I like these lines, after a brief
report of a dream set in France: “Rid slowly of all his dreams / he faced the
wicked ordinary day / in a tumult of seems”. Writers sometimes are judged by
how “real” their work seems, or how relevant its effect is on our understanding
of the environment we inhabit. But as a poet he’s laying out a thunder of seems
and he’s fully aware of that fact. Credit for candor here, and a nice escape
from a wicked ordinary day. “whilst wanderers on the coasts look for the man /
actual, having encountered all his ghosts / off & on, by the way.” In other
words: Critics still don’t get it, those self-important phonies proselytizing
from their offices in New York, Boston, LA and San Francisco, who have made B.,
or Henry, I suppose, famous, but perhaps it’s all based in la-de-dah. If that’s
the case, it strikes me that B. might have been wondering just what he had
gotten himself into—I would. All that fame-making malarkey. “Work while you can…along
those treacherous coasts.” Yep. The coasts are treacherous, taking away the
accolades from which fame sprouts and the fruit that ripens from there being
what Poet Berryman has pinned his hopes on. There is an insecurity that has to
follow from that, prizes and the starry-eyed attention of grad students aside. He
goes on to note, in italics, that, “We
are struck down, repeat the chroniclers, / having glowed.” It can get whisked away, folks. Make hay while the
sun shines. Seize the day. The poem ends on more terrific lines: “Leaving the
known world with an awkward kiss / he haunted, back among his colleagues in this verse / constructed
in angry play.” “Angry play” is as good an encapsulation of the Dream Songs as
anything. There’s a lot of meaning folded into these lines. He leaves the known
world, the wicked ordinariness of it, the land of critics and scholarly
orthodoxy, and “haunts” his way, ghostlike, into the dream world of versifying,
rounding out the poem which had started with a dream, and he back with his
colleagues. Art is an escape here, but an understandable escape from the
madness and hypocrisy of the normal.
I’m so happy to have run into
such a great Dream Song, one of my favorites so far, because I was starting to
get a bit exasperated with this poet, and like Ismael, it was taking positive
act of will and a strong moral principle to refrain from stepping into the
street and begin methodically knocking people’s hats off. But going to sea, or
going a-whaling, is no option for this sailor, so I was feeling a bit grim in
the mouth and my hypos were getting an upper hand of me. I’m sitting here in the
Denver Airport thinking, I can keep doing this. I can keep going. When B. gets
off his whining, he can write all right. It’s a hurried and noisy atmosphere
here, like New York harbor going on two centuries ago that Melville knew pretty
well, and the garbled announcements, the two business suits right behind me
talking about who to schedule and who to lay off, the ear-piercing whining—what
is that?—the rain and thunder outside, the smell of Starbuck’s coffee, the nearby
roar of jets throttling up outside the window and the distant roar of jets ascending
through the rain out on the runway. There will be nostalgia for this kind of
airport scene two centuries from now, probably. Probably from some putz like
me. But it’s all pretty wicked and ordinary right now, except I’m about to step
onto a massive, powerful machine and fly at 30,000 feet across the continent. You
have to marvel at our ordinary, in all its glorious, wicked magnificence. But you
can’t concentrate or create here. The airport won’t tolerate it. There are critics lurking around about here. But I’ll
get home and I’ll haunt away again soon. What a life it is we live, I’m telling
you.
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