#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