#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!