So, in early 1965, B. learned
that he was admitted to the roll of the National Institute of Arts & Letters.
He was drinking hard, and in pain from a variety of physical problems. T.S.
Eliot died, and of course whenever a poet died, B. got upset about it. Then
R.P. Blackmur died, and B. was upset again. Blackmur had been an old
acquaintance, but B. hadn’t written or spoken to him in 15 years. Blackmur was
an English academic and a poet, who always wrote in strict rhyme and meter,
work with an old-fashioned tone to my taste. If you’re not careful with it, meter
and rhyme can distort the syntax pretty drastically, giving the language that
archaic flavor, like this passage from Blackmur’s “By Luckless Blood”:
Soft to the river falls the
millet field
moulding and giving to the wind,
as might
an ordinary woman slowly yield
by moonlight her own summer to
the night.
It’s fine. Makes me feel like I’m
walking alone through the deserted, mid-nineteenth century galleries of some
local art museum, a bored guard watching your every step that echoes around the
30-foot ceiling and dark paneling. (If only you could move the benches aside
and play racquetball in there!) You clasp your hands behind your back, gaze at
the intricately executed perfect flesh tones, maybe some Greek god or a chubby
midget angel with a tiny penis floating overhead, some gorgeous young woman pressing
the back of her hand to her distressed brow, in grief over a deceased pigeon,
and you think, nostalgia be damned, to be stuffed away rich and young and
stunted in some damn mansion in 1840 was the very apotheosis of pointless
tedium. You move on to the Abstract Expressionist gallery, with the requisite
Mark Rothko canvas, equally tedious and pointless, and you’re forced to think,
thank God for Netflix, Facebook and Candy Crush Saga. I wonder what trouble
Lindsey Lohan has gotten into lately? How did Meg Ryan’s latest facelift turn
out? Who got voted off Dancing with the
Stars?
This Blackmur poem is interesting,
“A Labyrinth of Being: Lament of a Father-to-Be”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/42/5#!/20579100
Now if this child be born,
it is our own death, tiding.
Here’s a question: Do you think
Donald Hall had this poem in mind when he wrote “My Son, My Executioner”? https://www.poeticous.com/donald-hall/my-son-my-executioner
(Hint: It’s a rhetorical question, with a flat “duh” as the obvious answer.)
It always comes around to death, doesn’t it? Thomas Pynchon has
this to say, in his introduction to Slow
Learner, a collection of the early stories that launched his career: “When
we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an
attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or
how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” This applies to Berryman, and
to his fictional character, Henry. But the line between character and writer is
blurred in The Dream Songs, and the
conflation of character and writer works both ways: Henry is obviously an
extension of the poet’s ego and persona, but it feeds back onto the writer:
Berryman partially fictionalized his life as he lived it, became his own
character, a walking, talking, stumbling Huckleberry Finn. Eventually he jumped
off a bridge and suffocated in the mud—nothing fictional about that, right? But
death and the “attitude toward death” are just folded all through these poems. On
one hand, it has to be true that the death of an old acquaintance, never mind
the death of someone he claimed to be closer to, like Delmore Schwartz, would
elicit an emotional response. This is especially true because the life B.
actually lived wasn’t stable, or controlled, or even marginally happy. Death
hovered nearby all the time. The confessional poet captured these emotions,
gave them form, and they ring through the canon now like singing bronze Zen
bowls. But you know what? If someone I knew fifteen years ago, and hadn’t heard
from since, if I hear months later that that person died? I say, hmmph, too bad.
He was okay, I used to like him. I don’t really profess grief, and I especially
don’t affect grief. Unless it’s part
of my act: Unless it’s a major aspect of what makes my work filled with an
unarguable “seriousness”: Unless it’s in character.
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