we do know what it was) drove the man, and that thing was bad enough that the long “sleeps & sleeps & sleeps” are worth the waking like death. Sheesh. Or maybe that’s just what got it all going, and the simple fact of addiction took over from there. This matters from a broad point of view, but when you’re looking in that mirror, you’re just sick. “Wastethrift” and “hoardy-squander” both describe the overall tension between health/success and addiction. This reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s “mixing memory with desire” in “The Waste Land” actually—forward or backwards? Which is it? Neither and both. Whatever that mix amounts to, it’s not whole nor unified, and not of the moment. A metaphor for existential dis-ease. Hoardy-squander is like that. B. isn’t going for a major existential pronouncement à la Eliot, just describing his hard and sickening predicament. But we’re a society of individuals. If we were all misanthropic hermits, then we’d be a society of misanthropic hermits. If we’re all wounded alcoholics, then that’s who “we” are. We contribute our condition, stir it in the mix, and it colors the world. Broad, sweeping, existential whether we like it or not. That’s why we read autobiographies and confessional poets. This poem isn’t in a happy place, but the lessons can hit home and teach something to even the healthiest happy-head if he only pays attention. The world in all its outrageous complexity.

#48

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3579

I have to admit that the notion of “an eating” as Christianity’s most sacred ritual has always seemed bizarre to me, even kind of weird and creepy. As a person raised Catholic, I’ve certainly done it often enough. The point, it would seem to me, is that the taking in of the physical bread is a symbol of our oneness with all of creation, as we physically take the food—both physical substance, and spiritual—of creation and integrate it into our bodies and our spirits. I’m interested these days in how spirit, intelligence, emotion and body all articulate in the person, and this is one way onto that avenue of meditation. As for actual transubstantiation…not going there for now. I’m too invested in metaphor, which is plenty actual enough for me.

If one is concerned with “the death of the death of love”—a thought that Henry here has trouble admitting into his head, being too bitter and full of the death of love on its own—then that metaphoric double death springs you right back into life and love. Henry’s not paying attention though, a lost cause, too bitterly gnawing at his own heart, a metaphoric self-eating.  If you eat yourself do you disappear, or do you transmogrify to pure excrement? (We’ll go with disappear…that’s what Henry has been doing in other ways all along.)While eating is an odd enough concept if you think too hard about it, seems as good a way as any to integrate body and spirit. Eat up! The organelles of the eukaryotic cell are an extended consequence of failed digestion, the merging of bodies more than just spiritual metaphor. Anyway, here’s a poem, about the sacred and physical rite of eating:

 

Eating Food

Like sex, it’s physical.

Cheese, the sweet cow’s milk altered
By the absorbing and crapping
Of fats sugars proteins
By all those bacteria in their
Endless infinitudes, dividing
And dying in a mute organic
Micro-ecstasy, making that good milk
Stink like the feet of angels
The French say, who know cheese
And who make sex
And food their best cultural pillars
Because the dirty French
(Which is what we tight-assed
Metaphorical Puritans think of them—
Admit it) take their lives earthy
Resplendent of powerful smells.
Napoleon wrote Josephine:
“Home soon. Don’t bathe.”
So, I can stand a little grit on my lettuce,
And I don’t wash the horseshit
Off mushrooms because
I’m not offended by a morsel
Or two of horseshit in the eggs
Of my good omelet.
Grape juice grows yeasty and burbling
Ruined and soured to dryness
Until we euphemize it
To elegance in ringing crystal.
And yes, I’ve made sausage,
Saw the pig’s throat
Cut, heard his ebbing squeals
(Pigs know exactly what’s happening)
Smelled the whole round
Full stink of his fresh blood,
Then ground his meat and fat, mixed
With marjoram and paprika
Salt and thyme, and ate
His liver for breakfast.
I didn’t gag. The bread
Alongside that wholesome partaking
Of pig flesh and wine
Was the body of wheat
Wheat the body of land
Land into my body and hers
Our food the sex of the Earth
Rich with the dark fragrances
Of a consensual communion.

KZ

#47 April Fool’s Day, or, St Mary of Egypt

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_47_April_Fools_Day_or_St_Mary_of_Egypt_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

A helpful online source, to which I have occasionally turned, offers this critical information, without which this poem would be less lucid: “Catholic Saint who after a life of prostitution attempted to enter a church, was barred by a religious force, repented, allowed in, then retired to the desert and lived a solitary life for 47 years. Greek Church members celebrate her with a feast April 1.”

An interesting follow up to DS 46. I don’t think there should be any doubts left about what Mr. B. thinks of organized religion. The onetime prostitute, “fondled by many,” hesitates on the brink of the church, shrinks away in shame and repentance, and lives the life of a hermit in the desert for the next 47 years. Hard to say what her experience as a prostitute was, but knowing what some guys now and then are/were capable of, I suspect falling prone on the endless, hot, wind-whistling blank solitude of the Egyptian desert might have been a welcome relief. Holiness and sainthood were fringe benefits. She has my sympathy. The point of this poem though, “And forty-seven years with our caps on, / whom God has not visited.” The outcast is the blessed one, not the church-goers with their pious caps on the whole time, who recognize themselves as bereft.

It’s fundamental to Judeo-Christian thinking, with Jesus himself the prime example of the blessed outcast. (I’m assuming that crucifixion makes of one the ultimate social outcast. And I don’t at all mean to make a joke of it.)

I’m still a bit hung-over from yesterday’s essay, and not in much of a mood for sympathy with philistines, wealthy orthodox piousness, and various contemporary incarnations of the vacant political suit. So this poem is perfect.

#46

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-46

[Long post here. I’ve always planned on not holding back on Dream Song #46—which in my opinion is among the truly great poems ever written in English. If I’m guilty of self-indulgence, so be it this time. But I hope you’ll settle in, if you’re game.]

 I’m reading this morning that Phillip Levine died yesterday, a much loved and well-respected poet. It’s a sad loss, but he lived a good long life and made a brilliant contribution through his art and his teaching. Isn’t that what we hope for? He attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and was a student of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who were both teaching there at the time, before the first of Lowell’s series of devastating breakdowns and Berryman’s getting fired for some kind of loud and drunken public incident that embarrassed the university to the extent they couldn’t tolerate him any longer. In an interview circulating on YouTube, Levine recalls an incident from B.’s class. B. held up a copy of The New York Times. It was during the McCarthy hearings in the 50s, a moment of ascendency of the darkest, meanest, most atavistic and sordid tendencies lurking in the depths of the American psyche. B. remarked, holding up the newspaper, “You see these fools? These thieves and fools and liars? Ten years from now they will be replaced by other thieves and fools and liars. Public crooks.” And then he picked up a book and read John Keats’s poem, “To Autumn”, saying “if this language survives a thousand years, this poem will be as beautiful as it is at this moment.”

Poetry still thrives because enough people agree with Berryman at some level, that in the long run, art and language are immeasurably more significant than public thieves and crooks. Levine was affected by Berryman’s pronouncement, and it affected his work and his life every moment after. But there is still a tension between the long-term significance of art and the momentary influence of legalized public criminals, who can do tremendous damage in their short stays of ascendancy and even destroy the legacy of art and learning. Think of Cromwell’s Roundheads wrecking the priceless stained glass of England’s cathedrals, ancient temples in the Middle East dynamited by some dystopian theocratic regime or another. Book banning and book burnings are attempts at this same kind of thing. Some insufferable blockhead politician in Texas hit the news lately because he tried to push through legislation that would force the teaching of the bible in conjunction with the Founding Fathers in all American history classes. Here in Kentucky, the Creationist Museum had a model of a dinosaur—with a saddle on it. I’m also thinking of Scott Walker at the moment, governor of Wisconsin, but he is just one example of a whole bevy of contemporary public thieves and liars—he cuts taxes on the wealthy and on corporations in his state, which causes severe budget shortfalls, then he uses this manufactured budgetary crisis to justify slashing the budget of the state’s public universities. It is an outright attempt to destroy what one of our great public universities stands for, and enrich and further empower his handlers in the same move. It is thievery and destruction in Wisconsin, on a massive scale. These examples are all variations on the same theme. The list of further examples is depressingly long.

Why this little rant? DS 46 takes on this problem of the legacy of planetary public crime. This was the poem that got me started, and a whole constellation of political, religious and existential understanding came to me from it in a flash. I’ve only had a handful of these moments—you only ever get a few—but they’re crucial ones in anyone’s life of the mind. One came in front of a painting by Gericault in the Louvre, “The Charging Chasseur”, where I had this flash of understanding of the relationship between warfare and propaganda: It was something about the exciting great dappled fighting horse on the ten-foot canvas, the splendid uniform, and especially the leopard-skin saddle blanket in the midst of atrocious carnage—which is deliberately kept off the canvas. Another moment came listening for the first time to Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, specifically the song “Trouble Child.” For those who know the song, it’s somber and intense and gorgeous, and there’s this haunting moment, “breaking like the waves at Malibu.” As her voice extended along that last syllable of “Malibuuuuu”, I had this uncanny sensation of a door opening, and I walked through it into a whole new world of artistry, beauty, and complex, subtle sensation that I had had no conception of, and I never looked back. One other I’ll mention: I was watching a PBS program of American Indian dance on some pleasant, uneventful Saturday afternoon. Most of the dances were contemporary, quite lovely and compelling, but there was this one dance by historical re-enactors—the wild turkey dance. It was interesting enough, the one-one-two-two dance steps to the rhythmic drumming, the loud, uninhibited wild singing, the costumes in all natural-materials, skins, feathers and fibers (no vivid chemical dyes on these), and then this moment, which had been building: The dancers crouched low to the stage, heads up, vibrating in place with tiny, rapid steps of their feet, and they fanned the great round tails that had been there all along but innocuous, and they became turkeys! Even over the TV screen it was an astonishing sight, and for me it was an instantaneous breakthrough of two understandings simultaneously, both of American Indian culture for one, taking me way past the dopey stereotypes we’re generally handed, and of the communicative potential of dance as an art form for another. I’ll never forget any of these.

DS 46 begins with a lively description of that moment when intolerable darkness gains ascendency: “I am, outside.” The comma there is full of meaning, establishing the persona’s existence beyond its mere placement outdoors. “Incredible panic” is the situation he finds himself in, and while it’s a metaphor, it’s also not. “The worse anyone feels the worse treated he is.” Consider the deliberate contemporary shredding of our social safety nets. Why? Because we can’t afford them. Why not? Tax cuts, proposed through a deliberate lie as a way to grow the economy, when all evidence has ever shown is that this flows wealth upward. The people without much wealth are stolen from, and if they suffer, too bad. The ones empowered at the top of the heap are insulated, except that it’s to the point now where they actually seem to take a positive malicious glee in inflicting even more suffering. “Fools elect fools”? Do I even have to elaborate?

 The poem then takes a remarkable turn: “A harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath, ‘Christ!’” It’s a common enough epithet, “Christ!”, especially enough in response to the mayhem just described, but in the poem it triggers a pronouncement, essentially on the veiling tendencies that organized religion can have. That word affects the vision of shopkeepers who were fitted with glasses. “Enjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.” The key word is “appearance.” We know from the first stanza that the appearance of love & law is only a rosy coating, metaphorically triggered by the word “Christ.” There is no love & law; there is only incredible panic. So what does that word mean here? I don’t believe it’s a reference to genuine spirituality. It’s a reference to the role that church can play in the political gamesmanship that triggers all the mayhem. Have any doubts? I doubt it, but if you do? This is a reference to the kinds of movements we still see unfolding all over the globe: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, is a vicious group of terrorists sanctifying their murders through an appeal to Islam. Boco Haram in Nigeria is no less vicious, if not quite as widespread. Well, but these aren’t “Christ”, so they don’t count. We see the same movements here. Lynchings and Jim Crow were subject to attempts at sanctification through spurious appeals to Christian ideology. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America makes mention of the God-ordained position of the white race as dominant over the subjugated black race. There is a linkage right now among ultra-conservative radicals grabbing power all over the US which promotes both a plutocratic takeover of American democracy with a fundamentalist Christian agenda. It’s not “Christian” in any sense of my understanding of the word, but it nevertheless claims the mantle with a genuine ferocity. Whether one believes this is indeed the case, or is enraged on the other hand by such an accusation, Berryman had no doubts on that score, and I am politically and theoretically inclined to sympathy with him on that. I was taken to the Creationist Museum once, and I gained some understanding of how fundamentalism bends Christian scripture to its cultural and political ends, consequently destroying scripture as it does so. Fundamentalism kills scripture and preserves it in a jar of formaldehyde, then worships the jar’s contents in simple idolatry. The point is that the goodness of Christian belief is co-opted, used for cover over much darker, more banal, and probably evil intentions—if one considers uninhibited greed or racial discrimination evil, which I do.

“Millennia whift & waft”—this whole business is not of a moment, and it isn’t necessarily American; it is a universal phenomenon in human culture. “Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw”—what did they see, once the sanctifying lie of rose-colored fundamentalist glasses were taken from their eyes?: “Man has undertaken the top job of all, / son fin.” Well. This is big.

When I first read “son fin,” I made a mistake in interpreting it. It’s French and translates to “his end” or “his ending.” It sounds in French exactly like sans fin, which would mean “without end,” and that was how I momentarily took this: Man had undertaken the top job of all without end, which might have a somewhat positive spin. Whatever the “top job” might mean (since it’s not characterized in my mistaken reading), we are engaged in an endless process of struggle and growth. Magnificent! Look, I have a naïve and optimistic streak, especially when I was younger, and that’s what I wanted to see. But that’s not what the poem says. The top job of all is man’s own destruction. In B.’s moment, fresh off the nightmare of two massive world wars, a collapsed economy in the 30s, and with the Cold War hanging over everyone with its tremendous arsenals of nuclear missiles on a hair trigger ready to incinerate the planet, this was an enduring anxiety: son fin. His own destruction. If the Cold War in our moment has subsided, and the nuclear arsenal doesn’t feel as ready to rock as it was 50+ years ago, we have other nightmarish eventualities that engage our fears just as terribly. More wars, wars, wars, terrorism and theocratic dictatorships, the threat of the rise of corporate Fascism in the West, and hanging over all of it, extreme climate change, which dwarfs all of the other nightmares.

“Good luck” has that tone of harrumphing snark, and sets up that brilliant rhyme, but first, “I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness. / Followed other deaths.” Whatever is coming has died—the narrator has walked at its funeral as well as the funeral of tenderness, and that thing, “like the memory of a lovely fuck.” That lovely fuck is only a memory, this real enough but still now only vaporous and insubstantial memory. What was it? “Do, ut des.” This is what has also died out in the world. It’s a Latin phrase, and translates to “I give so that you can give.” The meaning is pretty complex. For one thing, it strikes me as what sex is ideally about, a reciprocal giving that simultaneously engenders reciprocal receiving, and the more one partner is able to give, the more he or she gets out of it. Beyond that, the phrase was meant to go up to the Roman gods accompanying a sacrifice—I burn this valuable goat so that you will send rain, something like that. So the overtones are religious as well, and this resonates with the religious associations from earlier in the poem. The reciprocal giving—even the true Christion doctrine of “love your neighbor” has died, giving way to…it’s not mentioned by name, only implied, and I think strongly implied: That thing that replaces reciprocal giving is greed. Here is the evil doctrine that replaces the grace that has passed away. It’s the reason behind the social ills, the political malfeasance, the class inequalities, and the fear all around. The hatred in even thinking that someone would get something you desire, and that desire, in the absence of the grace of Do, ut des, grows and grows and grows.

This is what I see in the poem, and while I believe the world is a less reduced, more complex phenomenon that what this reading of the poem allows for—Do, ut des lives on is what I’m saying—Do, ut des is also not ascendant. It doesn’t thrive at the top. It didn’t then, and does not now. Greed pumps fossil fuels at the cost of the planet’s atmosphere, greed squanders people and devours land, greed destroys equity and justice, the greedy sociopaths of the world struggle bitterly for total wealth and the attendant benefit of total control. Do, ut des can be learned in a thriving university, which is precisely why someone like a Scott Walker, the Koch brothers’ walking, talking meat puppet, installed in a powerful political appointment, elected by fools who bought the bullshit that came out of his moving lips, will try to destroy it.

It angers me. But I do mean this, this is not the whole story. There is meaningful counterforce against this timeless movement. The critical first step in fighting it is to see it. The poem still teaches me this. It’s why I stick with teaching.

This poem is important to me as well because I didn’t understand at first. It was just a poem, gobbledygook, but I was a kid. I bored in and stuck with it, and it opened up.  “Deacon Blues” and a few other instances aside, this was the first time I read a poem. If you dare the struggle to pass through that door, you don’t go back.

#45

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_45_He_stared_at_ruin_Ruin_stared_straight_back_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

This poem is quite accessible as The Dream Songs go. “He thought they was old friends.” Don’t most of us think we’re friends with some personification of ruin? Tests or trials ignominiously flunked, maybe a weekend in jail for something ridiculous (the schmuck’s rite of passage), that moment before the final abject surrender to nausea and vomiting when your feverish imagination extrapolates with great dramatic flair toward one of well-being’s myriad disasters. Or things worse like losing a job, divorce, death of a loved one. We are—or, let’s be honest, I am—kind of emotional sometimes, and that can cast a gruesome gray light on the normal fender benders caused by the potholes life strews our roads with. This poem has its own list of B.’s particular stand-out moments, including nights in India drunk into utter oblivion, and possibly an electro-shock treatment? Ouch.

Turns out they were all imposters. Here’s the real deal, now. Ruin of a character not yet encountered. “Henry nodded, un-.” It’s another ending, like is so in striking for DS 14, signifying the narrator’s diminishment and disappearance. In this case, on the negative prefix from which nothing follows.

That’s a difference between him and me. In my deepest potholes—and trust me, most of my friends have no idea—the swirl of emotions never admitted effacement. There were all sorts of things—rage (self-directed and outwardly directed), sadness, confusion, shame, and almost always, a renewed determination. But always the sense that this is the bottom, and now it’s time to make it better. Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” was a teenage theme song, and perhaps the very first instance in my life where I took on a verse lyric and opened it up. I didn’t get it at first. My first real experience with poetry. That song comes out of a bottomed-out moment where the speaker decides “I’ll be what I want to be.” It’s a lovely song, and it taught me a lot when I was younger. I hope it doesn’t sound too silly, but I experienced several serious Deacon Blues moments.

B. faces something very different, that I sympathize with, but can only take his word for. He could not overcome that one thing that preordained his ruin. It’s appalling and very sad. It drove the many alcoholic and emotional disasters that kept him a twisted and embarrassed wreck. It also drove his great accomplishments, his brilliance as a teacher, and the literary prizes and fame, that have me still talking about him now. I had an inkling when this project started, but I wasn’t really paying that close attention to what I should have known was coming: The record of what facing real ruin means. I’m convinced it wasn’t just a pose, not mere narcissistic drama. But John Berryman will always, I’m afraid, remain something other to me, alien in fact.

Incipient ruin can be turned to creativity, and amazing things can come of it. But I’m also learning that there are other sources. The great jazz artists didn’t need heroin after all, but they learned that too late. I’ve already written more poems in the past six weeks than I have in the previous three years, and I’ve tapped into the artistic energy that B.’s desperation engendered to do it. I am grateful for that. It’s not stealing. Every poem is a way of transforming my trivial discomforts and frustrations, in engagement with an echo of the ruinous ones of Berryman, into something affirming. But I am not tending toward diminishment. Quite the opposite. But what I didn’t realize, what I was too shallow to imagine, is that a deep relationship would be in the process of forming, with the poet’s art and probably with his ghost. Whether I wanted it or not, and whether I still want it or not, it’s happening. And I’m clear about this: It’s not stealing. It’s an offering. I can see clearly how the source of these poems, from the life that wrought them, tends unendingly toward suicide. That will never be me, but maybe I can take that whole process, in my inconsequential way, and transform it just a little through whatever grace it or something else in my life has offered to me.

#44

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/dream_song_44_tell_it_to_the_forest_fire_tell_it_to_the_moon.html

All about sex and death this one, the big topics. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. How does one not think of flowers and death at a time like this?

 

Flowers

Florist shops smell like funerals,

that cloying vegetative sweet-
ness bred to show that loves and lives
bloom in brief, rainy seasons.

That’s fine. My love is like a rose

that spreads for a time in succulent heat
a slow July 4^th bloom and sizzle
that fizzles to ashes on low wind.

That perfect spreading rose there?

Dianthus? Carnations white as plaster,
mums so red they’re embarrassing?
They’ll stop drinking soon enough.

Vase water a film of algae green,

petals on the tablecloth like underthings
left alone on the bedroom floor.
Bouquets flung on the compost heap.

I’m not young. I still keep

dry roses around the house—
roses from my father’s casket,
the wedding boutonniere I swore

would remind me always what we said

we’d guard, and have. That’s endurance
pressed and dried. Fresh flowers
smell like funerals. We still pick more.

That rosy freshness pink like her cheeks

is lovely, but I’m grateful for our chance
to die away. We’re born cut,
drying in a vase of living water.

KZ

#43

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_43_Oyez_oyez_The_Man_Who_Did_Not_Deliver_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

How do you forgive someone whom you think has abandoned you? It’s a bitter struggle and it never stops. You’re eleven years old, a moment on the threshold of changes coming in your life, and you’re young and it’s proper and right to expect the guidance that will help you make the transition from boy to man. But Bang! is what happens? Bang! right outside your window? Once that gets set, there’s no growing back. I’m sympathetic to Mr. B. today, yesterday’s sadness transforming to this today—caught and frozen in an emotional snapshot, that one instantaneous flash-illuminated crescendo in the up and down, give and take, back and forth—to an unassailable indictment. The Crown finds him guilty, “The Man Who Did Not Deliver” who did not deliver. I can see how it’s an endless goad and nauseous push, the thing the boy tries to write away, to make something of it, express it for a moment so it can hiss out before the pressure builds again. Writing is to vomit. Then there’s all that drinking to help numb it away for long hours, which is what works best, with the payment due still worth the blankness, and sex to soothe it for a time in build-up and then obscure it beautifully for infinite seconds in another kind of flash. There are the accolades you strive for, where people tell you, You: You’ve done it. You’ve risen. You’ve overcome. Have a prize! You are a Person of Tremendous Value—after all. It’s a lie, of course, you know that, because you wouldn’t have been so ruthlessly abandoned otherwise, so you drink and sex and write, in desperation, for those brief stretches of oblivion that appear, in the critical moments, to be worth all the corrosive cost. Any consequence is worth oblivion.

I’m pissed off enough about something else today that I get it. At least in part. That the Crown would “split him” open, physically—I’m not that far, but I acknowledge the hot and bitter place from which such hard pronouncement is conferred: Behold the awful wage of treason. Something tremendous and implacable and bigger, sterner, and more impassive than you makes a decision, makes a “tough choice” and decrees that your horror is much, much less than its towering judgment.

And that is the evil that arises from an institution.

In the heart of a human being, such stuff ascends to its fulfillment for a moment and subsides. In a poet’s heart, it gets its moment too and then subsides as well, back into sorrow and decency. When the artist fixes it, then it can ring for centuries, pure and perfect and isolated in a timeless righteous fury. “I must sting.” Of course you must! It’s justified in that ringing instant, and here we are, readers, insinuated. We let it go too. But the institution, the soulless social machine of the government, the church, the Crown, the administration, management…in their soullessness they study how to hold such stuff constant, raising feeling to sustained blasphemy, hold it, and act. The Crown has spoken—it’s a metaphor in the poem, providing for the timelessness of an emotion marble-sculpted. The institutionalization of the same thing suspends in blasphemy. We sting in a terrorized sympathy.

Q: And what of the “grave ground-rhythm” of a forgotten “makar” (a Scottish bard) that reverberates? That reminds us of the human ebbing and flowing?

A: So what?

#42

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/dream_song_42_o_journeyer_deaf_in_the_mould_insane.html

A poem addressed to the poet’s father, who of course ended his own life when B. was just a boy. It is an expression of grief, with other complex emotional flavors, but not hot, not angry.

This has me thinking about my father. I guess that’s not surprising. In response, here is something I wrote on the occasion of what would have been my father’s 80^th birthday, August 10, 2011. He had died just over 2 months earlier. I first posted it on the Ohio Game Fisherman’s Forum, for some reason, and got a nice response from the online sport fishermen of southern Ohio, who value a humid summer evening spent waist deep in a river with the fishes in the same way I do and like to tell stories about it. It’s an acquired taste I suppose. A decent group of people. I think I also put this up on Facebook back when. I’ve resurrected it and I’ll post it here this evening, because it arose out of a similar tone of grief—a grief that doesn’t paralyze like grief so often can, but that rather asks to be given a form.

The Monster Catfish I Saw Last Night

After dinner and fine wine with Mom last night, and some tearful reminiscences, instead of going straight home I spontaneously stopped and bought a bag of Doritos, a six-pack of Miller High Life, and a tub of chicken livers and went to the spot where Dad and I always used to meet. The moon was shining bright and clear, and it felt kind of lonely, but I baited up. Lots of bumps and bites right away, but I just ended up feeding chunks of liver to the catfish (like normal). Finally felt a good tug, set the hook, and realized I was caught on a big rock—no give at all. Then that “rock” started swimming straight toward me. And kept coming. I reeled in line as fast as I could, all slack, and right at the bank I caught up with it. Got one more strong tug, then this big black moony-mouthed noggin stuck up out of the water, tail splashing what looked in the moonlight like about four feet away from the head, and spit the chicken liver right back in my eye. Then it turned around for good measure and splashed me three times with its tail and was gone. It left me shaking and scared—I wade in that river all the time!!! Not anymore, not with monsters like that thing lurking down there. Not so much as a nibble for the next hour. After a beer (just one—I was alone and driving), and half the bag of Doritos, I decided it was time for bed, and I still had a 40-minute drive to get home. I put my gear away, folded up my chair, and the last thing I did was empty the tub of livers into the water as a parting gift to whatever other loathsome giant might be skulking down there. Another splash and commotion (I’m telling you—a lot of water moved) and that same big head stuck up out the water in the moonlight, chicken livers spilling out of the corner of its wide ugly mouth, and it belched something sounded like a cross between a blue heron and a bullfrog. A most unmusical croak. I said, “You’re welcome,” and I headed into the woods in the dark, owls hooting on both sides of the valley.

Last night would have been Dad’s 80th birthday. He passed away May 31st of this year. I loved my dad and I miss him. He loved good wine and good food, traveling, making things with wood, and hunting and fishing with his sons more than anything.

#41

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-41:-If-we-sang-in-the-wood-(and-Death-is-a-German-expert)

"Varshava" is Warsaw, Poland, and this Dream Song comes from an article B. read about three Jewish men who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto.

No attempt to link Henry’s anxieties with the Jews of Warsaw, I don’t believe. It’s simply a dramatization in verse, and a powerful one.

Most of the online versions of this poem have the error “pslam” for “psalm”. At first I took it for a simple mistake; then when I found it repeated in several places, I thought it must be deliberate, a verbal technique called a portmanteau, the mash-up of two words to create a hybrid meaning (e.g. “stagflation”, “Jazzercise”, “beefalo”). “Pslam” would be a clever portmanteau of “psalm” and “slam”, signifying a kind of raising of violence and cruelty into a complex, subtle but diabolical art form, which the Nazis tried to do. But no, it’s a mistake. “Psalm” is the intended word.

Psalms are the biblical prayer songs. This comes after the linking of human sounds—singing—with animals. Cats mew, horses scream, men sing. The dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust is expressed really well, in a compressed way. These animals have emotions, one of them being fright, and of course they may voice them, but ultimately the exquisite emotional nuances that human song is capable of are reduced to a comparison with those animal noises. Mere noises, mere fright. A horse may scream when it’s shot, but it’s just a horse. Jews may sing and worship and make art as human beings in response to genocide, but in the eyes of an expert German killer, it’s all just animal noise. To follow that use of “psalm” as a verb with “Man palms his ears and moans”—“man”, the world, trying to block the sound of the singing and hide from it, from the suffering, and consequently suffering the more as he hides. I think it’s a powerful moment, brilliant and disturbing.

The details that follow are descriptions of the escape, including simple cries of anguish: “ai!”. “Death was a German / home-country”: The Polish home-country being made German, i.e. invaded by the Germans, equates to death. For a Polish Jew, this was more than a poetic metaphor.

#40

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_40_Im_scared_a_lonely_Never_see_my_son_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

The bluesiest Dream Song yet. Sometimes I avoid grappling with these poems, occasionally because I’m not up to it—they’re too obscure or opaque, often because they trigger something quickly and I follow that instead. That has been part of the point from the beginning. No shirking today. This one brings up something that needs to be addressed, the role that race, blues (a Southern, African-American form), and minstrelsy play in this whole long poem. It has seemed strange to me from the beginning that B. would ever adopt a blackface persona, but he does it. The risk of it is something I could never imagine taking. Minstrel shows are this profound, and to my sensibilities, weird American phenomenon that so many seem to have forgotten, but in the 1800s, pre- and post-Civil War, they were incredibly influential and popular. Though I almost never see minstrel references in popular culture any more, I remember the echoes from when I was a kid. I remember brief snippets of people imitating Al Jolsen, who came a full generation before me. His singing of “Mammy,” in full blackface, was an iconic moment in American entertainment—I believe it was from the film, The Jazz Singer. Jolsen himself was two full generations removed from the heyday of the minstrel, but obviously it had had a deep impact on the American psyche. I remember Saturday morning cartoons still being shown on TV in the early 60s that featured flat-out racist caricatures that are almost unbelievable in retrospect, and these caricatures had their roots in minstrelsy. One of my mom’s favorite songs was “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”, which she sang to us when we were like 4 and 5. It’s from the Disney film, Song of the South, a film which Disney has pretty much buried because of the racist content (my mom just liked how happy it was). I’m fairly certain the film isn’t unavailable on CD or any other format. If it is available, you would have to work hard to find it. At the very least, it’s certainly not something the Disney Corporation publicizes any more like its other classic films, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Mary Poppins, etc.

I took a course in grad school titled “Modern Southern Fiction,” and to lay the groundwork for our discussion of the writers at the course’s focus, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty, et al., we read some antebellum Southern work. It is almost impossible to believe that stuff. It’s pretty much lost to history because it is so bad. Because of its content, it wouldn’t be appropriate material for something like an undergraduate class. It was appropriate in a Ph.D.-level seminar, I think. It was marked by a couple things. One was the cult of sentimental death. Mark Twain absolutely skewers that in Huckleberry Finn. Emmeline Grangerford was the deceased daughter of the family who takes Huck in. Her poem about Stephen Dowling Bots is Twain’s hilarious spoof of the style: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174686. Huck eventually dismisses her: “I reckon with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.” The other thing all over this early work, and that I found pretty appalling, was the trope of the happy slave, the Mammy or the Uncle Tom, who was also ruthlessly derided. There were other stereotypes as well. What I mainly took from these tropes was a vision of how deeply sick the society of the antebellum South was. The only antebellum white Southern writer I can think of whose work has survived in a serious way is Edgar Allan Poe, because he dove into the fusting cauldron of white Southern consciousness and pulled out something honest. Macabre, but honest. The rest of it—no. Too much sickly sugar-goo and bullshit. I mention this because it is very much related to the minstrel show’s treatment of the African American presence, with the same stereotypes of happy, musical, dancing black slaves who are also relentlessly treated to a contemptuous condescension. Song of the South draws on these same conventions. I’ve read that Walt Disney knew in 1946 that his film would be controversial because of the racist content, but he was working in a moment where that simply didn’t matter. Things changed, however, and the film hasn’t survived, and of course the minstrel show hasn’t survived either.

 So what’s with Berryman’s drawing on all of this? In reference to this particular poem, minstrelsy is relevant, but only partly. The minstrel plays in blackface to ridicule being black and at the same time to sugar-coat the dominant white culture’s contemptuous perception of blackness. It’s always from the white point of view. When B. invokes minstrelsy directly, he turns it over, ironically identifying with the black object of minstrelsy’s ridicule, even though he’s still the white guy in blackface. He turns it on himself in layers of irony. Here, B. doesn’t appear to have ridicule as the object. He never does—actually, quite the opposite. But by adopting a blues persona, like he seems to be doing, he is still playing a blackface part. Blues is a statement that comes straight out of African American experience. Unlike the minstrel show which mimics African American experience from a white point of view, blues is an expression of African American experience that arises honestly out of African American experience. At the end of DS 40 B. states, apparently (?), that he’s “free, black & forty-one.” Well, he ain’t black. Unless I’m really missing something, it looks like an attempt to identify with the underdog position of African Americans in broader American society, and as an outsider himself—misfit, dork, wounded little boy—it can serve to underscore his role as the maladjusted, struggling loner, crying out for solace. And if that’s really him, then he’s got nothing to lose. I think that’s the intent. It risks, and steps over the line as far as I’m concerned, a kind of cultural appropriation that we’ve hopefully gotten to the bottom of. It’s not cool any longer for white people to wear a feathered headdress and whoop-whoop like an Indian—the Washington Redskins are still doing that, but probably not for much longer. I tend to think B. crosses the same line here. I totally grant that his appropriation isn’t intended to be derogatory; I believe he means it as celebration and as a way of proposing the relevance of African American experience to his personal situation. But times have changed. Are we as racist a society as ever? I guess so, but to our credit, we have become aware now of the pitfalls of this kind of appropriation and its consequent devaluing of the experience of the people being taken from. Just like reading the worst of that godawful antebellum Southern literature whose main purpose is to justify slavery, there is a value to it from a certain perspective. But I’m not convinced that this aspect of The Dream Songs holds up well except as historical perspective on how our culture is evolving.

#39

#39

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3571

The third of three tributes to Robert Frost on the occasion of his death in January, 1963.

I wrestled with this poem today. (I’m afraid that maybe it won. Some days are better than others.) It’s like the poem from yesterday, following Robert Frost’s occasional approach of making symbolic use of nature. Anyway, it’s an attempt at an answer to Frost’s great sonnet, “Design.” This is about a very small incident that I witnessed in Bloomington in 1988. It was a summer of absolute drought, among the worst ever in Indiana. I had planted a packet of seeds that spring meant to attract butterflies to the garden and managed to keep the flowers barely alive with nightly hose watering. But the drought had devastated the butterfly populations that year. Not a single one came to the garden all summer. Finally, in September, I saw the first and only butterfly that would make its way to the flower bed, a small cabbage white, an invasive from Europe normally common in the Midwest now as houseflies.

Cabbage White

Into burgeoning life, a fluttering popcorn

Against the pink and red of cosmos grown
Despite this desiccated year, flown
From nowhere now to whiten and adorn
A nearly dry and sterile summer yard.
What steered the white delighted insect
Toward the flower? The purple lure of erect
And glowing cosmos might not be so hard
 
To figure on a droughty summer lawn,
Despite the mantis waiting there, who frees
Her folded arms. Do mantis arms belie
A sinister design? I know we’re drawn
To fear the tragic end one never sees.
But only if we think we’ll never die.
 
KZ

#38

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_38_The_Russian_grin_bellows_his_condolence_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

The names in the 2^nd & 3^rd lines refer to a messy love affair—secretary/mistress (?) to whom Frost proposed while she was still married, her husband, Frost’s wife, and a friend. My take is simply to acknowledge that love and life can be messy—sometimes really messy. He who is heading for the pantheon of the greats, to duke it out with Horace, et al., also lived a life with all its anxiety, frustration and squalor down here. That’s still always the foundation of the fame industry. But there needs to be more, which Henry puzzles over in the 2^nd stanza. It’ll come with pain and mystery, and best to leave it alone. Chasing fame on its own is certainly possible, and some get it, but that’s a hollow pursuit in the end. Pursue the mystery with integrity instead, and leave that other stuff alone. As for the rest of us: Just listen.

Berryman was ambitious, I’ll say that for him. Aiming for The Pantheon. He was a mess too.

Here’s a poem that came this morning from looking at the weedy urban woods I see out the window of my study:

Invasives

English ivy colonizes the oaks

That bear an alien green canopy
In the snow and chill of February.
Thickets of honeysuckle
Crowd their trunks and shade-stomp
Their sprouting acorns. Garlic mustard
Poisons the soil and yellows
The delicate trilliums,
Wise native beauties
Older than the trees above them.
We don’t approve this invasion
The forest seems to say.
You’ll never belong here.
Riches of light and soil
Are for those with the right
To take them, the English
Ivy responds. As it seems
You don’t approve, we suggest
You might talk to the poison ivy
Over there, but don’t touch.
They’re agile and irascible vines,
Who root with a toxic power,
And we especially admire them
In the fall, when they don
Their magnificent red coats.

KZ

#37 Three around the Old Gentleman

 http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_37_Three_around_the_Old_Gentleman_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

(37, 38, and 39 are tributes to Robert Frost)

In style and tone and subject matter, Frost has always been easy to identify with, but of course I’m not alone. He’s one of the best-loved American poets. He is popularly imagined as having had an irascible temperament, but that doesn’t matter anymore. As B. says, “off stage with all but kindness, now.” Obviously, this calls for a poem in remembrance of Frost.

 No attempt at imitation, just a poem that I’m thinking should be one with kindness in it.

I’ve had horses on my mind today after reading back over Frost and his horse giving its harness bells a shake. I spent a year working with mentally and physically disabled people and horses at a therapeutic riding academy.  I came to feel that the horses understood their charges better than we ever give them credit for, and that the animals gave willingly of a patient kindness. Not a new poem, one I wrote a couple years ago, with horses, patience, and kindness in it:

Past Horses

Back across expanses of chemical grass

       steaming iron lids
horses amble to the wooden gate
speak in round black eyes
say whatever lies
ahead for you, boy

with you these heavy mouths

       thick lips clapping
wet mouthfuls of grass
the hoofs we lift for you to pick.

They stand easy by the gate

       raising me to their backs
roll away, canter home
stand and clap their lips
on my shirt and tug
       keeping me still beneath
their tall legs
the hot heavy necks
       tails switching flies.

Wood in the barn

       smelling of manure and dusty coats.
The hay was sweet.
The horses are gone
past the divide
where ghost ponies
crowd the receding stalls and goad
us like reluctant horses
who look over our withers
for a fear to kick
see vapors, gallop

to what lay ahead

a yellow fire, a book
this yellow cat who curls
against my thigh
       catching my eye
       smacking her lips
       granting with timeless love of animals
that she may be stroked.
 
KZ