he growled, broke wind, and
scratched himself & left
that fragrant area.
When the mind dies it exudes rich
critical prose,
especially about Henry,
particularly in Spanish, and sends it to him
from Madrid, London, New York.
Now back on down, boys; don’t
express yourself,
begged for their own sake
sympathetic Henry,
his spirit full with Mark Twain
and also his memory, lest they
might strain
themselves, to alter the best
anecdote
that even he ever invented.
Let the mail demain contain no
pro’s or con’s,
or photographs or prose or sharp
translations.
Let one-armed Henry be.
A solitaire of English, free of
dons
& journalists, keeping trying
in one or two nations
to put his boat back to sea.
The most important line of this
poem is the final one, where Henry claims he’s trying to put his boat back to
sea. In other words, getting his act together, being a writer and probably a
sane, sober (in relative terms anyway) human being. But it’s the conflict
between artist and critic that gets most of the attention. Here’s Mark Twain on
critics: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in
somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” Henry has his own fragrant
scatological response to the problem. What’s worse is when the critics don’t
get the point of what they’re criticizing or expounding on in Rich Critical
Prose, with the ability to alter the best anecdotes that even Mark Twain ever
invented, who was the master at anecdotes. My experience with the kind of
contemporary critical prose Henry is railing against was that once you work
your way through the dense thickets of jargon, meant to exclude non-initiates
as much as communicate to the select, the ideas aren’t that complicated. And
most people who have made their way through a graduate program in English
realize there are forests of nonsense out there masquerading as scholarship. I
don’t mean that as a blanket condemnation, but there is quite a lot of it. It’s
something to behold.
As far as critics not getting the
gist of a Dream Song, I think Henry might want to give them a break. Some of
those poems, the early ones especially, are tough nuts to crack. I’ve had a few
embarrassing miscues myself, and B. himself cautions that Dream Songs are not
meant to be understood—which may be an admission that they don’t always make
sense. (Which makes sense when you
remember he wrote a bunch of them on cocktail napkins at 2 a.m., sloshed in
some bar or another.) You’re just supposed to feel them, be terrified and
comforted. But the critic’s mission is to make sense, (or appear to make sense
of an esoteric kind to a select cadre of initiates). So take one kind of critical
approach which is to use language partially to intimidate and terrify, then apply
that to Berryman’s poems, some of which amount to evocative jabberwocky, and
you apparently get some pretty high-falutin’ horse hockey. I think it’s
hilarious. A story I heard once concerned an editor working on a collection of
critical essays about a well-known and much-loved writer, and the writer asked
her, “Who are you people? What is it
that you do?” Well, the tension
between creative and critical types, lumped together in English Departments in
ways that art historians and painters don’t have to deal with, is old hat to academic
insiders. B. gets to have a slap at critics here, and he farts in triumph over
it. In the end, one must appreciate the necessity of valorizing Berryman’s
arcane patriarchal socio-linguistic conventions while recognizing the
intersections embodied syntactically between a modernist poetics and the post-modern
vertigo of excess that resulted in the post-anthropocentric,
quasi-anti-humanist discourses located in the quiescent spaces of his work’s
lived negotiations. Pffffrrrrrtttt….
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