#90 Op. posth. no. 13

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3623

The poet Randall Jarrell died in 1965, struck by an auto. The incident was determined to be an accident, but a previous suicide attempt, some issues with mental health, and side effects of some powerful prescription psychiatric drugs made most friends close to him assume it was a suicide, and while the general consensus seems to be that it was, it’s not clear. More important is that he died, no matter the reason, and DS 90 is a eulogy to Jarrell, who was B.’s friend. It comes in a moment when Henry is also dead, with Jarrell in the afterworld, considering whether or not to leave the living world permanently behind. The “panic” is probably a reference to the mental state of Jarrell before the drugs settled him down a bit, but maybe not settled down to the end he would have preferred.

Jarrell had enlisted in the US Army Air Corps during the war, and during his time serving as a pilot trainer, and afterwards, he wrote a number of poems about WWII. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is a short poem anthologized in every Intro. to Literature textbook ever published, because it makes such a powerful, shocking statement:

            From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

            And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

That’s what war is.

I had an interesting talk with my friend, Jennifer, today, about Berryman. Yesterday I sort of sidestepped addressing DS 89 directly because the images triggered a poetic response instead, and that felt like a more effective approach for me at the moment. A number of people have remarked in person and online, though, about the images in that one and what they say about how Berryman views women. I told another friend, Judit, that the whole poem reminded me in an odd way of those idiotic game shows where fifteen women compete to be the bride of some millionaire. Who’s gonna be the lucky girl?!!!! In this case, what lucky girl gets to seduce Henry from the confines of his coffin? I’ll write more about this when the next opportunity arises, but it doesn’t sit well. Same with the race stuff, which I have dealt with (and also stepped around when I wasn’t comfortable or didn’t feel up to it). But when it comes to warfare and geopolitical power politics, Berryman and I, we’re a lot more in sync.

 It wasn’t always like that, only because as a kid, I was a—well, not a dumbass about that kind of thing particularly (though I was an inexcusable dumbass about a lot of other things), but just young and romantic. I’ve always loved toys that fly: kites, gliders, parachutes, model rockets, those totally, totally cool Cox gas-powered models that zoom around the operator in circles, controlled by a pair of strings. My family moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1969, when I was already building model airplanes in much of my spare time at night (if I wasn’t reading books—I read constantly). Probably my brain was more than a little addled from glue, paint fumes, and model airplane dope. I was already an airplane buff, a plane-obsessed kid. I was 10. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is located in Dayton, and in 1969 there was a squadron of B-52s based there. I have this vivid-as-yesterday memory of looking up one afternoon just after we moved in and seeing this great B-52 bomber flying in a low, banking circle around our new house, like they did all the time, and completely blowing my stack. Most of the B-52s based out of Dayton were painted a high-altitude silver and white, but this one had the Vietnam, night-raid camouflage scheme, black on the bottom and sides, green, brown and black-green on the top. It was flying low, in a wide turn, with the sun behind me so I could see the paint scheme. Oh my goodness, was that ever the coolest thing I had EVER seen. Airplane obsession stayed with me for a long time. When I grew old enough to even imagine this, I occasionally hitchhiked across town to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Pat, which is one of the truly great airplane museums in the whole world. No Navy planes, of course, but if the Air Force or the Army Air Corps flew it, an example is on display there, as well as most of the planes flown by allies and enemies. It is a spectacular museum if you’re into that kind of thing, and even if you’re not, you walk out thinking to yourself, man, that’s a spectacular museum. I grew up, went to college, took literature courses, and ran into “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—which planted a seed. It sprouted sometime not long after, when I was still in college, home for the weekend. I went to the Air Force Museum, as familiar and comfortable a place as my own bedroom by then, to be honest, and found myself standing in front of an RAF Spitfire, an airplane famous for helping fight off the German Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. It’s such a famous airplane that I can’t imagine that many people haven’t at least heard of a Spitfire—and it’s also a beautiful machine, with aggressive, elegant lines. It’s gorgeous like a wasp is gorgeous: Impressive, dangerous, don’t mess with it. It stings. Then it just hit me that a Spitfire was designed to kill people. That’s what it was for. Many thousands of people have died by the guns of Spitfires. On one level, of course, I knew this, but I’m talking about an emotional breakthrough. These airplanes are not romantic. I had to have a breakthrough in maturity, and I had to have lived enough life to understand at least a little what life means in order to understand what a sick thing a Spitfire is. (In its defense, obviously, the Brits, Americans and Russians had to win that war. Our P-51 Mustang or P-38 Lightning are just as famous, just as elegant, and just as deadly—and just as necessary. But the whole concept of a fighter plane is still sick. Blame Hitler and his Messerschmitts.) That was a moment for me when something moved, not only about the coolness of warplanes, but about war in general. Propaganda, macho posturing, Patriotism and all manner of hawkish horseshit too often linger as infections in the minds of young men from when they were boys. I remember being roused, at age 7 or 8, about 1966, by commercials for “The New Action Army” with stirring martial music, marching soldiers, and a really catchy theme song. The “action”, of course, was war in Vietnam. It’s hard for me to even believe.

So, we grow up, and we change our beliefs, sometimes by confronting the passionate nonsense bequeathed to us by posters, airshows, and TV commercials. Randall Jarrell, with this one small poem he left ringing through the canon of our literary culture, helped me take a step toward a saner adulthood. If Berryman grieved his loss, then I can extend a full empathy on that and grieve with him.

#89 Op. posth. no. 12

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-89:-Op.-posth.-no.-12
 

“O she must startle like a fallen gown,”—nice line. Startling. It’s always and always will be an arresting image, at least for the likes of a Henry, always a moment of thrill, fleeting maybe, familiar, sure, but thrilling, and of course that’s the point in this line of the poem. Sex and desire will finally rouse Henry from his coffin. Here is a poem about living with desire and satisfaction:

I Will Remember

Thankfully, that I baked bread,
That I had resolved that mixing,
Kneading, the plump rising of dough’s
Yeasty community, breathing the warm
Fragrance of browning loaves,

Like incense through a cathedral

That reminds hers and his and our senses
That like fragrance, spirit saturates creation,

Would enrich the rhythms of my life

And join me

                      to the women of Ur
Who slapped and folded
Their coarse brown loaves,
The famed boulangers of Lyons,
The unshaven miners of California
Who found tart richness in flour
And fat that communities of germs soured
And plumped,

                        and when the crust

Of my loaf resolved firm and hot,
And I tore it open, smelling
The steam curling from the warmth
Of bread,

                startling as that moment, again,

When my love lets fall her gown,
Or rich as when that bright spring hyacinth
Releases its lavender perfume
And I step off the porch
Patting my wallet, checking my watch,
Keys and briefcase in order,
And I stop and raise my face
To the red stamens on the maples
The morning sky blue, its blueness
Permeating the morning like
The fragrance of smoke through a church
Like the smell of bread baking
Through the kitchen,

I will look back and say, I ate.

 

KZ

#88 Op. posth. no. 11

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12825

“Bhain” is Robert Bhain Campbell, a poet and friend of B.’s when he was younger. Campbell died in 1940, age 29, of cancer, his life and promising career cut off early. William Butler Yeats, and Dylan Thomas, of course, are famous poets. Whether Campbell had the illustrious future the other two attained awaiting for him can’t be known, but Berryman was a fan of his work and so was James Dickey; they both felt he was underrated. The point here is that he’s with Henry in the afterworld, who here is not simply speaking and moldering from his pine box, but out exploring and meeting the other denizens of the Underworld as one might expect. The three poets mentioned all died in different ways, but all their deaths were marked by physical decay. Campbell by the ravages of a fast-moving cancer, Yeats by old age, and Dylan Thomas was an irrecoverable alcoholic who died in New York in 1953 at age 39. Alcohol poisoning was a contributing factor to his demise, but he was ill to begin with. These are the “violent dead”, the violence being done to the body by illness, age and abuse. B. was a kindred spirit: alcoholic, famous poet, and of course, undergoing a kind of decay of his own through Henry’s being dead for the time being. They’re all a clan, Henry claims. No women, I notice. B. alludes to Sylvia Plath’s work once earlier; maybe she could be one of the guys? Her decay was in the form of mental illness, so maybe she rounds out the group nicely. But probably B. was only looking at people who looked like him. In the end, maybe it’s ironic, he’s grouped with Plath and Ann Sexton in the literary canon—the great suicide confessionals—not with his friends and heroes.

I read somewhere once that when Ann Sexton heard that Sylvia Plath had ended her own life, instead of being saddened, shocked, something like that, her response was, Damn. I’ve been scooped, figuring now that when her turn came it would pale, look derivative, seem like a copycat move, some lame appeal for post-life attention. This all has me thinking more than I have been about suicide and what it means. I’m aware of what depression and mental illness can trigger, and in cases like that, suicide is a tragic symptom of a mental illness. My cousin, who is trained in counseling and social work, has told me several times how dangerous clinical depression for men in their twenties can be. It’s so for young women as well, but men, according to her, can be quite decisive in acting on their suicidal impulses. I had a student in a class some years ago who started floundering, eventually disappeared, and then the news came around not long after of what had happened to her. It hit me hard, and for what it’s worth, it taught me to be more proactive in my response to students who look to be struggling with depression. I had to examine if there was something I might have done differently. I concluded there was, and I’m sorry. In Berryman’s case, the depression was deep and irrecoverable, stemming as it did from his father’s suicide and the resultant psychological shock he never was able to overcome. You just get the idea that he was determined to make something happen, make something of his life before this all caught up with him. And then it did. The videos of B.’s interviews and the readings recorded near the end of his life are startling because of the contrast between his younger, stronger, more confident self, and the place to which he had arrived, which seems so played out. There is something quite disturbing about it. He was only two years older than I am now when he died, but in spirit he was much, much older, having expressed what he had to express, made the proper friends, and won the awards that established his reputation, and he just seems finished. Me, I still haven’t gotten started. If Ann Sexton really entertained the notion of self-destruction as a career move, then I couldn’t understand that and I wouldn’t have much sympathy for it. Much more likely is that such attitudes in her were attendant to other more conventional suicidal impulses. I don’t mean to sound flip about it. A number of other poets of the time drank themselves to death or struggled with dangerous depression. What is it with that? Nearly 7% of Americans are clinically depressed, so the numbers are there. Maybe we just notice once it has happened and are twisted enough to celebrate suicide as a gesture by the artist rather than the something else it really is. I have some doubt about the overall good mental health of American society at large, so a misapprehension of the struggles of depressed poets would fit squarely into the diseased patter of American life. Maybe that’s not fair. Sylvia Plath asphyxiated herself in an oven, and that’s part of her image and her legacy, but her novel, The Bell Jar. is about her struggle against mental illness; it’s hardly a glorification of it. It’s a novel that many people read and learn from, and there is nothing about that that is prurient or stupid. I think B. struggled against his severe depression as well, though as I’ve remarked before, he had enough self-awareness to realize it would overcome him one day. His imaginative foray into the Underworld was an exploration of the way out of the impasse his depression had forced him into. His art was following from his life and mental state, drawing off of it. But if life had thrown him into an unfair and cruel position, he could take his art—based off of that position in life—and turn it, even with the idea that turning the art would also turn his life. The tail wagging the dog. I believe we’ll see him working toward understanding and forgiveness, of both his father and of the cosmos, the impersonal vastness of which can seem so unfeeling. If that’s the case, we’ll see, and whether or not it worked, we’ll see about that as well. For now, the foray into the strange life-after-life will be drawing to a close. Like Orpheus, the great musician, he’ll re-emerge, though the Eurydice he means to go rescue is the boy he was at 11, killed at the same time his father killed himself. Like Eurydice, the boy doesn’t make it out either. It was a Hell of a journey, though.

#87 Op. posth. no. 10

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12050

Saw this one coming a mile off. The “Op. posth.” Dream Songs have been fun and delightfully (more or less) ridiculous (more or less) on one hand, and there was the set-up of a very good one, a serious poem, I thought. But their novelty has run its course, decayed, you might say, and it’s time to get this thing moving again. Not much longer. It’ll come. I declare a day off from Henry today, from puzzling poetry, and especially from that creepy voice emanating in dreamlike paradox from a moldering corpse in a coffin six feet under the muffling Earth. Henry is making his way back.

In the meantime, life for me goes on in fairly good form. There was a hint of spring in the air last week, but last night got below 20°F and we had a fire going. Probably the last one of the season. Fires bring a spark of extra life to the house; it’s such a wonderful and strange phenomenon. When I’m finally dead, and sure that it’s time to say so-long, I’ll miss food and wine, fire, books and friendly people, cats and horses, rivers with fish, and the smell of trees and rain the most. I met somebody last summer who has developed a long, detailed and unambiguous belief in an afterlife and frequent reincarnation, complete with gatherings of spirits who line up and yell at her. So maybe you never have to say permanent good bye, but I’m an entrenched agnostic on that. If she says so. Whatever. In the meantime, just in case we only get one shot at it, it’s time to buy my fishing license, and I want to make sure the cabernets in my rack are decent ones, and opening day for the Reds is right around the corner. Oh, and the bluebells are shooting up. They don’t just sprout, get established and them mosey around to a delicate flower or two, no, these babies start blooming underground, so when they hit the air it’s a crowd of opening buds, petals to the wind ASAP. You have to admire that kind of enthusiasm in a plant.

#86 Op. posth. no. 9

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_86_Op_posth_no_9_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

This one makes me roll my eyes a bit. But the rhymes are perfect, so it’s a poem all right. The rhymes are crisp. Only “lord” and “record” aren’t perfect, but they’ll do.

“we judged him when we did not know / and we did judge him wrong”. I’ve dwelt enough on the maladjusted nebbish persona, but of course it’s a consistent motif. Here it’s a bit more complicated than just a clever exercise in run-of-the-mill self-pity, because much of what Henry is being “tried” for happened after his death. So he’s not guilty by reason of death. Other people are the causes. He’s just lying there quietly in his box, meat with a voice. It’s kind of funny, actually, but remember: It’s all a dream! But in the end maybe that’s just an excuse for run-of-the-mill self-pity anyway. The wound behind all this is real enough, and tragic enough, that the poet gets a pass.

I’ve never been called for jury duty, and the idea of studying law or becoming a lawyer always made me break out in a cold sweat. Nothing could possibly be further from my talents and interests, unless maybe it’s a Washington lobbyist for the coal industry, male pole-dancer, or Weepsy the Melancholy Birthday Clown. Actually, there’s a lot now that I think about it. But I hate regulations, and rules only matter in the breaking, and quit telling me what to do anyway. Who do you think you are?

Henry will emerge from his coffin eventually, likely none the worse for wear, though having learned some sort of important lesson.

Here’s what I really think: Even for a Pulitzer Prize winner, some days are better than others. Same goes for me. Excellent rhymes though.

#85 Op. posth. no. 8

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-85:-Op.-posth.-no.-8

Geez, Henry is down in his grave just—rotting. It’s quite extraordinary, and funny. Of course, it’s all a dream. I remember reading John Updike’s poem, “Ode to Rot,” when it came out in The Atlantic Monthly in 1985 when I was a literature undergrad, thinking that, yes, we absolutely do need more poetry about biological processes. This was a moment that drew literature and biology together for me, and I’ve kept the two close. I probably wasn’t counting on “Ode to Excrement,” but sure, I’m good with that, and given that one, you just know there has to be an “Ode on Urination.” The “Ode to Masturbation” reminds me that pretty much anything goes in art these days. We’re bodies too, and that means excreting, masturbating and eventually rotting get their moment’s in art’s spotlight. I have to confess that “Ode on Periods” pushes me a bit past my comfort zone, so I’ll abandon this avenue of discourse and head back toward the Earth and the dirt where I’m more at ease.

 

Gardening

There are more creatures

In a handful of soil
Than all the humans who have ever lived.
Here’s a Ceasar, that one’s a Shakespeare
Harriet Tubman and Beyoncé
Pantheons of saints and infamy
In the grit under your fingernails.

They live with you, in you

On the ground of your hands
Ground in the cuts on the skin
Of your knees, gritty
On the lettuce in your salad
That doesn’t wash away.

And why wash it away?

Mycobacterium vaccae
Teems over carrot roots
Pulsates in crowds in the eyes
Of your potatoes—
Swims in your blood.

Sends cascades of choline

Through the labyrinth
Of your microchemistry,
Through your muscles,
The fat you wish would subside
From your waist and thighs
Cell by cell by cell.
Washing your brain

In suds of seratonin.

Ah—seratonin:

            Your garden is a lovely place

            Reflects the sun’s didactic face
            Rears your work in mounds of dirt
            Turns to food without a hurt
            Taters carrots lima beans
            Varied, tasty salad greens
            All the food you care to eat
            Every growing greeny treat!

Food the legacy of dirt,

Bacteria’s artistry,
Sustenance of the sun,
Brotherhood’s ancient fullness,
Kin of the crowded soil.

KZ

#84 Op. posth. no. 7

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3616

Reading this poem, I’m oddly reminded of George C. Scott’s famous opening soliloquy in Patton, which is adapted from the famous speech given to his troops by General Patton himself: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Fair enough. How do you work that out? Scott as Patton again: “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads on our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.” I have looked this speech up on several occasions, not for inspiration, but to remind myself of what other philosophies circulate out there beyond my cozy house/family/yard and the Catholic liberal arts college where I teach, which has had a small measure of painful skullduggery pus-tulating on its figurative behind, as do most institutions, but on balance is fairly nice, and service-oriented, and doing its best to live up to some lofty, non-violent ideals.

This poem has a political sucker punch lurking in it. The first stanza, about the lobster, is all set up to maintain the discussion of physicality. The poem from yesterday (DS 83) ended with the word “Plop!” and this one begins with “Plop, plop.” Obviously, they’re not separated, a reminder that this is one long poem in 385 parts, not really 385 separate poems. DS 83 was about physicality, as have been all of these “Op. posth.” Dream Songs. The lobster as food continues this motif. The first stanza is uncomplicated except for the substitution of “dislike” for what should be “unlike”, reminding us that whatever is happening in the mind/spirit of a lobster as it gets its first whiff of the lemon-scented steam roiling upward out of the pot of its boiling destiny, it’s probably not happy. Neutral at best if you assume there’s not much happening in the psychology of a lobster beyond simple stimulus/response and the unconscious nervous-system minutia of lobsterly body maintenance. But nevertheless, whenever any living thing is reduced to mere body—exactly what happens when you apprehend it as food—the thing is going to be outraged. This same move is repeated in the second stanza with the punning substitution of “slave” for “sleeve.” This struck me as gratuitous and inexcusable on first reading, but I’ve backed off of that judgement. I may not like it, but I get exactly what B. is up to, and it works. A slave has value on account of his or her ability to do physical work, and that includes even the skilled craftsmanship of a cabinetmaker (see my poem in response to DS 60), the interpersonal intimacy of a handmaid, whatever. A slave’s value as human being, with all the moral rights we should assume come automatically with that status, is denied. This is an outrage, but of course it was pervasive. There’s nothing unusual in this world about an outrage. So what does Henry’s friend suggest was up his “slave”? A lesson? “O no no no”. No lesson. Just a light grieving over the loss of his body, and the recognition that “bodies are relishy.” His is decaying, or “was” a body, and the loss of relish—the relish of other bodies as food as a pleasure, as well as the relish of being in one’s body as we eat, have sex, live—is something to lightly grieve over.

The raising of “Political Economy” is totally puzzling, and drops out of the clear blue sky, except that it sets us up perfectly. There is the brief return, and lull, “leaving me here?”—in other words, decaying in a coffin underground—and then the whammo line, which I think is pretty darned effective: “The military establishments perpetuate themselves forever.” It’s partly a statement of simple fact, it’s quite likely a reference to Eisenhower’s warning upon leaving office against the military-industrial complex, and of course the war in Vietnam was now in full swing. But its impact most arises out of its contextual placement. We’ve been dealing, in sometimes creepy, sometimes humorous ways with thoughts of the body and loss of the body, a yearning over the presence and pleasures of the body, and I think this line has been gathering momentum from the beginning of the “Op. posth.” section, and it was meant to. It all comes to remind us that war is a lot of things—patriotism, various stirring and/or violent emotions, the extension of failed politics, assertions of power—but in the end it’s what Patton reminded us of: We will use the biological oils of the enemy’s living guts to grease the treads of our tanks. Unfortunately, I fully acknowledge that it was entirely appropriate for General George S. Patton to address his troops thusly and remind them that in the end, this is what they were in France for. Here’s another quote from that speech: “When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend’s face, you'll know what to do.” Exactly. Regarding Vietnam: Screw the Marxist Dialectic, the ideals of Democratic Capitalism. The Domino Theory be damned. We went to Vietnam to turn our enemy’s faces into a bunch of goo. Period. What do you think of that?, he’s asking. The poem ends with a reminder: “Have a bite, for a sign.” Eat, and in doing so, remember what you are and how it is you stay here. Alive. Maybe show it some respect?

Of course the meditation on life and the body, the voice from the grave, has to be tied up with the unasked-for obsession with the suicide of the poet’s father. But that doesn’t mean it’s also not a powerful statement against the war in Vietnam. It’s fully that as well. I’m starting to think that when Berryman gets humorous, look out. Humor looks to be a weapon, a tool, not an end in itself, and he’s pretty good at swinging it. These poems are serious, and despite the tragic or goofball mess of the poet’s life which they draw from, the statements coming through in the art can be powerful, devastating. I admire that.

#83 Op. posth. no. 6

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3615

Hey, just because you’re dead and moldering in the grave doesn’t mean you can’t have a sense of humor about it! Henry is remembering some of the disadvantages of that body he has more or less dispensed with for the moment, specifically, a boil on his posterior the pain of which rendered said posterior a locus of distraction and discomfort. Ah, right: Pain. That’s also a body thing, isn’t it? A boil on your behind can be a bit of an issue because what a writer does is sit on his ass and plunk away at typewriter keys. A writer’s butt is more important to a writer than one might think, and it needs to be maintained in proper working order. Properly oiled perhaps—although on second thought, it might be best to let that image subside. This is all a bit reductive, anyway, as it ignores the “troubles & wonders” that arise from the typewriter’s secret curse, but it still all starts with a good solid butt, and without that, trouble and wonder haven’t a foundation to sit on.

But, it’s more than physicality, it’s also posture. Can’t write standing up, sitting is great for writing as long as your ass is healthy, and to extrapolate, lying down in a coffin should be fantastic. Oh the things he could tell! If it wasn’t for that little detail of the muffling six feet of dirt betwixt him, coffin-bound, and a potential audience. Don’t take this too seriously.

 For some reason, I ran into a set of illustrated instructions on the Internet once explaining how to escape from a coffin should you ever find yourself awake in the dark, healthy, and buried alive. They assure us it can be done. Screaming, as we know from DS 83, won’t accomplish anything. I read the instructions carefully and concluded that I’m too tall and not limber enough. A leopard could manage it, I think. I often wonder if it’s possible to will yourself peacefully dead should that ever become necessary, but I suspect not. 

I got stuck in Buckner’s Cave once, in Southern Indiana, which is the closest I’ve come to this predicament. I didn’t like it. It was a narrow vertical passageway that corkscrewed, and you had to sort of squirm, twist and butt-walk your way up through it. I made it up without too much trouble. You emerge through a tiny hole at the bottom of this great conical funnel. Caves offer all sorts of fantastical topographic experiences like this, which is why some people like them, and I don’t. We explored for an hour in the cavern up top—people had sculpted an amazing little dollhouse town out of the clay at the back of the cavern. That was cool, but I also dreaded knowing that the only way back out was the way we came in. No choice, down I went, I had to, like a monstrous roach getting flushed down the drain. I got stuck, of course, and I don’t mean held up for a sec, I mean friggin’ stuck. Did I mention I didn’t like it? Finally, after some quiet screaming, a few sincere and fervent prayers, and tightly constrained contortions you wouldn’t think possible from a man who’s 6’6”, the back pocket of my jeans tore off and I slid on down and through. I haven’t been back to that spot since. The crawl in and out was tough but kind of cool—about a hundred yards, the ceiling between two and three feet overhead, and lots of bats flying through the low space, whooshing past your ears. Rolf, the friend I was with, went back a year later. He’s as wide as me, but not as tall, so he makes his way through the funnel challenge fairly well. He ran into three people up there, two guys and a girl. The guys, as one would expect, were covered in yellow clay and mud, which is totally standard, but the girl was spotless, and that bizarre fact alone made the encounter extraordinarily creepy. One of the guys asked Rolf, “You want some heroin?” He said no and slid back down the funnel fairly quickly.

#82 Op. posth. no. 5

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-82:-Op.-posth.-no.-5

I’m not sure if “good nature is over” has a double meaning or not, but I see something. The whole poem has a pissy, irascible, even bitter tone, so there’s that. But “good nature” can also mean something like the embeddedness in nature, that some of the other poems preceding refer to, with the potential for pleasure and meaning that come from being of nature and in nature by virtue of a body, which of course now is lost or over, or at least falling apart. One interesting thing: Henry looks to be speaking not from the Great Beyond, the timeless realm of spiritual eternity, etc., but from his actual grave! So, maybe not fully dead? “Do not do” is obviously a reference to Plath’s great poem to her father. “Perché” is likely the Italian, for “why” or “what for,” spoken at the end by henry’s Death-chorus-conscience.

Henry’s not in a good mood today. Regarding religion: “We was had.” Regarding fathers: “Do not do.” Regarding the accolades in response to his art: “Maskt as honors, insults like behaving missiles homes.” They didn’t fool me, in other words. So we’re bitter in the grave? I suppose I’m sympathetic.

I think and write a lot about what has been lost. We live in times of such rapid change, and despite the advances that supposedly drive such movement, change ensures that something will be lost. Lost is a sense of cultural and community continuity, and a sense of a place in nature. Also probably lost is a sense of the inevitability of fate, awareness of the narrowness and limits of one’s world, so that’s to the good. I look back on the life of flowing creeks, abandoned farm buildings, pastorality in the countryside, and trees and trees and trees as the markers of my childhood. But I remember as well that I also played a lot on bulldozers and excavators and the trenches and holes and mounds of dirt they dug up. We were too close to expanding cities. The abandoned buildings that so fired my boyhood imagination were abandoned because their usefulness at their locations had decayed before they were quite physically gone. I played in that brief space. But at 10 and 12, there is no sense of overarching cause. An abandoned log cabin simply is and simply should be, and when I played there, it and I were timeless. When they finally succumbed, it was tragic, a travesty, and I make no apologies for that even now. I played in Kentucky in a deserted village, built in the late 1860s by a community of newly-freed slaves. A century later, the cabins and barns were empty, but the spirit of the place was my teacher—though I didn’t know at the time that I was a student. The village, abandoned as it was, should still timelessly remain in its place, and the Home Depot dropped like an anvil on its place, and that stirred up a great boiling cloud of dust in its landing, will be forever a monstrosity. Later, having moved on, the barn I played in, built on the estate of a successful and wealthy industrialist, taught me that that particular pastoral aesthetic is precisely how we should inhabit an American Midwestern countryside. Never mind that the place was conceived in a wealthy, aristocratic spirit of image-making in the '20s, by a rapacious and image-conscious industrialist whose wife convinced him that gentleman farmer was a role it would be advantageous for him to play. I absorbed the lessons folded through every shingle and nail in the architecture without understanding what I was learning or why. Now, because of my having absorbed the lessons of that timeless boyhood space through a kind of existential osmosis, I know in adulthood that aesthetics are every bit as critical as utility, and I am sure that the dairy barn in all its stuccoed splendor was worth infinitely more than the expensive travesties of the houses that landed in the hole left when it was demolished. It’s what was bequeathed to me by the accident of showing up then and there, at that moment of my life, and frankly I haven’t absorbed anything since to convince me I’m wrong.

So, I understand Henry’s looking back on his life with bitterness. Changes are always wrong, you see. The hottest circle of hell is reserved for real estate developers, and I do not mean that as a joke. Those changes for Henry include the changes that come when your father kills himself, and the changes that come from success and the struggle against grief and the unassailable knowledge that things should never, never have come to this pass. Never. Just lie there pissed off in your pit and decay. I do so totally get it.

#81 Op. posth. no. 4

 http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-81:-Op.-posth.-no.-4

“It’s on its way” that thing “which in some vain strive many to avoid.” Right now Henry is still kind of getting used to the idea I guess. Since I know that a Lazarus rebirth moment is looming, still over a week away, I wonder what the point is, overall? The poet is just trying on death for awhile, and I’m thinking as a way artistically around it, since it has been such a burdensome presence so far. Not as much is going on in death with Henry as I might have expected. A longing for the body already, this repeated awareness that it is being stripped away part by part.

Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter, “Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get to thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death would be a relief to so endless a state of existence.” The death of death, in other words, is what offers relief. Henry seems bored with it already, and Dickinson was afraid of the same thing. The dreadfulness of eternity, the endless, painless, pleasureless boredom. But this all assumes that a consciousness goes forward pretty much unchanged from what it was in life. I suspect that won’t be possible, because consciousness arises out of brain, which is body, which dissolves into Earth upon dying. But who can ever escape the consciousness of his body? Even Emily Dickinson, who was free to imagine her way into death free of constraint because she kept her poems private. If you believe in ghosts—I’m agnostic on this—then spirit and body separate. One dissolves and reintegrates into the physical substance of Earth, the other progresses unaffected by death; it haunts, or maybe it comes around for another go, or merges into the spiritual substance of the cosmos, of which we know almost nothing.

Here’s Captain Ahab, darkly, on this problem: “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him an outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.” All the entertaining, obsessive hatred of it aside, whatever the white whale turns out to be, even Ahab doesn’t know if it’s “agent” or “principal.” Is the brain—seat of consciousness and one with the Earth animal—agent or principal? There’s the rub.

For Henry, the body and brain is agent all the way. For Dickinson, agent. For Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen, Jim Baker, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and every other electronically overpuffed televangelist preacher to ever grace our screens and call for money—assuming they’re sincere, which obviously not all are—their fortunes are made on an understanding of brain/body as agent. These guys know where their bread is buttered. We can’t admit a spiritual dissolution, even a spiritual merging, because the ego won’t stand for it. At best we join the crowd in the heavenly bleachers. But—are we not of the Earth? Do we not love the Earth? The answer, for far too many, and for the aggregate consciousness arising from humanity: Nope. Not that much.

But, we’ll let Henry—ghost for now—have his disembodied consciousness for awhile, and screw the Earth and his/its disintegrating body, falling off around him in pieces and chunks. We don’t really ever die, right?

#80 Op. posth. no. 3

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-80:-Op.-posth.-no.-3

1^st stanza: His body is buried. Hates the thought of leaving it behind. 2^nd: “The great Uh” (God) is above him. “Goodness is bits of outer God” is a statement of the divine presence, really, and the image that follows, is also about that small experience of goodness that hints at the existence of the much greater. Sex symbolizes the greater good in the subsequent image, that sleepy, half-dressed woman is a hint of what had happened the night before. 3^rd: Except, a real-life problem was that maybe he shouldn’t have entertained the daughter of a friend. He’s reminded that she liked it too, was living her choices, what’s wrong with that? Henry says it had happened before. All this a moment of thinking back on life from within the state of being dead, though the only difference so far is that being disembodied, you can’t have the pleasures that come from being alive, pleasure that hints at the greater presence into whose presence Henry hasn’t quite been admitted yet. So, the thing here is that Henry doesn’t quite seem fully integrated into the beyond. He’s a spirit and a voice cut off from life but still looking back, going over what happened, experiencing some regret and being soothed out of it, longing for life. That’s what a ghost does.

Ghost of a Rhino

Coarse, hot grasses and a muddy
Waterhole were the perfect food. I rolled
In the brown dust, dark Africa
Dry on my broad back
My two horns sharp and hard
Above the power of my great snout
My skin an armor against the tsetse
That drives the kudus bolting
And stamping into the dark forest
Where longing for the good sting
Of equatorial sun pales their nervous
Stripèd spirits. Leopards feared me.
Prides of lions envied my strength.
The great elephants in their herds
Raised their trunks in salute
As they paraded, and the buffaloes
Waggled their shaggy pelts.
Heaven stretches behind us:
Sun-ringing plains, the scratch
Of acacia thorns, the Maasai herders
Ornaments on the veldt’s vast
Canvas. Kilimanjaro ushers Africa
Upward to a blanching with He
Of the White Sun. Here, the grass
Is soft like wet droppings, and sweet,
The waters are flavorless
And cool, and the spotted
Ghosts of hyenas laugh
Madly at the infinite days.

KZ

#79 Op. posth. no. 2

http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/19634/dream_song_79_op_posth_no_2

The effect of this poem is terrific. The effect depends on a technical trick: Check out the rhymes. The rhyme scheme varies, but they’re perfect rhymes mostly, especially flat and clear in the 3^rd stanza. B.’s not using the more frequent and more subtle half-rhymes that often show up in The Dream Songs, and he does it for a reason. So all is dandy and rhymingly in place until the second last line in the third stanza, which should rhyme with “returns” but gives that phrase instead “lest he freeze our blood.” He does this to shatter the rhyme scheme and make that seemingly sinister line jump out even further. (I did something like that with the sonnet I wrote in response to #27, so it’s interesting to me to see it here.) The effect works something much like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzolCu-QLw0 The poem is comic as well, maybe not quite to this extent, but the poem and the film clip are working in exactly the same comic mode right up to the startling moment. There is a comically overstated drama and then a “gotcha!” One difference is that the scene from the film plays it strictly for laughs. Berryman does too, except the laugh is much more complex, with all the overtones of Henry’s complicated, graceless life hovering over the humor that the tragicomic mode of The Dream Songs has established: heartbreak, bewilderment, futility, Henry’s buffoonery. In the end, the overtones overwhelm the humor, which is really the point. The other difference is that the film clip catches you right at the peak of dramatic overstatement, whereas the poem takes a dip downward into “let too his giant faults appear”, recalling something of the droop and dope we’ve always known, giving us a break before the return to the overblown celebration of the entire town, region and cosmos, and then the startle, making it that much more sophisticated, more unexpected, and more startling. Henry’s speaking from the grave casts the whole thing in a creepy, even threatening light, though it’s hard to see Henry as capable of anything like “terrible returns” unless he’s dead and thus invested of supernatural influences he never had in life. So in spite of the chill it causes, the whole thing is a joke in the end anyway—probably. The only return he is capable of is through his art, which has indeed shown a pretty formidable potency, giving the fear of the returns some heft. The poem ends on a suspended emotional double entendre: Extreme, grand fright, or joke? It’s both, though the distance between these two modes is so extreme that that in itself is comical. I tend to think it’s the joke that finally prevails, though there is a poetic brilliance in its complex layers.

#78 Op. posth. no. 1

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-78:-Op.-posth.-no.-1

77 Dream Songs was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize. This begins the next volume, only 308 more to go! Who’s with me!? The second volume, published in 1969, is titled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. It won the National Book Award that year, so I’ll wager there’s some good stuff to come. Some slow days, sure, but worth the slog. At this point, blogging on The Dream Songs has just become one of those daily things we do. Shower, brush your teeth, make coffee, drive to work, teach, go home, respond critically or creatively in admiration or exasperation to The Dream Songs, eat dinner, sleep, etc.

The thing is, things are gonna get weird here for awhile. Henry’s back! But he’s dead—sort of. “Op. posth.” stands for “opus posthumous”, so the first 14 Dream Songs of the second volume are from the Great Beyond. Should be fascinating to see what unfolds. I don’t read ahead, so I don’t know what’s coming, but op. post. tells us plenty.

 “Walt’s ‘orbic flex’” is a reference to Whitman’s Song of Myself, part 26, where he goes into the litany of sounds in American life that thrill him so much; the orbic flex in Whitman’s poem describes the mouth of an operatic tenor. The triads of Hegel are the thesis/antithesis/synthesis relationship that may or may not have actually originated with Hegel, but that’s what it’s called. Some critics see this pattern in the three-part structure of a Dream Song, though like the other aspects of his form, he’s liable to mix it up or break it or ignore it at any time. In 1950, Berryman had written a critical biography of Stephen Crane, and he revised it and it was republished in 1962. It was well-regarded. The references to Whitman and Hegel are still ironic, arising from the critical success the first volume had garnered, and Henry is embarrassed at being called anything close to a Whitman/Hegel figure. Poet, biographer, it all adds up to a kind of “so what?” What’s really interesting in the poem is the way the physical “parts” of Henry are being sheared away, which is what happens to the body in death, until only “his eyeteeth and one block of memories” remain. So we’re in the realm of disembodied spirit here for awhile, and I’m juiced over the possibilities. This is the opening poem of the new set, setting the stage, but already Henry is well into the process of physically disintegrating.

I tell ghost stories sometimes and have fun with them now and then when the right moment arises, about an inn I stayed at once and made the mistake of reading the guest log before turning in, and a very cool haunted restaurant in Bloomington where I worked when I was in grad school. Yikes! A suspicion or two other. But I’m a shameless bullshitter too. A few incidents in total, odd enough that they bear a touch of embellishment. It’s not that I’m lying, I’m telling stories. Oh, and I had a long night with a friend on a Ouija board once, that was way out there. But that might just have been collaborative creative writing through a different medium. It was wonderfully creepy. I do know someone who saw a ghost, in the flesh as it were, and I believe her. And I’ve read several of the authoritative accounts. Why all this ghost business? Oh, I don’t know, I guess because it appears that Henry has drifted out of life toward the ghostly realm, which will give him a peculiar take on things back here in the world as he speaks.

I can’t wait!

#77

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-77:-Seedy-Henry-rose-up-shy

This concludes 77 Dream Songs, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Before knowing about that, Henry could hold in his hands the couple books he got out, and that’s something, but he is tired of all those seasons of life except the one where all that procreation, growth and moist liveliness is giving way to a falling off, and he’s tired too of “a squeamish comfy     ruin-prone proud national / mind”—Not so happy with that American exceptionalism there, is he? The outrages of our social/political moment that so piss off and make despairing me and my ilk and kin have their origins in the outrages of his, though we did have to wait some years for the counterculture to play out, and there was all that business of the civil rights movement, and the environmental movement, and feminism, and all those great speeches and great music, and the American Indians had their movement. And there were some laws passed, and some changes made, so that black Americans could vote and rivers no longer caught fire and women could go to college and be taken seriously, but eventually the rich bad guys got organized, got their propaganda machines reassembled and oiled up, and they’ve wrested back the upper hand again and they’re busy, busy tearing down whatever they can reach. Although stuff is arising that they’re not equipped to deal with or even see. Keeps me from going all Henry, it does. But, he’s stript down and ready to go now, move on, leave it behind. It’s all clear enough. I’m ready to move on too. Thanks, B., I loved the challenge, and I learned plenty, and I’ll keep with it, meditating my way through the next collection.

I never had any doubt about it, but it’s good to write. It helps.

#76 Henry's Confession

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-76:-Henry's-Confession

Sad Sack Henry’s expecting something bad to happen every day gets silly after awhile, but that’s the point, the cartoonishness of Henry’s character. Berryman the real person also cultivated a sense of tragic comedy about his whole life, I think, but he was not a cartoon. Maybe it’ll pay to be more sensitive to the difference from here on. In this poem, like always, the slide from poet to character and back is seamless, so it’s easy enough to mix them up. Henry speaks first, then the second stanza abandons Henry for the poet, speaking directly. As for Henry and/or B. as bumbling Sad Sack, other, more positive things have arisen in The Dream Songs lately, so B.’s not inexorably portraying himself as a buffoon. Here, Henry’s confession, only hinted at, is that surprisingly his art has at least partially redeemed him. It’s that he’s undergoing a “modesty” of death, not a full one, a flirtation or engagement with it. It’s there at the end, too, in “I saw nobody coming, so I went instead” which has a couple meanings. One is that, no one is coming, especially the father he lost who is so directly and sadly mentioned in the second stanza. The details are autobiographical. “Agone” is not a misprint, it deliberately compresses several words together—gone, agony, ago. But since his father is not coming, and never will, Henry will go to join him. His art gets him part way as he lives his painful way through this “handkerchief sandwich.” But there’s something else too. Who exactly is the minstrel voice who speaks in a caricature Negro dialect and calls Henry “Mr. Bones” is unknown, except that Berryman hinted, when the collection was all written and published and over, that it might just be the voice of Death, that figure whose influence he courted all his life. If this is so, then there’s a pretty likely explanation for the dance in the third stanza:

I offers you this handkerchief, now set

your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.

Get ready, because here we go! We don’t actually need a hint from beyond the books to see that the voice is Death with whom Henry is being invited to dance. Death offers him a handkerchief, and if life is a handkerchief sandwich, in other words bracketed by tears, then this is an offer of comfort but also a symbol of the end. There is one more Dream Song in the collection, then Henry indeed slides into an easeful death—again—and the first 14 of the next volume are all titled “Opus Posthumous”—written from beyond, until, like Lazarus, he’s back for more mayhem. But there is something of comfort in the melancholy of this particular poem, a going home, a rest for a while. It’s the saddest Dream Song yet, I think, and I think also that there’s something beautiful about this one.

#75

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_75_Turning_it_over_considering_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

“No harm resulted from this.” There’s something to be said for that!

I might be wrong, but I think this is the first time a plant of any kind has been mentioned in The Dream Songs. I can’t think of a flower, a blade of grass—something rainy or jungly in the ones about India? I don’t think so. I could page through the volume and find an exception, perhaps, but I’ve given these poems as much attention over the last two and a half months as anyone ever has. If I say I can’t think of a mention of plants, then that’s something!

The book grew as a tree. Not necessarily a brand new metaphor, but it’s striking to get it in the midst of all this urbane craziness and lust and despair, so that there’s something comforting and even wonderful about that flashing & bursting tree. It’s a good feeling. I haven’t published a book yet, but I’ve written a couple. There’ll be more to come, too. I think it would be a nice moment when you hold your book in your hand for the first time, and look at the words on the pages, knowing that there is flashing & bursting in there to be released, as if a reader, by reading, is holding a match to an otherwise gray and boring sparkler. We know something’s latent in there, and it took a crapload of work to make it such. As messed up as he was, B. knew accomplishment and pride too. If dogs and others pee on it, doesn’t matter. He did it. And as a result, eventually, this remarkable thing begins to “strike the passers from despair”. I think this means it strikes them out of their despair, not because of it. Books can do that. Even the darkest stuff—Elie Weisel’s Night, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War—redeem through witness; they work to transform darkness and madness and cruelty by exposing it. Place 77 Dream Songs in that company.

#74

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3607

This one made me very sad at first, until I read the events surrounding it. The poem could be read as an overall statement of existential angst, with the “unlove” coming from his father’s suicide. Ouch, yes, that would be sad. But actually it was written as the poet’s second marriage had decayed into open warfare and was dissolving away rapidly. It’s a sad enough situation for anyone, to be sure. No one wants that. Unfortunately, it throws a harsher light on the poem to see what really prompted it. Instead of the sad, helplessness of the boy who lost his father, which would engender some genuine pathos, now it’s much his own fault. One partner is half-responsible for a breakup. Are you inattentive? Career mean more than your relationship? Have you been a caring father? No? Drink too much, like waaaay too damn much? Fair enough. It happens. But don’t go claiming that “what the world to Henry / did will not bear thought” since you weren’t quite the passive victim here, pal. But, then again, we all indulge in self-pity from time to time; it’s another of the “secret bits of life” he refers to. But right now, all the adventures on Earth don’t compensate for unlove, whether it’s well-earned or not.

I’m sitting here all cool and secure and superior, passing judgment, as is my prerogative as reader. This poem does bring up memories of the power of negative emotion, though. I remember the isolation and smallness of feeling unloved, the need to hurt something when angry, and I’ve had bitter moments of jealousy that taught me it’s a bad, bad emotion to have to experience. Most of this was long ago. Fear and anxiety are mainly what I’m left with as I’ve gotten older, negatively speaking. Plenty of good stuff in my life too, but we’re not talking about that at the moment.

I’ve had moments in villages and cities of Europe and wild spots in North America that no jealousy, rage or self-pity will ever have a chance of supplanting, emotionally or otherwise. But I also know that an upwelling emotion can spread over your psychological surface like an oil spill. It dissipates eventually, unless you write it—and then there it rings, hanging for everyone to see and reverberating indefinitely. There’s something cool about that, even if it’s some kind of ridiculous self-pity ringing over the decades. Art shows us who we are, sometimes the minutia and fleeting wisps of who we are, and reminds us that it’s all amazing. Henry gets it at the last line: even in the midst of a dark, dark sorrow, an uptick of wonder.

#73 Karensui, Ryoan-ji

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3606

 “Karensui” (karensansui) is the art of Japanese rock gardens, usually featuring large, carefully placed rocks surrounded by a carefully raked, smooth sweep of sand or small pebbles. Ryoan-ji is a temple in Kyoto, Japan, with one of the finest karensansui gardens in all of Japan. B. visited Japan in 1957, and he wrote the poem about a year and a half later. It was one of the most important Dream Songs to him because the karensansui became his model for the collected Dream Songs. The idea of the rock garden is that because it never looks the same from any two angles, one can never actually “see” it directly. Its shape and structure can only ever be put together in the imagination, though this takes repeated viewing from different angles and deliberate contemplation.

So it’s a good time, maybe, to back away from this one poem and reflect on what themes have arisen so far in The Dream Songs as I’ve watched it come into shape from different angles. To wit: fear of nuclear war, geezer lust and a frank invocation of sex and sexuality, self-effacement and diminishment, criticism of political power structures, the complications of fame and artistic recognition, identification of the poet’s self with the repressed and victimized condition of African Americans, shame and embarrassment, alcohol dependence and abuse, a broader existential despair at the state of the world, and of course, overlying and triggering everything else, the ongoing effect of a serious, persistent psychological wound caused by the suicide of the poet’s father when he was a boy. This is most often sad and melancholy, but it can turn to anger or compassion at times as well.

Uncomfortable, disquieting stuff. The poems are also marked by a puzzling obscurity (at times), a remarkable verbal compression that can communicate through allusion, through silences, and the fragmentation of which also communicates in unexpected ways. The poems can be quite funny, but they sometimes shade toward the self-absorbed and self-indulgent.

The other thing that comes through for me is the unshakable artistic confidence, or what may actually be a simple devil-may-care rejection of worrying about what anybody thinks. Perhaps these two things have to work together. Think of the kid in school who knows damn well he’s ten times smarter than the blockheads who pick on him, but he’s been bullied so relentlessly he gave up long ago on trying to be cool. He wears what he wants, reads what he wants, has no friends, lives in fear, and bides his time for the day he knows is coming when the blockheads who torment him will sell used cars or industrial flooring and live for college football games on the weekend, and he’ll have made millions before he’s thirty. That’s sort of how I picture him, with the added quality, of course, of an intimate look under his hat because he’s a poet and not something else. He makes mistakes all the time. So what? He moves on immediately and makes more, and it’s all kind of a brilliant mess. Which is the opposite of the careful, raked perfection of the karensansui dry garden, I suppose.

Actually, I don’t see that a karensansui ethic is at work in this long poem at all. I’m much more inclined to see The Dream Songs as a linguistic/poetic equivalent of the great jazz record album covers of Jim Flora: http://www.jimflora.com/gallery/recordcovers.html and the equally great paintings Flora did a bit later, during the same years B. was writing The Dream Songs: http://www.jimfloraart.com/gallery.html. I’ve always understood how B. works in the mode of mid-century modern illustration—the strange palette, the fragmentation, the dark surreal cartoonish whimsy, the odd but characteristic shapes—but when I remembered Jim Flora’s work awhile back, the association for me became solid. He has the same kind of quirky energy, analogous combinations of shapes and colors.

Flora has a woodcut print, called “Railroad Town”, which maybe best captures the overall sense of The Dream Songs as a whole. http://www.jimflora.com/fineartprints/railroadtown.html. While the print is only 11” x 22”, it is conceived on a grand scale, as if you had 50 of Flora’s album covers competing for attention over the same ground. The effect up close is a visual madness, but from a distance, it all takes on a kind of uniformity and it becomes calmer: Instead of the up-close cacophony of horns blaring, tires screeching, women screaming, men fighting and grunting, kids banging on pots, from a distance it resolves into a gently sparking buzz. Now take 50 of “Railroad Town”, each unique, variations on the same theme, and juxtapose them next to each other and back off further: The activity is like the jumble of random pebbles and sand grains: Zoom in up close, chaos; back off far enough and you can rake it all smooth. If The Dream Songs have any affinity with karensansui, you begin to feel it from this distance.

#72 The Elder Presences

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3605

B. wrote this while he was living in Washington with his wife of the moment and with his mother in the apartment downstairs, and he would take his daughter to the park across the street from the Supreme Court and play with her on the swings. It was a time for him of nearly constant alcohol abuse, though, and not much work, though he did manage to get out this poem. It was the last one to be written for the first volume, 77 Dream Songs.

It’s a bit of a puzzle, like usual. The first two stanzas are pretty straightforward, although I’m not sure about “the justices lean, negro, out, the trees bend.” “Negro” I guess, is an aside to Henry? Or are the justices or their statues somehow adopting a "negro" style of leaning? Seems too ridiculous to consider. Whatever. “Man’s try began too long ago” is an intriguing line—Supreme Court or not, an institution ostensibly dedicated to law, order, and rationality in the administration of justice (it’s too partisan these days, having been stoked with moles by criminals, and doing real damage, but that’s another story), the institutions are playing out over the long decline of history.

“Henry’s perhaps to break his burnt-cork luck.” Wow—burnt cork, of course, is what the minstrel blackens his face with. In a period of near constant drunkenness, the decline of the self is evident, and the erosion of self-confidence. He’s feeling his end, here. He denies that good got us up that “broad shoreline”, but instead greed may have been the motivator, though “like a fuse,” with the implication that it’ll all explode soon enough. The Court overlooks it all. It’s a fairly bleak pronouncement, and doubly sad when prompted by swinging one’s daughter on a playground which is supposed to be fun. It is fun for her: The innocent little girl playing with her daddy, and daddy ruminating on 1) the slow, dolorous decline of the human institutions representative of light, justice and reason, and 2) whiskey in which bar tonight?

I’m closer in spirit to the girl for the moment, even though I just now moaned about our corrupt Supreme Court too—stoked with partisan moles (Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Alito) by criminals (Bush, Cheney). I haven’t swunged too much lately, but it wasn’t so long ago. Tonight, even the memory of swinging’s better than moaning about conservative radical shites, so to heck with the Supreme Court. I’d rather scrub toilets or mine coal or be a strip-club pole-dancer than a lawyer anyway. (But Ruth Bader Ginsberg rocks!)

#71

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-71:-Spellbound-held-subtle-Henry-all-his-four

His first collection, 77 Dream Songs, which is coming to a close here, won the Pulitzer Prize. The next volume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, won the National Book Award. So there were a few more than four listeners attendant to his preaching, and he sure enough had them by “the heart & brains & tail,” and they paid him money. This was all to come. But B. saw even further beyond the success—that he was already experiencing—to the day when it would be over and played out and no one would listen. That did come, too, as he knew it would. This poem forecasts to the sad day when it’s finally over, and “none… came.”

Here’s a found poem also forecasting from a day in the flush when, finally, “none…came.”

 

The West Texas Big Bobcat Contest

You must have a fur harvester’s

License and obtain a tag for the cat.
You must tag the cat
Right after you harvest it.
The bobcat must be registered
With the DNR with-in so many days
After the season ends
In the area you harvested your cat.
There are different season dates
And limits depending on the area you hunt in.
Jeremy H, a fifth-generation rancher,
Organized the Big Bobcat contest in Texas.
Contests do a public service
By reducing the number of livestock
Predators and protecting the public
From rabies. This is not bashing
Baby seals in the head.
To those who are offended, he has simple advice:
Butt out. It's none of their business.
It has nothing to do with them.
It's one of the best things about this beautiful
State of Texas. We have 100 percent
Support from Texas and from the local people.
If they don't like it, they can just
Stay away from it. And there is a jarring
Sort of gleefulness that surrounds the slaughter.
They're growing exponentially, said Geoff N,
A champion coyote hunter
Who is cashing in on the phenomenon.
His website, Coyote Craze, exhorts visitors
To “Feed Your Addiction” and offers
Videos of coyotes being dispatched
By high-powered weapons, along with t-shirts
That read “Coyotes Fear Me,” and depict
Dead coyotes hanging by their feet.
Two of his sons bagged their first coyotes
At the age of five.
Almost every weekend you can find a contest
Somewhere within driving distance.
Contests are completely legal.
Some may consider it ethically wrong,
But hunting has been around forever,
It’s who we are out in this part of the country.
We’re killing animals for money and prizes.

KZ

#70

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_70_Disengaged_bloody_Henry_rose_from_the_shell_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

The sport of rowing is the extended metaphor, and since I can find no reference anywhere yet that Berryman ever engaged in the sport, I’ll regard it as made up or a dream. If I’m mistaken, so be it.

“malgré lui” is French for “in spite of himself”, which describes well enough Henry’s accidental heroism. His seat in the rowing shell jammed, he completes the race on the rails, in pain, and wins some accolades for it. “Rowing, rowing, rowing” might just as well read “writing, writing, writing” and the metaphor comes into focus: With a jammed seat at the start of his life (the grievous blow of his father’s suicide) he keeps going, wins some accolades for the work he does.

“This afterworld” is interesting: I take this to mean that the now of his life is a kind of afterworld, what followed after the blow of that moment when he was a kid and nothing was ever the same afterward. And it’s weird. It reminds me again that whatever mental or psychological state B. found himself in, it wasn’t healthy or normal. It’s easy to forget that. And yeah, that’s a constant wellspring of goading and pain, which prompts the writing and doesn’t give a damn if life is embarrassing or humiliating or painful: It’s all a bizarre mess anyway, and the conceits of normality, orthodoxy, conventional conservatism are just as pointless and just as foolish as anything else, so why all the fuss? There is also the realization, though, that if you’re going to root for a winner, then “cheer for the foe” because probably Henry isn’t your best bet—a tacit acknowledgement that there’s the strangeness of normalcy and then there’s the really strange strangeness of this particular rower’s bloody struggles. When the father is invoked right at the end, it puts it all in perspective: There’s the issue. That he’s “blue” I read simply as the color of the shell he’s rowing, through his own bizarre afterlife, and the son isn’t in the boat with him, rather is watching, stopwatch in hand, replaced and not part of the contest at this point. It’s the dream logic that throws the father in a boat and has him timed by his still-living (sort of) son.

Back in the boat: I’ve never rowed, but what must make the sport attractive is it minimalistic simplicity: Arms, back, legs, muscles, and the elementary rhythm of the movements. Nothing else matters when you’re racing. This project is teaching me something, which I’ve heard from teachers, mentors, a hundred times, to no avail, but now I get it: The potency of discipline. Put your head down and row, forget everything else, and the more you do it the better you’re able to do it. It’s actually quite simple! The race will be over soon enough and you can sit up and look around then if you want to. But first, don’t think, don’t complicate it, just row. Anything else is a distraction. Row.

#69

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3601

Yeah, I’ll admit it—this kind of think rolls around up beneath the balding pates of various middle-agèd Henries, though not all of them. It does strike some as passing ridiculous. But the provenance of lust dates back to well before the Middle Ages. In fact, Pompeii, that Roman town so famously preserved by the volcano that not-coincidently also destroyed it, is filled with scandalous mosaics depicting scenes of nubile young things indiscreetly getting down with middle-aged Romans with their togas draped over the window instead of their thinning shoulders. Pompeii was famous in its day for its production of a particularly fine vintage of garum, the culinary condiment sauce made of fermented fish popular all across the Empire, but Pompeii was also renowned for its panoply of fine brothels. It had a volcanic reputation, so to speak, well before it got what you might call vulcanized. So there’s nothing new or even that particularly scandalous here.

B. wrote this in a bar in 1959. Bars, with their combination of gathered people and multiple alcoholic beverages for sale, do invite this dance of preening and display in couple with the attentions of uninhibited—sometimes drunken—lusters, and we know which end of this timeless flirtation spectrum Henry rests at. Throw middle age as a concept into the mix and the word “creepy” creeps in, but I guess not always. I’ve given up trying to interpret what makes men attractive to women when they’re so often not actually that attractive. But, to be honest, that’s just a pose I adopt because it’s less challenging. I do sort of get it, but that’s all on that.

The “Sleepless One” is of course His Satanic Demon-ness. Henry’s got it bad here. But, well, you know, it’s just a moment that passes, and comes around again, now and then, and maybe again, and the esteemed poet here has fixed and immortalized these normally volatile vapors of the libido, and here I sit—with an aching lower back, to boot, got from working too diligently on house-repair with all these college kids chastely (for the week at least) and cutely energizing each other and working their slipshod way into the big confusing erotic mess of youth and life and figuring it out as they go—forced into consciousness of that which, in my world, at this point, ought better stay locked beneath ones hat. (I can’t imagine reading this poem to an assembled literati.)

Still, I’m still smiling about it. B. is playing here, all in good fun. That Mrs. Boogry, she might as well be on Mars, as he says way back in DS 4 in the midst of another, more famous, foray into geezer lust. Garum, from what I read from the culinary archeologists who have worked on recreating it—with great satisfying mess and a powerful, old-oceanic stink—comes on strong with intense fish on the nose and heavy salt on the approach to the palate, but resolves into unexpected herbal and organic complexities: An attractive and compelling condiment indeed, they claim.

#68

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3600

These should accompany any reading of this poem. It will greatly enhance the experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrx2-vvwC4

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dQrUxHkVJE

Bessie Smith’s fame grew across the South in the 1920s, when it was shown that black blues singers’ records would sell, in spite of doubts from record companies. The old recordings from 1929 and 1928 carried her voice forward, and B. was listening to them the day after Christmas, 1962, while visiting his mother, which is when DS 68 was written. I don’t have much patience with the gratuitous appropriation of black American culture, and all the racist minstrel stuff, but the blues figure too in The Dream Songs, in a different way. Black music—blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and more—has been so defining of American identity in the 20^th century that the music transcends racial matters and all Americans have a stake in it. Nothing I can see in this poem stretches my sense of correctness past the snapping point like B. has managed before. The last stanza references Bessie Smith’s death, and with some bitterness. She had a bad car accident in 1937. The ambulance—as would have been standard procedure—refused to take her to the whites-only hospital (the “sick-house” with its white birds). Once she made it to the Negro hospital, the thought was that it was then too late, which was why she died. Likely it wouldn’t have made a difference because she was too badly injured, but the fact remains that the best-equipped and nearest hospital was never an option for a black woman in the South, even if it meant she would die as a result of being refused. So it goes. “they all come hangin Christmas on some tree / after trees thrown out”—now that she’s gone, it’s permissible to celebrate her, since her art in its recorded retrospect is safe and meaningful, but her actual life as an African American woman, which her art sprang from, meant nothing. Again, so it goes. This will matter to somebody who poses, or at least envisions himself, in sympathy with the outsider, repressed image of the black artist in American society. More broadly, clearly something like this is going to matter to a poet who mines his life and psyche for inspiration.

#67

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_67_I_dont_operate_often_When_I_do_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Not much time for blogging today. Off to Eastern Kentucky with the Christian Appalachian Project to help repair houses. I’ll post this week if time and Internet connections permit. If not, I’ll catch up when I get back.

I know that the notion of service is not of paramount importance to a lot of people, and that’s okay. There are lots of ways to better the world, and being an artist is one of them, and one of the most important, I think. But I have found that helping people who can’t afford to repair their houses does pull one’s attention away from one’s own burbling cauldron of self-obsession. Maybe that’s not a good thing if that’s the motor that drives you.

The first 77 Dream Songs were published together in the first volume, and I’ll be closing in on that at the end next week. That would be a place to stop if that’s what I want to do. But I know that the second volume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, while it goes on too long, these poems also move away from the self-obsession that has been a little too distressingly evident on occasion up to this point. There’s a lot of good stuff there. So, I’ll stay with this project for now, as long as I keep enjoying the process, which I have so far.

And, I’ve been collecting readers from all over the world! The number of people stopping by averages about 35 a day, on the weekends closer to 80. To that regular reader in Indonesia: Welcome! Saya harap Anda menikmati proyek ini! 

I’m off…

#66

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_66_All_virtues_enter_into_this_world_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

This poem mentions the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đức, on June 11, 1963, in protest of the escalating war in Vietnam. The images were all over the news and they shocked the world, and of course it was a sign of things to come. It remains one of the iconic images of the horrible tragedy of the war there. “The Secretary of State of War” might be either Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in 1963, or Dean Rusk, Secretary of State. Neither was involved in an actual sex scandal in 1963, but the reference to winking and screwing a “redhaired whore” has to be an oblique allusion to “red” Communism and Vietnam, quickly escalating into the Cold War’s hot outbreak once the dangerous affairs in Cuba had settled a bit. We’re of course supposed to hate war, right, but perhaps not every winking adulterer in power does? It brings them more power, and if you’re also, for example, ex-CEO and still with close ties to a company like Haliburton, which stands to profit mightily from an engagement, then you stand to make a lot of profit as well. An excellent use to which your power may be put! (And by the way, water boarding is merely a form of enhanced interrogation. Some of these people have an infernal poetical streak themselves.) Pope John 23 died that week, and his friend and Papal Secretary, Loris Francesco Capovilla, of course mourned his passing. Abba Pimen, of the Orthodox Church, said: “A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, that is, he says nothing that is not profitable.”

It all fits. There’s the week, then, second week of June, 1963. I’m sure Walter Cronkite told his viewers, “And that’s the way it is.” What arises in the poem is the discrepancy between the arrival of fame, which is supposed to be a good thing, but in the end might be just as awful as the litany of newsworthy tragedies listed in the first stanza, because of the underlying recognition that deep down, you’re not worthy. This is what sours his fame, turning it into something like the burning monk, a horrifying demonstration, even though you’re also affable and top-shelf, la-dee-dah. There’s a sour vapor curling from your affability; the top shelf is glass and it’s cracking. You go get laid, then, feel bad about it after, keep going.

The quote from Abba Pimen seems to be assuming that silence is a virtue to be cultivated, though he doesn’t mean a mere superficial not-talking; It’s rather a deeper, spiritual stillness, something “profitable.” Does this fit the poet? I think so: The deeply silent holy person may indeed never shut up. Ideally, that’s the poet, speaking, speaking through his work. There is a resonant, complex silence that follows from this Dream Song, like a bronze Tibetan bowl struck once and that shines forth its tone for a full minute. This one interior moment held aloft in all its ambiguity: famous, false, fearful, flaming: tragic and magnificent. “Quelle sad semaine”: What a sad week.