#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!