#151

[No online link available.]

Another uncomplicated, and seemingly (to me) unpoetic report on the death of Delmore Schwartz. It’s a sad story, truly, alone, ill, mentally unstable, and B. was obviously devastated by the whole thing, enough to write twelve poems about it. But rather than participate in the grief over his demise, which spoke quite clearly to the poet who might just have been worrying about a similar end, let’s be honest, we’ll instead celebrate Schwartz’s work with another look at one of his poems. They’ve been quite interesting so far. We’ll see what comes of it.

“In the Green Morning, Now, Once More”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238114

Do we not all have a childhood memory, or a few, that embodies “The merry, the musical, / The jolly, the magical, / The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival”? Here’s one of mine: It was 1968, on the very last day of 4^th grade. It was a Field Day celebration. We spent the day outside, playing games, or free to roam around the school grounds doing what we pleased. I was sitting somewhere, alone for the moment, enjoying the perfect early summer weather, and actually thinking to myself that the weather was so perfect and pleasant, and the tone of the school, the teachers and my classmates, and my mood such, that I would always remember this day. And it turns out I have. A second grade girl sat next to me and we talked for a long time, I don’t remember what about. I just remember her yellow-blond hair, how pretty she was, and being content that with all swing sets, ball games and tag games, the quaint carnival attractions the teachers and older kids had set up, the ice cream and lemonade, that she was most content to sit with me on a concrete parking curb and chat about whatever was on her mind. That’s all. I felt too old at 9 to properly have a crush on a girl of 7, so that stayed under wraps. But it was otherwise exactly right and I remember it. An elegant and happy summer day, fresh and hopeful. The summer that followed was a great one, though with no girls involved whatsoever. Horses, caves, barns, cornfields, cows, bicycles, treehouses, creeks, ponds and fishing, butterflies, abandoned buildings to explore—heaven. Maybe the memory of that day keeps shining because the hope in summer it portended came to such ripe fruition.

Like with everyone, I guess, the sky descended too, eventually. Cares, bullying, failures, growth and awkward change, sadness and loss, shame, unrequited love and unfulfilled desires, the familiar distressing litany of growing up. The conventional take, exactly as with the poem yesterday, is that as we grow and the sky descends, we leave the freshness of a perfect Field Day behind forever. Schwartz doesn’t see it that way: The perfect days follow and grow with us. And you know what, Berryman? If you lose sight of that, it’s because you’re not looking. Maybe something, booze or an enduring distress, have made you blind and stopped you cold. For all their maniacal energy, there is a torpor evident in The Dream Songs too. Schwartz has a poem titled “Baudelaire,” which I read and didn’t choose here, because I’m not in an inviting mood at the moment for laziness, lack of motion, and the damnation that follows. And Charles Baudelaire, whose great book is titled Lest Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), is all about exactly that. My good friend, Fr. John, told me not long ago that sin is lack of movement. Maybe I’ll look at “Baudelaire” tomorrow. Schwartz here claims that there is only the feeling, in the midst of all the dark falling, of freshness. It’s not as positive a statement as I would like: only the feeling can be read as less than the full presence of fragrance, freshness, birth and beginning; it’s a feeling, but in the end you only get birthed once. But I’m not fully convinced, either in my experience of life or my reading of the poem. You get rebirthed all the time! It's there in the title: Once more. Pay attention!

#150

[No online link available.]

Another uncomplicated set of thoughts about the death of Delmore Schwartz. Wondering what he felt as he dropped to the carpet in his New York City hotel. B. would like to say that as he aged, he got better. It wasn’t to be, and there we have it. It is what it is, they say as they say. Since this is Delmore Schwartz week, I think I’ll just look into another of his poems and see what’s in store. I’m choosing this one because of the great title:

“Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers”

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171346

William Wordsworth wrote about children a lot: “The child is the father of the man” is his great statement from “My Heart Leaps Up when I Behold”. Wordsworth mentions his “glad animal movements” thinking back on his boyhood with his sister in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Here is the connection of children with animals, and from what I remember of my boyhood, it’s a pretty apt comparison. Freud, of course, had a lot to say about children and the stages of development they go through, and how interrupting one of those stages leads to various neuroses in the adult. They are expression of the id, pure narcissistic desire, so their obsession with natural functions is normal. For Schwartz, the idea seems to be that they live in a timeless, thoughtless existence, which the progressively maturing, educated adult, who dawn into a “knowing that heaven and hell surround us.” This sucks, but we have to end up figuring this all out if we’re to live as normatively functioning adults. Emerson called this dawning into knowledge of our existence The Fall of Man—Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biologists say, which means that the evolution of the organism, say a human, from fish through amphibian, to reptile to mammal, to upright primate mammal, is cycled through again as the embryo develops then loses its gill slits and its tail, all that. For Emerson, the development of the youth recapitulates the development of civilization. The child dawns into consciousness and eventually self-awareness and self-control. Emerson remarked how much the ancient Greeks remind one of a pack of unruly boys, except, I expect, they fight with dirt clods and bicycles rather than spears and chariots.

That line “this which we say before we’re sorry” is a good one. The wild animal and the pre-self-aware child don’t say they’re sorry, because they’re not developmentally capable of such a thing. Adults do, with their sophisticated understanding of their roles in the social world they dawn into. But Schwartz is telling us, wait a second. These beasts of our pasts aren’t quite the strangers we like to tell ourselves we think they are. We live them behind our unseen faces, and they’re not gone, but the thing is, this glad animal wildness doesn’t just fade into our backgrounds: It grows and develops with us. So the whole concept takes a new turn: We don’t leave the child/animal behind as we grow into newer, more socially acceptable incarnations. Rather, we paste on new faces, like with clowns with makeup, and the wildings beneath grow, and change in a continuous act of new becoming, howling, and dancing, knowing no future, but also more learned and adult than before.

How is this Shakespearean? I just think it’s a nod to Shakespeare’s understanding of the human person and its psychological layers. He saw it all, and well before Freud burrowed into his patients’ psyches, categorizing and generalizing from what he discovered there, Shakespeare knew it already. Hamlet, for example, has some pretty severe mother issues that it takes him awhile to unravel before he’s finally free to act and eventually get killed. Shakespeare seemed to be in touch with the things Freud studied three centuries later. Dogs, children, Shakespeare: We see them related. What connects them doesn’t fade as we mature, though, which we like to tell ourselves.. It’s always with us. So if you’re barking like a coonhound at your misbehaving child, you’re communicating effectively.

#149

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x29jm0k_john-berryman-dream-song-149_music

[Recited with marvelous computerly flair and feeling. The future of poetry? I think not!]

Since this is Delmore Schwartz week (to “the sacred memory” of whom, by the way, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the second volume of The Dream Songs, is partially dedicated), let’s look at another of the guest of honor’s poems. But first, a glance at the Dream Song triggering today’s rumination. “The world is gradually becoming a place / where I do not care to be anymore”. Not much to unpack there. Another statement “glimmering” in depression, I’m afraid. What follows is also blunt and uncomplicated, a plain memory and unadorned lament. Schwartz was once “gift strong”, had earned exceptionally high praise from writers and critics for his early work, and was personally admired by many for what apparently was an engaging and compelling conversational style. (It really does help one’s career to develop fluent party skills. This holds for all occupations.) Mental illness took him out, but it was abetted to a great degree by what seems to have been most mid-century poets’ demon of choice: Ethanol.

So how about we check out “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day”?

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171344

Oh, now this is a lovely poem! The first time I’ve read it. Here we are, dropped into a New York City park someplace, in 1937. I think I would have liked the 30s if it wasn’t for, you know, the Depression. Black coffee and corned beef hash at the counter of a local corner diner. Everyone wears a great hat and dresses up to go outside. If it’s new, it’s Art Deco. Except for the occasional spray of bullets from gangsters’ Tommy guns, much more isolated than today, the streets are safe and people are talky and friendly. The cars are gorgeous and you can work on them yourself, and plastic hasn’t come into widespread use yet. Boys play marbles a lot and ride bikes with comfy balloon tires, and look up there! It’s the Graf Zeppelin! And don’t even talk to me about those streamliner steam locomotives chugging across the countryside, pushing glorious masses of smoke and steam into the air. It makes me sad that something so magnificent—powerful and beautiful at once, symbols of pride—could have ever even existed. Here’s what a streamline locomotive really means: You can make a great steam locomotive, sure, with 6-foot driver wheels, a boiler 30-feet long, and it’s pretty damn impressive through its sheer technological might. But keep all that, and not only engineer it, but design it as well, and now your locomotive means something more: It means we care about the perception of the public. We acknowledge a responsibility: If we make something, we make it not only functional, but we make it beautiful, because we respect the people who ride behind it and watch it roll past their communities. We care about what they think; public aesthetics are worth investing in, and we will not tolerate anything less of the machine into which we invest so much of our time and energy, our sense of self-worth, and our public service.

But I digress. I went and got all rosy there. Even without the Depression, the thirties had their dark side too. Back to the poem. It’s controlled by the refrain, “This is the school in which we learn…this is the fire in which we burn.” Watching the activity of the city swirling, both observations and memories, the speaker wonders how his perception of his selfhood fits into both the masses of people swirling before him, but time as well. They all have their perceptions of their selves, and they all change through time—they learn and grow, their bodies age and decay, the technological and social landscapes that influence their lives evolve as well, and those landscapes will never be the same again. Me, I’m the same person I was at 7, when I had this still-wonderful experience of riding my bike around the forbidden other side of the block and feeling the world open up in a marvelous adventure of discovery. I carried that to Europe in my twenties and felt it again as each new French town and cathedral hove into view from the train window. Since then I’ve earned four degrees, embarked on a career, a marriage, parenthood, more travels into strange new societies and unfamiliar new ecosystems. Merely riding my bike around the block will never bring me that sense of opening again, yet something important that sprouted that first time stays with me, the same emotion but arising from new forms. I know the world is infinitely bigger than I will ever be, so I know that the newness and discovery will always remain inexhaustible. My memory plays a critical role in that awareness. Yet, time will eventually burn it out. My body will hold me back until my discoveries get smaller and smaller. But—when I hobble out to the garden one last time on the morning just before my heart finally grinds to a stop later that afternoon and I discover my last fresh violet, I’ll remember the thrill of seeing Paris for the first time, and I’ll know that while Paris encompasses a hundred million blossoms just as complex and vivid, and museums overflowing with art works that were the very apotheosis of the careers of many thousands of the world’s greatest artists, and architecture just as necessary, and street performers, wine and croissants, gorgeous women in stylish clothes kissing their lovers by the riverbank, perfumes wafting around the corners of tiled Metro stations where Spanish guitar masters play their classic hand-crafted instruments for coins, and feel privileged to enrich our days—I’ll have that first bike ride at hand, and the thrill of being in Paris, and Budapest, and the day my son was born, the mountain I climbed, and all else, at hand, and I’ll have it all again in a violet. I won’t care what comes next. It won’t matter. Memory fills and inspirits our moments, yet only the now-instant’s burning purple ever really matters.

#148 Glimmerings

[No online link available.]

Another in a long line of Delmore Schwartz Dream Song elegies. The man’s death had an effect on Mr. B., clearly. It’s a pretty good representation of what depression can do to one’s focus. Losing interest in projects under way, lying lazy in the sun, sketching out other projects (even in depression some minds never stop), finally a statement of regret to everyone just arriving here in life or on the way: Sorry. It’s not as great as you might think. There’s death and woe in the world. A depressed, depressing statement. The “glimmerings” are of suicide, I’m afraid.

But rather that wallow in that kind of stuff, since this is a bright, early summer day full of sun and promise, and I don’t feel depressed at all (sorry, Henry), let’s look into a Delmore Schwartz poem and see what all the fuss is about.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171348

“The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” is a philosophical exploration of the relationship between body and self, and there’s a clear separation between the two. The self speaks, the self perceives, and alongside stumbles this lumbering, wallowing, drooling bruin appetite that goes wherever the speaker goes. Here’s the key: “Trembles to think that his quivering meat / Must finally wince to nothing at all.” Doesn’t quite seem fair, does it? I’m separate from my body, but when it finally winces to nothing at all, so do I—as far as I can tell. In that thought right there is the genesis of all the world’s afterlife myths, from heaven and hell, to reincarnation: The body may die, but I sure as hell won’t. Not me. Nosirree. I got plans.

Of course, maybe the spirit does live on after death, and in that case, I’m being a bit of a smart aleck. More people believe that than not, and who am I to question it? This poem, and the orientation that separates mind from body, has to be spiritual in nature from the beginning: There is my matter, here is my spirit. Therefore, there is spirit somehow within creation. I think this is where Schwartz is coming from. René “I Think Therefore I Am” Descartes would approve. I don’t find it satisfying. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s understanding of matter and spirit broadens things a bit: Matter has spirit inherent in it, that’s part of what makes it matter, and as we move up the ladder of complexity from crystal to petunia to elk to poet, that spirit focuses more and more, and more and more finely, finally into perception and awareness. For Teilhard, the Jesuit priest, spirit inherent in matter is God’s presence in the universe. And what that means is that if I see my body as lumbering alongside me like a drooling, sex-starved and ravenously hungry grizzly bear, on one hand I’m missing something in that I don’t see that bear as fundamentally an aspect God’s presence and God’s love, but on the other hand the fact that I can think and experience at all, attached to a body or not, is not just the me of me perceiving, it’s the God in me that’s perceiving. We are one. He’s part of me. To perceive—even to perceive one’s body stumbling along over there—is to participate in universal holiness. I think that’s a fundamental tenant of Christian belief. Teilhard sees my awareness as an inevitable result of the universe’s God-filled substance.

God is a bear.

#147

[No online link available.]

An intense lament, where the grief at losing a friend (Delmore Schwartz) strips away the joys and rewards and nobility and even the decency of being alive. The speaker reduces himself and everyone else to a number of pretty ugly images: “the act of an aged whore,” “the leavings of a hag,” Marcus Aurelius’s pronouncement that “All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.” Finally: “The world is lunatic.” “He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.”

Well, it’s kind of melodramatic, but I won’t push that judgement too hard. An emotional poem is often a snapshot, an artifact that fixes in time something that otherwise would go fleeting away. A poem is also an exercise, word play and word puzzlement, even when it’s addressing something that is undeniably hurtful. And clearly, the death of Schwartz affected the poet on a deep level. There’s nothing wrong with that.

At the end, there is a reference to DS 1—“Once in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, and I sang.” Here, he remembers this incident again: “High in the summer branches the poet sang.” But it follows with: “Hís throat ached, and he could sing no more.” Then: “All ears closed.” There threatens to be no more singing.

The irony is that the poem (the song) falls to the page anyway; he sings about not being able to sing. It may be a posing in grief, or it may be that the grief is real and shuts the poet down on one level, but on another he keeps writing in the same way that his heart continues beating: Perhaps this is not a matter of volition, writing. It’s a physiological mode of being, the brain putting out poems awake like it puts out dreams asleep, a necessary aspect of its functioning. It dreams and it sings automatically. I’m going with that. I think mockingbirds choose their songs with a certain volition too; I think they make aesthetic choices about whom they’ll imitate, based on their tastes and their values and their assessment of the territorial competition for which their songs are weaponry. They also sing because there is no choice but to sing. Their hearts beat and their throats make song. Because they’re birds.

A mockingbird used to sing on our chimney, and the acoustic peculiarities of the house and chimney amplified the song and broadcast it like a PA system speaker out of the fireplace and through the whole house. It was a lovely way to come awake on Saturday mornings. For the bird, it was all serious business. Songs never have a single meaning.

#146

[No online link available.]

The first of twelve (!) elegies to B.’s friend, the poet Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz’s reputation was growing until mental illness took over and he retreated from public view, growing paranoid, rejecting his friends and family, writing constantly but publishing little of his work. He died in 1966, alone, of a heart attack in a New York hotel, where had been holed up, writing furiously the whole time, but it took authorities three days to find someone to claim his body. So, a difficult ending, but who knows? Maybe the opportunity to write without expectations or an audience is liberating for someone infected with the need to free himself through bursts of language.

Early on, before mental illness took over, he was learned, philosophical and intense, and B. became good friends with him, meeting through the social and professional networking structures that high-placed literati call into being.

Toward the end of the poem, Henry declares, speaking of the dead, “’Down with them all!’” Their deaths were theirs, Henry waits for his own. “I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, / but they are past it all, I have not done”. He’s holding himself up to the accomplishments of the great poets who have lived and worked, and he’s finding himself and his work wanting. It’s a lament of unattained glory fueled by ambition.

So, here’s a philosophical and political poem after the little of Delmore Schwartz I’ve read, but with no pretense of imitation, gratitude, nor elegy:

 

The Weight of Books, the White of Glory

The weight of books comforts, the obdurate

Fragrance of sewn paper a thermal blanket

Against the frost of our Confederate

Renaissance. Poe knew that fust 

And reported his findings: Red Deaths

In a black room, a stone mansion

Crumbling into its tarn. The breaths

Of slaves corroded the oaken boards

Of grand white houses, breaths which frighten

Like shades in revolt, so history urges

Again to make the cold grip tighten

Since those others have forgone 

Their rightful places. Book spines fade

In the light, their papers crumble.

To open and hotly take is to trade

A bleachèd glory. Mine eyes

Have seen. Mine eyes have weighed

The glory of the soulless lords,

Found them light and feeble, afraid

Of blanched mist and airy lies.

KZ

#145

http://april-is.tumblr.com/post/87758898/april-28-2006-dream-song-145-john-berryman

“Whitman on his tower” is a reference again to Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed a tower at the University of Texas with a rifle and other weapons and started shooting. He killed 14 people from the tower and had killed his wife and mother earlier. Some 30+ were wounded. He was eventually gunned down by a policeman who climbed up the tower to take him out. Whitman’s name ought to be forgotten, and it mostly is, but B. brings it up here—fresh after the incident, obviously—because of the comparison he makes between Whitman and his father.

B.’s father, of course, died when B. was 11. Suicide was the official conclusion from the police, and B. is careful all through The Dream Songs to call it only that and gauge his heavy emotional responses accordingly. But the details pretty clearly point at something else, a murder, either by B.’s mother, or her boyfriend, or both. It happened on the day they were to finalize a divorce, that B.’s father didn’t want—his mistress had stolen all the money she could get from him and taken off—and the night before they had had a loud, angry fight. She was most certainly afraid of him, for herself and for her children, because he had threatened to drown the boys and had been carrying a gun around. It seems quite plausible that the mother or her boyfriend took action and put a stop to the threats. Berryman must have known all this on some level, and in psychotherapy, this possibility had come out and was discussed. So he did know, but chose not to address it in the work.

There is an odd sense of empathy for the shooter in the tower, that arrives through a sense of empathy with the father he is being compared with. One can imagine that Hitler, in the last days of the war he started, cowering in his Berlin bunker with the Russian army approaching from one side and the British, French and American armies from the other, was absolutely terrified. Doesn’t change what we think of him one bit, does it? Not after what he caused. Empathy, forgiveness and understanding, even as the noble and necessary emotions they are, still get overwhelmed by a comprehension of the evils that led to the predicament that sparks the empathy. Empathy for such a monster’s suffering is tough to maintain. B. does it for just a moment, noting how bad the shooter in the tower must have felt, even as he kept murdering. The father is separated from this by the simple acknowledgement that he didn’t do what he had threatened. The sons lived on, to deal with the wreckage left behind. That shooter in the tower knew he was on a suicide mission; he just tried to do all the damage he could, inflict all the woe he could, while he could. And, gosh, he must have felt pretty awful about it.

The stance of the poet here is that the father did what he had to do, which included taking out himself before he accomplished something even worse. To not swim into the Gulf with his sons in his arms arises as an act of love, and B. seems to be treating it that way. The real situation, that B. doesn’t treat at all, tells a different and actually less complicated story. The father didn’t stop himself. He got stopped.

I’m aware at the moment of how much literature has taught me. I don’t deal with wretchedness all that much in my life. I’ve been afraid, I’ve experienced pain that exhausted me so that I couldn’t resist any longer, and I’ve had to face the consequences of my bad behavior and bad choices. But that’s just being human. I’ve always experienced this as something that will go away if I take action, or wait it out, or get help, because nothing bad enough can really get below the root of my self-esteem or my sense of well-being. It’s the gift a more or less healthy body and a loving family. These sufferings are anomalies. I know that this could change. But I have known people in genuine distress, several who have come to the edge of suicide, and some who have gone over the edge. That was all just baffling. Books have taken me, myself, over. Stories of real people, characters made up, poems. Well, here is a story of a real person. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus struck me so hard when I read it in college, with its characterization of the suffering of the damned in hell manifesting as laughter. Not a mirthful chuckle, obviously, no gleeful belly laughs here. The manic, crazed laughter of the tormented who can never even dare hope for relief, not even through death. That’s an extreme, melodramatic conception, and I fear something facile about relating it to any real life, but I think Berryman plays that conception out in his work. Probably it’s deliberate. The strategy seems to have worked.

I can’t pin down something, and I’m not sure I can articulate the question. If you only approach the poems from the inside, then they tell one story: My father committed suicide when I was a boy, the psychological and emotional blow was so severe that my subsequent emotional development was stymied, causing me to fuck up my life and at the same time I have used the pain as a wellspring for championship books of poetry. I live at both extremes. But when we readers poke around outside of the poetry, into the life that ostensibly supports it in pretty fine detail, we find a different story. Clearly, the hurt is real. The father is dead. Don’t people get over it after 40 years, though? No, not get over, but emplace it, build a fence around it, cover it in wax like honeybees do with the invading mouse they stung to death. But, this story has some shelf life, so he runs with it instead, and to justify it, he doubles down, time and again through questionable behaviors. People live out artificial personas all the time. His eased the way into emotional crimes. It greased one outrage after another and one triumph after another.

This is the problem that adheres to all autobiography. Even the most boring life is too complex to fit into a book, or series of books, or 385 desperate poems. So the author chooses to include this and exclude that, and so in the process rewrites his life—he isolates a thesis, chooses to support it, leaves out details that don’t support it. I teach exactly this to developing writers every day. So, this is what we have to expect. St. Augustine, John Stuart Mill, Dorothy Wordsworth, Rousseau—just a few of the great autobiographers—choose their details carefully, honestly, and derive a compelling thesis from them to which readers respond. Thomas Wolfe, D.H. Lawrence, others, fictionalize it, which gives them a bit more room for creative invention. I tend to think that B. probably goes even a bit further, and I think he knew it. So how seriously do we take the psychological insights that arise from the work? To the same extent we respond to fiction: Since a thinking human being wrote it, somehow, there will arise something of value if it’s any good and if we recognize it. I’m to the point now where questions of whether the psychological insights are real or not need to subside. Do they resonate with a reader? Great! Join company with Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary and, as well, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Makes no difference. Does it feel like horse hockey? Okay, well: Has Dick Cheney written an autobiography yet?

The poems are tight, or not, often they’re linguistically inventive and clever, and they engage with a broader world that has receded into history now. Vietnam, the Soviet Union, the Civil Rights Movement, Eisenhower and the Kennedys—history. Lots to learn there. About the poet’s emotional, psychological struggles and social missteps? If something valuable seems to arise, cool. If not, there’s no point worrying about it. And if Dick Cheney does write an autobiography, I have no intention of reading it, because a liar lies, and who cares about that? Unless it’s well done, and the liar is honest about his lies, like all fiction writers, then okay, show me what you’ve got. In the end, I don’t think we have a liar of Dick F***ing Cheney’s grandmaster caliber here. It doesn’t seem that way, if for no other reason than that the work has an almost irresistible draw. I’m hardly the first person to feel it. I know also that the subject matter of the poems has put off some friends—the sexism and racism in one case, and the desperate tone of the struggling in another, and the just the general obscurity in several friends who don't feel the need to summon the patience for poetry it takes to open up some of these. But I find them gripping and sometimes a bit repulsive, but not enough to make me turn completely to writing poems about butterflies every day.

So, I’m not quite sure where this ramble led, exactly, only that I’m not taking the “confessional” poet so much at his word anymore. You’re not fooling me, John Berryman! But show me what you’ve got anyway, and we’ll see. And I’m not getting suckered, and I don’t have to get sucked in. I declare that I will write butterfly poems in response to your suicide poems if that’s what I feel like. At any rate, this poem ends Book V of The Dream Songs. Something different may yet arise!

#144

[No online link available.]

Douroucoulis are nocturnal monkeys that live in South and Central America. They have large, owl-like eyes, and they watch people from the trees. The image of the iron pear, rammed down the narrator’s throat, which then swells and cracks his skull: A symbol for the grief rammed down his throat as a youngster. These Dream Songs often arrange thematically in groups of three. We’re in the middle of the suicide/grief triplet that ends Book V of The Dream Songs. I’ll engage with that further tomorrow. For today, a poem, about eyes and light, and pressures that crack our skulls and spontaneously combust.

Firelights

Once around a campfire, red

Coals shone from the woods

Embers boring into embers

Drilling holes in our repose,

A welder’s sparks through tissue.

That they resolved into the eyes

Of hungry bears was less

Disturbing than the specters

We felt leaping there at first,

Though a bear, in a forest,

Who has designs on your dinner,

Is strong medicine enough: Dank

Stink and musk, ursine slobber

And the ceaseless pressure:

Pressure to take and eat, pressure

To gulp organic creation

Down and through its rumbling

Guts and glorify it all to shit.

Bears who famished stare at us

Stare as brothers. Then the moths

Arrived. Sparks of the fiery

Forest in familial red eyes

Pressured by that strange

Mothly drive to eat light

Which they did eat of freely,

And ate, until their wings

Burst into flames

And they smoked and crashed

Like vanquished fighter planes

Brothers too, the night

Shining in the sated red

Lights of their burning eyes.

KZ

#143

—That’s enough of that, Mr. Bones. Some lady you make.

Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man,

I’ll sing you now a song

the like of which may bring your heart to break:

he’s gone! and we don’t know where. When he began

taking the pistol out & along, 

you was just a little; but gross fears

accompanied us along the beaches, pal.

My mother was scared almost to death.

He was going to swim out, with me, forevers,

and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent     Gulf,

but he decided on lead.

That mad drive wiped out my childhood. I put him down

while all the same on forty years I love him

stashed in Oklahoma

besides his brother Will. Bite the nerve of the town

for anyone so desperate. I repeat: I love him

until I fall into coma.

 

The movement from “Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man” directly to the recapping of his father’s suicide, coming out of the voice of the blackface conscience, is telling. While on one hand it’s not fair to judge anyone’s grief at a serious loss like the suicide (or murder) of one’s father, this is a more than tacit charge that the grief in question, genuine as it might be, has nevertheless been made theatrical. It has been dressed in blackface and it belts out tunes and tap dances, does the old soft-shoe and cracks corny jokes, and there it is, a show-stopping, prize-winning song-and-dance, a showbiz act that brings the house down. Then the voice, right after “pal” switches abruptly to the poet’s: “my mother was scared almost to death” and it hints at another thing, again, about the incident. “He was going swim out with me”, in other words, take me with him—wherever he was headed. Was that not a threat? His mother was afraid. B. plays the suicide angle in these poems almost without a break, but evidence seems to point to his father being shot from a distance. If the father had been making threats against the mother’s child, probably her as well, then it all resolves into a different focus, doesn’t it? I know that he revisits this in 145, and adds something to strengthen this, but I’ll wait. For now, whatever happened, it was tragic and ugly. But I think there’s more than a hint that B. at some level knows what happened better than he lets on, and he knows why it happened. Whatever it really was, there for sure was a family situation flying off the rails into absolute wreckage—affairs on both sides, crippling debts, suicide or murder. Uncomfortable, heavy stuff for outsiders to gaze at. From inside the experience—crippling. Sure. The last part of the poem isn’t showbiz, I don’t think. The showbiz was an accusation anyway, and though it’s in the voice of the blackface conscience, of course B. is levelling against himself. But the last lines just seem an uncomplicated, honest statement, about something that’s always there and that always hurts. It’s quite human, quite understandable, and sad. You get pinned by something like this, and all the life’s subsequent choices—the alcohol, the bad behavior with and against women, the money woes, the obsessive writing, the brilliant teaching, the public weirdness and disgrace, the public accolades of genius—it all resolves into a grand public squirming, consequences of the wound that doesn’t let up. If it has been made theatrical through the art, that’s part of its character. It’s sad and it’s hellish, and the laughter that rises from it, and the social missteps and the lifelong faux pas, are sometimes manic and sometimes just exhausted. Might as well laugh at it, there’s nothing else left. So I’m aware today of the impact of long-term emotional intensity, and feeling forgiving of the consequences of that. We all have our crosses to bear—it’s the oldest cliché going—but some are heavier than others, and life isn’t fair to an eleven year old about the woes it doles out. For someone with intelligence and an aesthetic sensitivity, you turn around on your own feelings and make something of them, and you make something of your own suffering. Don’t I admire that? On some level, yeah, I think so.

#142

[No online link available.]

Well, there’s something noble—I guess—in turning away from that next affair, especially when she’s married, and he’s married to a beautiful, young, volcanic Irish woman, and he succumbed so many times before anyway, unfaithfulness to those previous other wives a previous mode of his being. The poem is a pretty flat description of a soiree’s aftermath, sticking around and then: “The animal moment, when    he sorted out her tail / in a rump session with the vivid hostess.” Collective eye rolls here, I have to imagine, and it doesn’t do much more for me than a trigger a half-mirthless chuckle. Whatever. A “rump session”? Really? Well, she said, apparently, “I’d like to have your baby, but, she moaned, / I’m married.” Takes two to tango, no doubt about it. Sounds like a pretty clear rump session offer to me.

He realizes he couldn’t have forgiven himself nor atoned, so the man regretfully passes on the pass. Then he writes a poem about it, and here I sit, 50 years later, thinking, you published this? Can we get back to the Cold War, please? Racial injustice? Carnage in Vietnam? Nuclear annihilation? Anything. Pull your damn pants up for Chrissake.

“—I knew what I knew when I knew when I was astray,” he admits. “all those bright painful years, forgiving all / but when Henry & his wives came to blows.” Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe the old goat learned something.

Henry’s blackface conscience pipes up with a comment that he’s strong on morals these days, eh? “It’s good to be faithful but it ain’t natural.” Evolutionary behaviorists aren’t quite unanimous on this one, from what I gather. A friend remarked yesterday that sexist jerks are a dime a dozen. We’re to admire it when he makes an effort to grow up a bit? Like, thirty years too late? I am bored. And to think the last third of my coffee got cold. But, Mr. Bones, you strikes me as intolerant. That’s why god invented microwave ovens & such.

Heading back to the kitchen…

#141

One was down on Mass. One on the masses.

Both grew Henry. What cause shall he cry

down the dead of Minnesota winter

without a singular follower nearby

among who seem to live entirely on passes

espouse for him or his printer? 

Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol

himself & for his spouse & brood, barely.

Nude he danced in his snow

waking perspiring. He’d’ve run off to sea

(but for his studies careful of the Fall)

twenty-odd years ago. 

Duly he does his needful little then

with a chest of ice, a head tipping with pain.

That perhaps is his programme,

cause: Henry for Henry in his main:

he’ll push it: down with anything Bostonian:

even god howled ‘I am’. 

Ars poetica is to write poetry about poetry or about being a poet. That’s the tradition this one lines up with. (For all their structural uniformity, The Dream Songs are still pretty varied as to their subject and to the awareness B. has regarding the tradition he’s working in and against.) You see the ars poetica approach forming with “What cause shall he cry”. “Nude he danced in his snow” looks to me like a reference to his work as performance, although there’s the self-deprecating characterization of it that comes after as “needful little”—that which needs to be done but is “little” in that it doesn’t cost nor accomplish much. It’s an apt phrase, “nude he danced,” since in his poems he undergoes such constant psychological stripping: Here I am, screwed up and ridiculous. Take it or leave it. He’d have run off to sea, except for his studies of the Fall—the outrageous BS the world serves up and that demands commentary and usually scorn. “Anything Bostonian” is clearly the world of sophistication, publishing, the decadent, mannered and mannerist art establishment. There’s no possibility of an “I” in that world, he’s saying. “Even god howled ‘I am’.”

Which causes this poem to strike me as a more direct and frank assessment of himself and his work than we usually get. That sense of erasure and cowering retreat, the emotional devastation, I’ve been seeing them more and more as poses, constructs whose purpose is to feed the art, but they become monstrous when they feedback onto the person, who then lives them out in order to justify them, in a positive feedback loop (that includes alcohol) that becomes devastating. This poem in its final statement asserts the opposite: It asserts the self against the pressures that would prompt its retreat.

It’s not that the pose I mention is only a construct. It is, but it isn’t because his life as it is, is. [I know. I’ve been reading an awful lot of Berryman lately and it’s having its effect on me.] Or, his life as it was, was. (He’s dead.) His art unfolds as it is because his life unfolded as it was. OK, what I’m saying is that this art/life complex, all scumbled together, is both construct, pose on one hand, and the real deal on the other. Depends on how you look at it. Try to pin it down and it slips away. That’s the whole point, so welcome to postmodernism—like trying to catch a butterfly in your hands, or clobbering a knuckleball, or as they say, nailing Jell-O to a wall. On some days you get a statement like, “somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away / into mountains or sea or sky, leaving / behind: me, wag.” You shake your head and say, Where did he go? On other days, “Even god howled ‘I am’.” Hey, there he is, dancing nude in his snow and sweating as he does it. What a bizarre spectacle that makes. Even the most reticent artist is a show-off!

#140

[No online link available.]

This one refers a couple times to the cornerstone Dream Song 1. DS 1 ends with, “Hard on the land wears the strong sea / and empty grows every bed.” Recognition of the wearing of age, the accumulation of cuts and bruises on the body is one aspect of life, and try as we might to hold it off with creams or surgery, in the end the Sea of Time wears out the land in this struggle. Our beds grow empty. It’s best to accept this, right? Doesn’t make it any easier to bear, but perhaps it does. This is a sustained motif throughout The Dream Songs. Self-abuse, substance abuse, make the anxiety that attends thoughts of mortality more acute in this long poem; because mortality comes on even faster and is attended by such a strong sense of regret. In the first stanza of DS 140, “Henry is vanishing.” “He broods & recedes.” Brooding and receding are also sustained motifs (in the famous DS 14, he recedes into his boredom till the only thing left is “me, wag”). Then in DS 140 comes this really interesting reference to DS 1 again: “I saw his point, / remains much, probably, but not enough.” This wouldn’t make any sense without recalling DS 1: “I see his point—, a trying to put things over. / It was the thought that they thought / they could do it made Henry wicked & away.” A line like “a trying to put things over” is tough to figure out, and even the most experienced and conscientious reader is liable to pass it over. It’s that unusual use of “put” that makes the interpretation a challenge. Now, a new reading of this line strikes me. It means something like a trying to make things stop, in others words put it to being over, end it.. Enough. End what? The ills of the world by commenting on them, assert the power of art for change, but maybe not, maybe it’s just a reference to this sustained campaign of self-erasure that mark The Dream Songs. Here’s the thing that makes poetry so endlessly fascinating for some heads who can accommodate it and so frustrating and enraging for others: it probably means all this stuff and even more I haven’t thought of yet. All at once. But, the poet, whatever it is he’s doing, is doing something. It means much. Perhaps. Perhaps not enough—there is real doubt in the poet right now as he feels himself disarticulating, “joint by joint”, that it’s ever going to matter.

I’m sticking with my agreement that it’s the thought they thought they could do it that so infuriates, often to helplessness. (We become Bob Dylan’s “Napoleon in rags,” cursing at seagulls on our self-imposed, far-off island prisons.) We don’t need the antecedent for “they” here; we know who B.’s addressing: Power. And it’s power’s arrogance and self-aggrandizing focus that is always, always the matter. You see it in state, national and world politics, you see it in corporate decision-making, you potentially see it in the administration of non-profit organizations, small Catholic liberal arts colleges, Boy Scout troops, book clubs, families, marriages—wherever one party gains power, whether built-in or taken, over others. It’s not always insufferable, corrupt, tyrannical; there are wise, concerned and gentle leaders. That fact just makes the recognition of tyranny when it arrives that much worse. On the world-stage level, animals go extinct, mountain ranges are levelled, hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions at a time, see their lives destroyed. WTF?

Another motif of The Dream Songs is the brutal awareness of the personal intricacies of the suffering poet splayed out beneath these greater, broader outrages. So it is here. “Does it advantage him, weak / / with violent effort, rickety, on the stairs”. The question remains unpunctuated and slides right into this: “It’s a race with Time & that is all it is, / almost, given the conditions / & the faceless monsters of the Soviet Unions”. Note that it’s not the singular Soviet Union, which would be a specific reference; it’s plural, where “the Soviet Unions” takes on symbolic representation of all modes of world-threatening power, including The US Air Force’s fleet of Minuteman missiles, the chemical warfare arsenal from corporations like Monsanto—Agent Orange, Napalm (in our day, Round-Up, PCBs, HFC, etc., etc., etc.)—the impoverishing activities of political power brokers, Wall Street financiers, and on and on, the same sold familiar, dispiriting list. It all culminates in the poem with the image of the first atomic bomb going off over New Mexico: “The shadows, under the tower, in the most brilliant sun / will get us nowhere too.” Those last two lines are self-explanatory.

In my poem from two days ago, in response to DS 138, I picked up on this broad existential dread of nihilistic, self-destructive tendencies that are certainly one way to respond to the bullshit overrunning the world. I ran with it for a time, et voilà la poème. It was valid in the 1960s and it drove the so-called Counter Culture in response. It’s true now, with environmental apocalypse replacing nuclear annihilation as the chief threat motivating thoughts of despair in the face of looming extinction. There are others: blooming racisms and misogyny, appalling income disparity, wars over oil and water in the Middle East. Take your pick, according to your lights. But I want to begin to question this approach of despair as a world-response, because in the end it’s a slog into the mire of hopelessness. There are reasons to think that the world is moving away from the establishment, and the powers in power are helpless to stop it, which is what makes them for this moment that much more virulent. Their virulence is born of the desperation of approaching revolution. We’ll see. The 60s gave birth to some real change. Much of what was progressively accomplished is under attack. But it happened. What matters more is the consciousness of the individual within the community: All this dread feeds itself, which is partly the tactic that disempowers the person and by extension his meaningful community. There are ways around it. Without those ways, you get stuck with depression, self-inflicted decay, nihilism, suicide, and you play with it right into the hands of power who wanted that for you in the first place. It shuts you up. B. was victimized by broad insensible power in the world, by circumstances emotional and actual, and by substance abuse, that together fed all this despair in him, and it led to a vision of his role on the planet that was dark and helpless. Good for him for speaking back. It was heroic, but here he’s fearing it was pointless in the end. That remains an open question. I’ll follow him, and I’ll respond to his despair as legitimate psychologically and historically, but also, for me, I declare: fuck that.

We’ll just have to see.

#139

[No online link available.]

This Dream Song is an outright expression of grief. The first line sets it up: “Green grieves the Prince over his girl foregone.” The speaker makes allusions to tragic theatrical personae: Prince, Rabbi, Celt, which dramatize the statement of regret over ruined relationships. “old men fail to follow either the pain— / Why did he leave her?— / or the fascinated blood that led to an end”. He finishes up with a description of a relationship left “cold as a toad,” and an image of a door not closed but never again to open enough to go back through, and that final question, one more time, “Why did he leave her?”

Why indeed? Relationships oscillate between fascination and love-making at one extreme, and boredom, irritation, and preoccupation elsewhere (and more) at the other. The latter can sometimes drain the fascinated blood from relationship till it’s cold as a toad, but when the oscillation continues, and if the lover has been chased off during the emotional pendulum’s previous extremes, there arrives this kind of moment of grief and regret. Why did I leave her? I need her now and she’s gone. Woe. Perhaps later he’ll remember, she bored me, or her carping at me grew tiresome, or I couldn’t stand the sounds she makes when she eats, or look, she was wonderful but I really was more interested in drinking and picking up strange women anyway. But that’s later. For now, the emotional moment has been captured.

Othello ruins his relationship with Desdemona, at Iago’s prodding, and in his jealous fury he smothers her in bed. When the truth comes out that Iago was the villain setting it all up, Othello reaches this very same emotional moment, except it’s even worse because “Why did I leave her?” has transformed into the even more difficult “Why did I kill her?” He can’t live with it and kills himself. Paul Simon claims there are fifty ways to leave your lover, and asphyxiating her with a pillow turns out to be one of them. But unless she’s psychopathically dangerous and insufferable, Shakespeare is hinting that it’s not the best option. “Slip out the back, Jack” is probably better.

The thing about slipping out the back, Jack, is that you need to keep moving once you’re gone. When you stop and look over your shoulder, that cold toad-ghost can catch up and then you have to suffer through a moment of regret and grief like this poem records. I know we all do it, if only because we need to slow down and rest now and then. I still carry around traces of this childish notion that accomplished people become accomplished because they’re strong, active, progressive, and committed, and consequently don’t ever stop long enough to let regrets like this catch them. I ran into a mention yesterday that Berryman was rated by somebody at #138 in the ranking of the top 500 poets who have written in English, which is a silly notion, but it speaks to the man’s artistic accomplishment—which by the way, was largely built out of his emotional wreckage. This poem is one well-kilned brick in that edifice.

#138 Combat Assignment

[No online link available.]

Oh, gosh:

1.”Look for the worst.” We come into the world accursed, but “some craved out of that” like out of the hopelessness of a Calcutta alley. The odd use of “craved” as an intransitive verb is killer. The desperately desirous ambitious rise to power, in other words.

2. “Grope for the cause” and you learn that all those who have something to say now are “comfortably established.” No kidding. Power will safeguard the status quo that led to its power, no matter how nightmarish that status quo for the vast powerless.

3. Atomic warfare? It blew off the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s just as well the stuff rolled away. Think of the problems that would solve! Yep, in the bitterest of ironies, there’s no doubt about that. Extinction is one excellent avenue down which we may solve the political and economic justice issues of the world.

4. The Dream Song form is stretched with three extra lines. An old leather chair, which has supported and comforted numerous friends, has its guts showing.

Powerful. Here’s a response:

 

Richly to My Burning

There clings the blithe air around my planet

Brittle as onionskin.

Gas it, hey, and the Tongass beneath bursts

Into brilliant celebratory flames

The Chukchi Sea

A well-salted

Walrus and narwhal broth.

The blueblack pole

Signals Mars for a gift of white ice

Which winks a bloodspot in the blackpeppered night

And hangs otherwise aloof.

I will walk richly then to my burning

Joan of Arc’s brother

Head haughty, contemptuous as a saint of the English

Oil, the Royal Dutch

And Double-Exxèd Oil,

Ecstatic at the gas-fired whites that sear my blithe onionskin,

Throughput to cool oblivion.

Problems solved

In the sanctifying fire:

Holy: Nil.

KZ

#137

[Note: The online links to individual Dream Songs, of which there have always been six or more to choose from, suddenly stop at #137. I have no idea why, but I think it’s likely there are copyright restrictions from the publisher of The Dream Songs. There are scattered other Dream Songs linked down the line, but only a few. One may link to online material without permission, but until I’m clear that typing out the poems falls under fair use, or until I get permission from the publisher, I don’t think I can present them all here. Fair use guidelines suggest that, “Where a poet’s work is reasonably available for purchase in volume form, compilers should restrict themselves to the use of single or isolated poems only.” Which I interpret to mean that for now I’ll be able to include a poem occasionally, and I will for today, but I’m not yet sure I can do it every day. Sorry! I’m working on it. I still hope you’ll keep reading. I’ll keep writing.]

For today, anyway, here’s the poem, Dream Song 137, in all its glory, unavailable online:

Many’s the dawn sad Henry has seen in,

many’s the sun has lit his slouch to sleep,

many’s a song to sing or vigil keep

of thought if you’re made that way.

An incantation comes in nines: ‘tahn  .  .  bray’:

heroes’ bodies, in circles, thin,

collapsing. I don’t understand this dream,

said Henry to himself in slippers: why,

things are going to pieces.

The furious bonzes sacked vast the Khmer temple

and thought fled: into the jungle. It was that simple.

Long after, spread the treatises. 

Learned & otherelse, upon the ruins.

How is it faith ever finds matters rough?

My honey must flow off in the great rains,

as all the parts thereto do thereto belong

ha, and we are pitched toward the last love,

the last dream, the last song.

 

I see significant parallels between the Khmer temple of Henry’s dream and the physical body of the poet: Both have been sacked. For those familiar with Falstaff in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, you know what “sack” means for Shakespeare’s big guy: Drink. Here is that relation between thought and body again, the overarching metaphor of this poem. If thought is an emanation of a physical brain, which of course it is, then if the brain is abused or overrun, the thoughts that might otherwise emanate from it flow off like honey in the great rains, or the rain of sack. I wonder if it was deliberate that B. chose the word “bonzes” (an Asian Buddhist monk) as those engaged in the sacking of the Khmer temple, which strikes me as close enough to “boozes” to merit a connection, because of course boozes have sacked the temple of more than one hero’s body as it finally collapsed into bed just behind the painful sunrise that came streaming in through the bedroom blinds.

“How is it faith ever finds matters rough?” Faith, in this world, isn’t always enough. Neither is beauty. Somebody, or something, might just sack your temple if you don’t take care of it, defend it. There are myths galore—Greek, Biblical, indigenous, others—of the Creator/Protector taking action to defend the faithful. In the real world: Temples get sacked. I toured Tintern Abbey in Wales last summer, a gorgeous gothic church and monastery complex, now in ruins, that got choked off, ripped off, and effectively sacked by King Henry VIII, he of the famed six wives, desperate for sons, and feuding with the Church of Rome. The faithful monks, depending on their faith, prayer and good works to protect them, succumbed anyhow to a tyrant king. So goes world history as often as not.

To be “pitched toward the last love, / the last dream, the last song”: There’s the referential mention of the Dream Songs, and maybe a recognition coming out of that dream that things cannot go on like this. But there’s a music throughout this whole poem, I think, a nice poem as a poem, with an incantatory beauty to my ears that lines it up with the holy incantations it refers to. But they’re elegiac incantations. If B., or Henry, says he didn’t get the dream at first, he does figure it out by poem’s end. The dream is symbolic of a fear: If the heroes defending the temple are circled, backed down, finally collapsing, and the temple is sacked, nothing of beauty or spiritual significance will flow from it again—including dreams and songs and Dream Songs.

#136

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_136_While_his_wife_earned_the_living_Rabbi_Henry_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

I once toured the Creationist Museum here in Kentucky with a friend who was writing an article about it. We saw such wonders as a model of Noah’s Ark with an Ornithomimus dinosaur curled up napping in one of the stalls, a life-sized model of another dinosaur with a saddle on it, Adam and Eve hanging out in Eden with a vegetarian tiger, and a life-history timeline that stretched back just over 6000 years to the seven days of creation. One exhibit had a representation of a filthy graffiti-smeared alleyway with gunfire and sirens blaring over hidden speakers, and descriptions claiming that the nightmarish urban violence (it was completely understood that black urban ghettoes are at issue) being depicted arose as a result of humanity’s not listening to the literal admonitions of scripture. It was all such utter bullshit of the most ridiculous order, yet there it is, taking in umpteen hundreds of thousands of patrons who pay admission to a well-designed museum in order to try and learn something about their history and their faith. Talking about it afterwards, I made a comment that made its way into my friend’s article, that fundamentalism essentially strips the life out of scripture, which to be relevant and alive needs to be continuously reinterpreted in light of ongoing changes in social norms, scientific discoveries, etc. We do this with Shakespeare all the time, and as a result, Shakespeare is alive and well and as relevant as ever in the over 400 years since his plays were written. I’ve since gone further and now see Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as a form of idolatry. As I might have noted here before, you crush the life out of scripture then preserve it in a jar of ideological formaldehyde. Then you worship the jar’s contents, a variation on the “graven image” the Ten Commandments or Ten Statements found in the Bible and the Torah warn against.

When Henry calls himself a rabbi, he is joking. I imagine he probably did talk about the Torah in his teachings since it’s such a critical foundation of Judeo-Christian and thus Western philosophy, and anyway, he claims he teaches around the fringes of the Torah and there’s no reason to doubt it. This poem has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian philosophy, however. It’s all about the fundamentalist urge to fix scripture, to kill it and pose it in other words, like the Creationist Museum does or like a butterfly collector does with his butterflies. I used to collect butterflies when I was a fundamentalist child: Net them, kill them, mount them, then line them up in rows to hang on the wall. And let me assure you that in certain dorkish young heads like mine was, that urge can be fierce. (Charles Darwin had it. While collecting beetles as a boy, he ran into three new species at once. With one in each hand the third was getting away. He popped one into his mouth. Unfortunately it was a bombardier beetle, which has a defense mechanism of shooting some blazing hot noxious chemical at its attackers. Darwin gagged and choked and the beetles all got away. Late in his life, Darwin chuckled at his youthful enthusiasm. Let me add here that I totally get it.) For the collector, whatever the dead butterfly has lost as far as liveliness and its literal embodiment of the vitality of nature, it gains in the collector’s sense of control and rigid, easy-to-comprehend order. This matters with butterflies: They are aesthetic objects when mounted, granted, but some of us who study butterflies go through an unsettling period when the bizarre mystery of metamorphosis is so disturbing in its incomprehensibility that we are motivated to reduce the butterfly to an object which can be owned and arranged in order to alleviate that sense of alienation the mystery of the butterfly as living strangeness causes. This is precisely what the fundamentalist does to scripture and the mystery of faith.

But B. is not talking about scripture in the form of the Torah. He’s talking about suicide, and further, one particular suicide that has arisen in his life as his own personal scriptural passage, in which he is indeed “an expert, deep & wide.” B. is holding up that suicide as “scripture,” and his invoking the Second Commandment against graven images is important. He knows the dangers of what he’s been doing all of his professional life, and he calls attention to it himself. It falls into this pattern he’s been doing all along. Can you say racist things as long as you’re deliberate about it and aware that it’s racist? Sure! Can you be a sexist jerk as long as you’re being ironic and funny and saying, look at me, I’m being a sexist jerk? Of course you can! Can you make an artistic fetish of your father’s suicide? I guess you can. I think of early Steve Martin comedy routines, with an arrow through his head, playing a banjo, making jokes about his “funny comedy gags.” He acts so smarmy and arrogant about it, an act, and it is hilarious because there’s a calm intelligence underneath that you can sense. He’s not smarmy at all. Push it to an absurd extreme and it becomes great comedy and a commentary on how we use irony to mask bad intentions. Back it off a bit, and double down by living it, and now it’s art? I wonder.

Actually, I question it. B. does too, and he questions it here, but what happens is that there’s this layering of meaning that arises. It looks real but it’s not but being aware that it’s not legitimizes it anyway. Thomas Mann’s great novel, Doctor Faustus, is a modernist take on Goethe’s Faust, which of course has ancient roots. It has a variation on this kind of movement. Adrian Leverkühn has sold his soul to the devil for 24 years of musical genius and fame. He has this encounter with the Dark One as his day of reckoning approaches, and tries to talk his way out of the bargain by invoking God’s infinite capacity for mercy. From what I can remember, the argument goes something like, I sin and reject God, but he forgives me because he’s infinitely merciful, which allows me to sin further and greater, which he also forgives in an even further and greater fashion, on and on, and his forgiveness is always that much greater than my capacity to sin. Satan responds with what for me became one of the great memorable lines in all the millions I’ve read in my day: “Let me assure you that Hell is filled with just such heads as yours.”

When you’re dealing with a confessional poet, you unfortunately have to deal with the person, in this case someone who in life I likely would have absolutely nothing to do with. I don’t even like him now. But I’m also partly held in check from really going after the guy because I do acknowledge and feel sympathy for the fact that his life was real, it was his, and he suffered in it, probably more than most people suffer in theirs—though obviously that’s a judgement fraught with peril. Many people suffer in their lives, and more often it’s not through bad choices they’ve made. It’s to his enormous credit that he took his suffering and transformed it through this great art of poetry. But there is also something fishy about it, and I think he’s totally aware of it. That suffering was partly a construct, and the art became a complex, high-concept rationale for simple bad behavior, irresponsibility and bad choices. It was a dynamic that fed itself, a dynamic analogous in its way to Leverkühn’s damnation and Steve Martin’s hilarity. And there’s something else: His father’s death was almost certainly not a suicide. There were no powder burns, which means he was shot from a distance. B. had to have known the details and their implications. But he steadfastly refused to ever acknowledge them. Yes, the psychology of such genuine grief is complicated and would understandably set up roadblocks to real understanding. But a grief in response to a suicide drove and also excused everything in his life, shameful and glorious, that followed. It became his own fundamentalist pose, and I think he knew it on some level and is admitting it here.

#135

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_135_I_heard_said_Cats_that_walk_by_their_wild_lone_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Written, obviously, after the notorious mass murders committed by Richard Speck and Charles Whitman, both in the summer of 1966. Speck killed eight nurses in a hospital, Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas and started shooting; he killed 16, wounded over 30. These are names that should best be forgotten, but of course we know that infamy is as effective as fame in service of the common good as far as the immortality of one’s name goes, from Hitler and Pol Pot to Gacy and McVeigh, and scores more. If their names are known, it’s nevertheless due to their legacy of villainy and disgrace. Not a pleasant topic on my last vacation morning at the beach, but I don’t get to choose.

The first stanza is the only one with any complications. There is at first a desire for company that for the moment goes unfulfilled, which we’ve all experienced—it’s unremarkable to have an immediate desire for company and everyone you know is out of reach or busy. Happens. “Shall I follow my dream?” At first, this would seem to be the broad dream of pursuing one’s art and resultant fame, again, pretty level stuff, considering. Maybe it changes some in the stripping that happens, but really, again: Unremarkable. When alone, it’s entirely within the realm of normal behavior to take one’s clothes off and assess the beauty as well the ravages, as pocked and weird as the vision may appear as we age away from the smooth and gleaming youth we so took for granted when we were young. The real turn and complication in the poem comes because this weird, aging and lonesome vision naked in the mirror leads to the stories of Speck and Whitman, with horrifying details. Time ravages our bodies and eventually kills them just as dead as any murderer can: Time/age has proven itself the greatest and most effective of all history’s mass murderers. There’s that. But there’s also this sneaking arrival of a new reading for “my dream” planted in the poem. “Who is what he seem?” indeed. The potential for a false representation of the body and the persona to the person is not necessarily easy to spot, though if one is indeed responsible for one’s face (which I do more or less believe), then the correlations are there to mark. But it takes time, experience and wisdom to see, and danger can be quick in arriving. John Wayne Gacy affected clown makeup to lure the children he murdered, living out a terrible and demented twist on this: If the intent is indeed apparent there in the face, then it is best hidden under makeup.

It comes and goes in the poem, the evil dream vision of the horrible self rising then sinking away again, at least how I see things. The disturbance gives way to the overwhelming reality of actual murder. Look, we all have criminal urges lurking in our depths like psychic barracudas in the colorful, beautiful wonders of a coral reef. They stay hidden when we learn to recognize them and chase them off. There’s nothing at all sick about acknowledging this. In health, revulsion in the contemplation of satisfying these urges wins the day. So it does here, so the details of the knife in the eye and the fusillade of bullets into the bodies of innocent strangers are actually a necessary component of psychic health. Urge? Fine. These things do rise from our depths. Now take a sec to think of the consequences, and that gives us the power to right ourselves. That’s this poem’s motive, a snapshot of what weird loneliness or rage can lure into the open, and a comment on how we deal with it. At the end, the poem also takes an appropriate turn to what we would now in the current political moment call Second Amendment Rights, which has become all about claiming the “rights” of people to arm themselves so that the weird, violent but natural urges we normally experience are given the opportunity to explode into an immediate and unnatural violence that can’t be recalled. (That it’s in reality driven by the profit motive of gun manufacturers is actually a different issue. The consequences of gun marketing [the NRA] feed a gun culture.) Gun culture, the consequence, is profoundly, profoundly and fundamentally sick because of this unnatural acceleration it provides for of normal urges that bloom into scarlet stains of violence—that cannot be recalled. Whitman and Speck did not represent that: They were psychopathic monsters who acted with deliberation. But their presence in the mind of the poet (and which thus find their way into the poem) triggered an engagement with the id-driven violence that fleetingly bubbles up from time to time, which smells like sulfur for a moment but blows away eventually as long as we don’t have weapons in easy reach, when for just the briefest of critical moments “respect for guns” outweighs respect for people, the consequences of which are permanent and will never just blow away. As hard as it might be to swallow, this poem is okay.

#134

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-134:-Sick-at-6-&-sick-again-at-9

For all that things stay the same in the world—our politics are just as out of joint and deadly as they were in the 60s; the environment is still under assault; women’s rights are losing ground—there has been some lasting improvement. It’s still true that for all the complaining one might reasonably engage in, women’s rights are in better shape than they were 50 years ago. Civil rights are in better shape, some of the environmental regulations still have teeth. And one thing that is definitely better is the development of a societal acceptance of the concept of wellness, which B. never seemed to have much awareness of. I wrote once before that his last interviews and readings are pretty striking because of the infirmity so plain in a person who was physically damaged. In and out of the hospital, smoking a pack of cigarettes before 10 am, and the “gas and shit” blowing through his “tail” four times in 2 hours is a literal description, no metaphor. Thanks for that, by the way. Poetry, sheesh.

This was an age when everyone smoked, encouraged by TV ads for cigarettes. I remember layers of cigarette smoke, like cloud strata, stacked in my grandmother’s living room when she had company. I used to fly toy planes through them, playing like I was a pilot. Getting drunk was something you laughed at. Calf’s liver and onions fried in lard was thought to strengthen a person. There had been a beatnik underground smoking marijuana for decades, and jazz hip too often included heroin addiction, but when drug use got established as part of the counterculture mainstream, then drug use went the same route as cigarettes and booze, into nationwide brain-altering excess and eventually physiologic destruction. Artists were no different from anybody else, and I’ve remarked before how so many of the poets of the time destroyed themselves, either by drinking themselves steadily to death or outright suicide. Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and I’m sure others, were poet suicides. Not much later you have the famous trio of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin who all went up in flames from pushing their bodies and spirits past the breaking point.

This poem is a record of persevering through the specter of bodily decay, brought on not by age but by not taking care of the body. Look, daily-meditating vegan yoga masters get sick now and then too. But we know this is not what B. is talking about. He’s a lot like the semi-autobiographical Bob Fosse character Roy Scheider played in All That Jazz. A total wreck in the morning, stagger to the mirror aghast at the image looking back, light a cigarette, swallow the handful of barbiturates and amphetamines it takes to get rolling, three or four cups of coffee in the shower, then the drugs start kicking in, “It’s show time!”, and off to the studio to make your mark as one of the top choreographers on Broadway. Except your physical heartbeat starts wearing thin, and now what? Jessica Lange, ravishing gorgeous blonde death herself, sets out to seduce you, that’s what.

B. knows what’s coming: “One day the whole affair will fall apart / with a rustle of fire, / a wrestle of undoing, as of tossed clocks.” Exactly. Maybe that’s a phrase that deserves wider circulation. “You’re tossing your clock, my friend.” Clocks are delicate and need to be oiled and set on a wall someplace for safekeeping. Pitch one on the floor and they get sprung. What really happens is that they speed up, and the harder they hit the floor, the faster they run your time out.

#133

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-133:-As-he-grew-famousah-but-what-is-fame-

About the hollowness of fame. We’ve been here before, but this is maybe the most straightforward statement yet that fame does not bring what one expects from it before one attains it.

So here’s what I think, being innocent of actual fame myself: You have to ignore it if it arrives as a result of your work. You have to remember that the obsessions, the voicing, are what matters and what have always mattered, and before fame ever comes you have to remember that ambition is about the desire for fame. The satisfaction comes not from success, the satisfaction of ambition, fame, but from the act of making. Which is not to say that recognition is bad. Writers want readers, artists want showings, musicians want an audience. But B. is clear here: The thing he struggled for turned out to be empty.

He gets it at the end. Fame makes him lazy. What matters is the voice and the obsessing. BBC specials? Not so much, apparently. Doesn’t seem like such a bad problem from my vantage, but like I say, innocence of fame is my lot so far.

This is infinitely better than the narcissist who thinks he deserves his fame, who lives for publicity. The boxer who fights a few too many fights because the lights of the ring bring him more than the headaches he’ll suffer all the next month cost; Nora Desmond, the aging starlet in Sunset Boulevard who can’t accept that her career is over even though the silent movies that brought her fame have gone extinct. Poetry and fame seem like such an odd mix anymore.