Wednesday, April 29, 2015

#119

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12168

Hmm. Begins with a reference to the (famous?) burgeoning scraggly beard, which got shaved off on occasion, sure. Well, look, it’s hardly an auspicious start, promising one of the great English language poems, but whatever. “Shadow & act, shadow & act”. Is this an oblique reference to Plato? (Doubt it.) Something akin to yesterday’s poem, the call, and my response? The cowering person projected via holographs and megaphones into persona? (Not quite seeing that.) It feels deep, and it’s repeated, so it seems important, but I can’t reach it. And then comes this:

Better get white or you' get whacked,
or keep so-called black
& raise new hell. 

I've had enough of this dying.           

I’ve had enough of this dying too. On this day today, the city of Baltimore is nursing some grievous wounds. Yet another black man killed while in police custody, his spine broken in three places. Go ahead, explain how he wasn't mistreated if his spine was so shattered. Ten thousand protesters in the streets for days, then the riots broke out, fires and looting, phalanxes of riot police subject to cascades of bricks, some injured (but no broken spines), and now here come the news agencies because this shit is juicy. Better get white, or you’ get whacked? I’ll say.

Except the poet is still talking about his beard. “Dying” doesn’t refer to ceasing to exist amongst the living, it refers to the chemical changing of one’s hair color. And we get back to the beard again in the third stanza. “It’s easier to vomit than it was, / beardless”. It reveals a steely-eyed bitterness in this one coming through for me. There are other images and messages in the poem, but this matters most to me today, as Baltimore smolders.

Because here’s the thing: “Better get white or you get whacked” and “dying”: They’re not about a beard either. The pun on “dying” is deliberate; the puns on “white” and “black” are deliberate: race or hair color, depends on your angle. They give rise to a metaphor. The “tenor” of a metaphor is the root-level image or concept being conveyed, the “vehicle” is the substitution that carries the tenor. The tenor is sometimes only communicated through allusion—you can’t prove it in a court of law—but poetry doesn’t give a damn about law. Nothing on this poem’s surface, the vehicle, is legally about anything other than grooming habits on a poet’s ugly mug. But put “black,” “white,” “whacked,” and “dying” together and the alternate meanings of the words, each with a radioactive aura, reinforce each other into a tenor about race and violence. The radioactivity grows to dangerous levels: You bet this poem is about race and brutality.

At the end there: Alcoholics vomit pretty routinely, don’t they? So there’s that. But how about one more subtle, implied double entendre? Rather than “I’ve had enough” of this “dying,” I’m sick of all this dying. There’s the poet’s comment on he why thinks whacking a black man because he’s black and you’re angry is behavior that’s acceptable. Get it? Myself, I could never, ever be a lawyer because my brain is not wired in such fashion. I’d rather empty outhouses. But, times like this, they prove their worth. Sic ‘em on the brutal tenor of violence and apply one last metaphor: You’re going to the big house. The Vehicle: The “big house” is defined as a larger-than-average domicile. The Tenor: prison. Where murderers belong.

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