#243

An undead morning. I . . . shuffle my poss’s.

Lashed here, with ears, in the narrows, memoried,

like a remaining man,

he call to him for discomfort blue-black losses,

gin & green girls, drag of the slaying weed.

Just when it began again 

I will remember, soon. All will be, soon.

The little birds are crazed. Survive us, gulls.

A hiss from distant space

homes in the overcast—to their grown tune—

dead on my foaming galley. Feel my pulse.

Is it the hour to replace my face? 

Dance in the gunwales to what they cannot hear

my lorn men. I bear every piece of it.

Often, in the ways to come,

where the sun rises and fulfils their fear,

unlashed, I’ll whistle bits.

Through the mad Pillars we are bound for home.

 

Oh, now this…is what I’m talking about. This poem gives me a chill, to be honest. “Dance in the gunwales to what they cannot hear.” It’s about the vision of the poet, the artist. We celebrate their visions—supposedly. The ones with acuity have whistled for us what they’ve heard. Like: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Such an insight is thrilling, but not everybody gets it, or wants to get it, or perhaps they wouldn’t value it even if they did. What is it that people want? Some want the thrill of addiction. I tried it. Didn’t stick for me, all yellow fog and nausea. I spent a week in Las Vegas—loud vulgarity, the crazed clink clink clink of coins in metal pans, garish and overbright. Wall Street and McMansions: Boring. How about danger, victory, and adrenaline? Sure, but physiological Las Vegas, finally.

But I do know what it’s like to top out on a mountain with friends and know that we’ve earned this view we’re sharing. I defended my dissertation, another arriving at the peak of a mountain. I looked once into a bear’s eyes and knew he was looking back, and I knew what he wanted: Can I come swimming too? I’ve closed a book on the last page and said, “Yes.” I heard a moment of music once, and understood, and felt a door open. My cat, Mehitabel, would lay her head in my palm and fall asleep, making me know that I was trusted and loved: No other way to read that gesture, from an animal. DaVinci laughed at me in Paris out of his great painting, and we laughed out loud together. I smelled and tasted, alert to keep up, while a bottle of wine, a ’92 Musigny, danced for us. I’ll almost certainly never visit Chauvet or Lascaux, and they’re too precious for my breath to ruin so I don’t need to, but I know what’s there.

Some of us lash ourselves to the mast and hear the sirens’ song, and it drives us crazy. If I tell you about that Musigny the tenth time, maybe you’ll be bored, and perhaps you’ll even resent it, but it’s because I want you to dance with it too. Or if I tell you I laughed out loud in the Louvre, knowing that the more we turned her into an icon, the more tickled Leonardo was, chuckling at us chuckleheads from all the way down the centuries—you’ll look at me, like everyone else did, and think it’s rude, or mad. But I don’t care. I want you to laugh with me. What I’ll do is I’ll look at an emerald jewelwing damselfly, and in a poem or a picture or a plea, I’ll tell you that if you’ll just stop and look, you’ll see a creature so strange and so lovely that your life will never be the same again, if only you’ll look. I’ve not been the same, once I looked. It only happened a couple months ago, but I’m not the same anymore. What a miracle that it’s there, and I’m here, and life and God and evolution and Earth have brought things together just so, so that it’s beauty is truth, and that truth is beauty in return, and they loop into each other, a positive feedback, and the insect flies on it! You could see it too. If you lie on your back in the mountains and stare at the chaotic star-artistry of the sky overhead, you’ll understand that you’re of them. It takes time, but it’s there. Hardy has Tess do it, so he had to have known. That’s helps me overcome my telling myself that I’m crazy, like some others are quick to do. With strength and experience come confidence that these things you feel and discover have meaning beyond vanity. One of these days we’ll all go home, like Odysseus on his ship, but I declare, so help me, that there will be no beeswax in my ears, and I’ll listen for the sirens singing, and if I lose my orthodox mind, then so be it. I’ll whistle bits of the tune for you, if I can, as well as I can, and you can listen or not, but I’ll do it because all I want is to teach what love is: Whistling bits of the siren’s song together in harmony.

#242

[No online link available.]

Students cry. Sometimes there’s no particular reason to cry. You just do it, because the sadness of human existence suggests this might be best. I didn’t cry for about four or five years of my life, when I was a teenager. When it finally broke through, it was excruciating, terrible, literally painful. I thought it was some kind of transcendent transforming moment. Bullshit. I hated it. I really hated it. Now, it’s much easier because I’m done with the strictures that say men don’t cry. It triggers from small, trivial things. Almost exclusively when I’m alone. (I don’t admit this publicly. Come to think of it, I’m not admitting it now.)

#241

https://books.google.com/books?id=qYEhZxBGkRMC&pg=PA107&dq=Father+being+the+loneliest+word+in+one+language&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAWoVChMInNiKpYzRxwIVBw-SCh3F_QBI#v=onepage&q=Father%20being%20the%20loneliest%20word%20in%20one%20language&f=false

The ghost of Hamlet’s father haunts the castle, clanking around the upper corridors and turrets in armor. I remember my Shakespeare class teacher back when, Elizabeth Armstrong, saying, I think this is what the image of a father meant for Shakespeare. There are all sorts of fatherly variations in Shakespeare’s work—Polonius in Hamlet is all father too, and he’s a bit of a tedious, but caring, fool, who meets his end being foolishly in the wrong place at the wrong time—but the ideal father overall comes off as strong, a bit distant, usually with a pretty harsh edge. They have to be men, and all that.

I have lots of memories of my dad, of course. Neck deep in the gray-green water of the Little Miami River while fishing, then having to swim, when we slipped into a hole deeper than we bargained for. Him sitting on the edge of his bed in the morning, head bowed, dreading the nasty situation at work he was forced to go back to. Young as I was, I understood and felt bad for him. On a canoe trip, wide awake, soaked and freezing at 4 in the morning from camping in the rain in a leaky tent, with a sleeping beagle who had serious adenoidal snoring issues, and just laughing together because it was so ridiculous. Happy and excited on his return from a hunting trip in Wyoming, with his rifle and a big chest packed with dry ice, meat, and the head of a pronghorn antelope. Furious with me for not doing my homework. Excited over the shotguns he got my brother and me for Christmas, when I was 13. Disappointed with my grades. Proud and smiling at graduation events. Dropping me off in Cincinnati as I moved to the city for college, knowing he was thinking that this kid isn’t ready. (I wasn’t.) Dropping me off at the airport on my way to study in France, knowing I was off on a great adventure. (I was). Showing me how to safely use a table saw, how to carry a shotgun in the field without it going off, how to smell and taste a fine Bordeaux. With his friend who had a huge gun collection and a pet chimpanzee. We laughed at the monkey so hard we were bigger monkeys than the monkey. Pushing my head underwater as I was struggling for the ladder in my uncle’s pool. Laughing at me when I got drunk at a wedding when I was 16. Playing with slot cars and electric trains in the living room. Constant wrestling. The most important memory I have of him is one of the earliest. I was four or five years old, sitting on a scratchy gray-green hide-a-bed in his den, while he studied over the mail chess games he was always absorbed in, or working on his paintings. I remember him working on this one, a stormy lakeshore scene with that scary greenish light that makes you think “tornado’s coming!” and head for the basement. The den smelled of turpentine and linseed oil. Kay Starr and Frankie Lane and Glen Miller 45s stacked on the phonograph. I always associate gray-green with memories of my dad, and the smell of oil paint. He was a solid chess player, with a strong almost invincible positional game, and not into fancy combinations and clever fireworks. He was very tough to beat—conservative, smart, careful, and rock solid. He stopped playing chess because he couldn’t ever stand to lose. I remember the smell when he taught me how to gut and skin a rabbit. He loved the West and never got tired of fragrant gray-green sagebrush and the great mountains. Maybe the most memorable of our family vacations was one where we followed the Oregon Trail through Nebraska and Wyoming: Chimney Rock, wagon ruts worn through sandstone, names and dates carved in a cliff face, Windlass Hill on the great rolling prairie, where some covered wagons still sat in the open, with rust-brown wheels, the arches of the canvas supports still curving overhead, the wooden planks of the wagon beds silver-gray under the sun and the huge sky, endless blowing grass and gray sagebrush, a few dark cottonwoods in the gullies. When I started writing, he started writing also, publishing reminiscences in retirement magazines and letters to the editor that were snarky and sometimes even aggressive and bitter, but usually pretty funny. When he died, he had been ill with Lewy Body dementia, but it was still a grievous day. Mom had been amazing in her dedication and stamina, caring for him. We were there with him holding his hand. If he made mistakes as a man or as a father, they weren’t important. He loved his family, there was never a single doubt about that, and that always overcomes a man’s mistakes in the long run. His favorite color was green. He had gray eyes.

#240

[No online link available.]

Written while giving final exams after the summer session at Middlebury College, 1962. “Air with thought thick, air scratched.” The room had exposed rafters and a stage, and B. was sitting on it, writing away while his students wrote their exams. One student—Mr. Torrey, who makes an appearance—remembers looking up at him on the stage, and every time he looked up, B. was staring at him, and then would wave at him.

             My rafters bulge with death

            kindly arising from creaking bodies, from

            my hundreds braining & self-burdensome

            yawning down there, catching their breath. 

B.’s wife, Kate, was pregnant, he was suffering from bouts of delirium tremens, he obsessively chain-smoked Tareytons non-stop, and he obsessively chain-wrote Dream Songs. He insulted about half of the faculty. His teaching that summer was universally regarded as brilliant, the talk of the school—brilliant, theatrical and passionate.

It occurs to me—probably late in the game—that Dream Songs are sometimes meant to be disposed of. I have a resistance to this, partly because when we study literature we go to the classics, which almost by definition are durable, relevant through the ages, timeless, lasting—classic. Big prizes cement the work’s reputation, the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Man Booker, the National Book Award. B. won two of these with his two volumes of Dream Songs, so that helps solidify them. I came to them expecting gravitas and wisdom. But the story of him, on a stage, smoking like a furnace, waving at his students as he wrote a poem about them, writing a Dream Song as busily as they’re writing their exams—I begin to see that the product isn’t really the point. It’s the process. He just does it. It’s just what he does. There is the responsibility to send them out, gather them into a book, go through the publishing routine, because that’s all expected of someone who makes his living writing and teaching literature. But that was ancillary to the real project. Smoke, drink, write, chase women, the product of it all is not important. It was the moment of writing that defined who he was. He needed it like he needed cigarettes, and like he was addicted to scotch and bourbon. That had to be the focus, the core. Reputation followed later, but he knew that head down, pushing the pencil, was the only way forward. But it wasn’t even that. There was not a forward, only a timeless, sick and driven meditation.

I go into art museums sometimes and I get astonished at some of the modern and postmodern work you can find there characterized by repetition. There is, or was, a piece in the IU art museum in Bloomington: Springs, probably nothing more than common toy Slinkys, about 30 of them, suspended from the ceiling. Each one is wrapped in miles of red thread, so that they’re an inch thick. Somebody sat in a chair and wrapped red yarn around a Slinky for unimaginable, mind-boggling stretches of blank time. Or, in the Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not museum, in Daytona Beach Florida or some such place, which I visited when I was about 10 with my family, there was a 300-foot wooden chain carved by some OCD craftsman out of the trunk of an oak tree, done with a pen knife. I used to sit it my desk when I was a young teenager, with inch-high lead soldiers, painting them, one after another, all the same, and sell them or give them to my friends who were into war gaming with the little figures. They would line them up on tables, measure their movements with rulers and lengths of string, and they would fight intricately calculated stop-motion battles with charts and tables, and dice. Actually playing these games always bored me miserably, so I rarely played them myself, though I liked the look of the games, like vast miniature dioramas—blue and gray for the Civil War, royal blue and redcoats for the Napoleonic wars, and so on. I painted thousands of them, a meditative craft that I would get lost in. The best were the mounted knights for the Medieval games, which provided a bit more creativity. Each one was unique in color and pattern, but all on the same lead horse, with the same stiff lead arm holding its little brittle sword aloft. The impulse that had me painting clever variations on the same pattern (heraldic knights with shields, on horses) is the same one that had B. writing like he did. For me, I have memories of some of the knights, and it cemented the bond with a few close, nerdy friends. No famous prizes, but that was never the point. It was just something I did. I didn’t drink or smoke Tareytons, but I did listen to music—Elton John and Queen, mainly—and while the paint fumes were probably not good for me, they didn’t kill me either. Once the figures were given away, they were gone. I just did more of them, and gave those away too. They made my friends respect me within the closed, uber-dorky basement war-gamer set, and that was the only recognition I needed.

#239

[No online link available.]

“Am I a bad man? Am I a good man?” A little of both, he decides, with the help of his blackface buddy, who’s shaking his head and talking in dialect like always. But I don’t think these questions are meant as seriously as the ones yesterday from DS 238.

Another woman left him and headed for Ecuador, without a word. Is this better than tears, some choice insults (calling him a coward for sure, that's always a good one), and with a good glass-shattering door slam she’s gone? Probably not. Oh, man. Oh, well. Been here before. “She brought me Sanka and violent drugs / which were yet wholly inadequate.” Then the doctor doubles them. “or may a niche be found / in nothingness for completely exhausted Henry?” Who knows? The ringing of her absence, which triggered these deep questions, also doesn’t allow for the questions to be answered. The guy’s beat up, though. There’s that.

I forget his black humor sometimes in all my tedious earnest seriousness. I don’t want to offend anybody. (Like he ever worried about that…) But I’m tired today, so heck with it. This whole poem reminds me for some trivial reason of Burt Reynolds’s buddy in Smoky and the Bandit, that libertarian ‘70s celebration of fast cars, law breakin’, sex, beer, and shit-kickin’ Deep South rednecks. He starts a fight in some country honkytonk bar and gets his ass kicked for it. He talks to Smoky on the CB, laid out on the gravel next to his car, explains he got in a fight. “How’d it go?” “’Bout normal.” So yeah, sleep with 65 women or whatever number you brag about, even if it’s half of that, you get used, probably, to slamming doors, or worse, her disappearing in disgust without another word. Split lip, black eye, bloody nose? No real harm done. Might as well laugh about it. You even learn to like it after awhile.

#238 Henry's Programme for God

‘It was not gay, that life.’ You can’t ‘make me small,’

you can’t ‘put me down’ or take away my job.

I am immune,

although it is not gay. Why did we come at all,

consonant to whose bidding? Perhaps God is a slob,

playful, vast, rough-hewn. 

Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya

& not Valesquez, never Rembrandt, no.

Something disturbed,

ill-pleased, & with a touch of paranoia

who calls for this thud of love from his creatures-O.

Perhaps God ought to be curbed. 

Not only on this planet, I admit; somewhere.

Our only resource is bleak denial or

anti-potent rage,

both have been tried by our wisest. Who was it back there

who died unshriven, daring to see what more

could happen to a painter with such courage?

 

In Focus

When gunshots burn holes

Through good people on live

Television screens

And candidate leaders

Suck attention and votes

Moneying like tornados around themselves

Turning desire to contempt at teachers

Blowing back desire

Like sour breath after a pokered-out

Morning still rank

Of rye and cigars,

I look around and I ask why

For awhile. Something has to be there:

I’m here: I peer out of my eye-holes

I feel my heart moving

And the concentrated

Center of my laser-focused

Feelings. I make

And I am. But God

Must be a slob

Heartless, at least careless.

Then again I remember:

I know I work and make

In a room lined with books

Each a making of one human’s

Focus and gift,

And when I startled

A deer last night

With miraculous pointy-hooved

Grace it danced into the moonlight

And stood, watching me back

Tall antlers like telegraph poles

Blinking messages with the fireflies

Reminding me to be still.

I understood

Like the rising of the moon

That his gaze back at me

Was holy. There is nothing

Unordinary about holy. A miracle

Looks through the lenses

Of my eyes, and back through yours,

Through the deep, wet eyes

Of an antlered buck

And communicates through our bodies’

Intricate languages

And when I’m struck silent

With despair, grieving reporters

Whose focus was punctured

I know it’s only the murder talking

Shouldering once more

Into the world’s awareness,

Diffuse and sour,

Clamoring for the proof

It was never handed

Because it was there all along

Still shining through dark-blinded eyes.

KZ

#237

[No online link available.]

An odd Dream Song in that it’s the only one (so far) written with five feet in every line. The details of the poem refer to a highly publicized murder trial from 1926, from a 1922 murder when Eleanor Mills and her lover, an Episcopal minister, Edward Hall, were found shot and laid out under a crabapple tree, her throat cut and her head nearly severed. Their love letters were torn up and scattered between their bodies. All grisly details of the poem are pretty much accurate. The minister’s wife and her two brothers stood trial; without enough evidence to convict, they were acquitted. A book about it was published in 1964, which B. probably read, or at least knew about, and which almost certainly led to the poem. The book speculated that the Ku Klux Klan had done the murder, since they were active in New Jersey in the 1920s. This is all in the poem.

The trial fed a nationwide media frenzy, one of the first in history, and it was not eclipsed in scope until the Lindbergh kidnapping in the 1930s. The poem is interesting because at the end of the first stanza, a description of the lovers being caught, then kneeling and praying, comes the line: “Henry was there.” He of course wasn’t there, but there is something going on. Both of his parents had been involved in affairs, and one of them was shot. While treated as a suicide by the police and by B. in his work, it really wasn’t. There had been a Florida land bust going on in 1926, people were losing fortunes right and left, and there were almost daily suicides because of it. The Tampa police were overwhelmed. John Smith, B.’s father, was losing his money too and was acting very strangely—he would head into the ocean and swim out of sight of the land, then head back in, and once he took his son with him. When they were rescued he threatened to take them with him next time and never come back. It seems likely that B.’s mother, or her lover, put an end to all of that once and for all. So, with this other highly publicized murder, was Henry there? In a way he was. At the end of the second stanza, all with clear, accurate details of the murder and the subsequent treatment of the bodies, “Henry was toward.” Well, it’s not clear what “toward” is supposed to mean. It does rhyme with “card,” so that’s probably all the justification for it we need. It does imply that Henry is still oriented toward the murder and the bodies. He’s still there. The third stanza is a description of the victims arriving in heaven, where they are forgiven and restored, and: “Henry was not there.”

The last statement means that God’s forgiveness, and the healing and restoring of the ruined, murdered bodies, does not extend to Henry, still floundering away down here on earth, wounded in a way that doesn’t heal. He experienced, in his own way, a similar terror and received a similar violence, but the healing and forgiving that victims receive in heaven have been denied him—because he’s still alive. It’s not something you ever get over. That’s all. Did he behave badly in his life? Yes, he sometimes did. Often did. Were there extenuating circumstances? There were. Give him a break. Bullets often scar more than the physical targets they impact. Murder or suicide, doesn’t matter. But this is also a case, I think, where the intimation of murder might be leaking through—if the reader is prepped and alert for it. And it’s possible too that the unique structure is a hint: Something about this Dream Song is special. Reader pay attention.

#236

[No online link available.]

A creepy, strange, violent dream is what this looks like, when dreaming Henry “swung” in the open square in Edinburgh in front of a crowd. It was all well done, under a pretty sky with little white clouds. “Swung”? Henry appears to be the guest of honor at a public hanging. Since B. was never publicly hanged, as far as I can tell from reading his biography, this seems most likely a report from a dream. There is an admission of guilt, there’s the swinging through the open air of an Edinburgh morning, and there’s all the business of the lard knife and the shoemaker’s knife at her throat. “It’s true he did it, because more to bear / of her open eyes and mute mouth at midnight.” Well, yeah, those big infuriating eyes and all the rest of her were too much for any man to endure, so put an end to it already. You’ll swing for it later, but that can’t be helped. It’s still all her fault, is the implication.

This one invites an interpretive field day. Plenty in there about victim blaming, which we still get to see lots of. If you dress so provocatively, honey, what did you expect? There’s also plenty of guilt and reference to B.’s treatment of women. That led him into vistas of emotional difficulty, and if it seems he never really got violent with anyone, he transgressed numerous societal boundaries and was caused to experience guilt and to suffer for it. Which translates through dream transformation into a nightmarish public swinging. It was her fault though.

Yeah. Here’s what comes of that. Some thirteen year old girl is sent home from school because her bra straps are showing, and how are the boys in class supposed to concentrate on their learning with that kind of thing brazenly displayed in their environment? A college rape victim is forced to publicly list all her partners, implying that sluts have no right to complain about being raped.

We don’t control our dreams, and if you have a dream, and you’re writing Dream Songs for a living, go ahead and lay it out there. Exposure and humiliation are part of the process if they arise. That just enhances the art. But I do wonder if waking introspection, maybe some meditation, and maybe some reflection on how sexualizing women who just want to be comfortable and cool on a hot day might not just skew ones deep attitude away from whatever it is that triggers those well-deserved swinging noose nightmares. Some nightmares are earned. It’s hard not to think that the moral environment of the day and the proclivities of this particular dreamer make this a well-earned hanging. Nightmares aren’t always deserved, obviously, but dreams can be teachers too. Women love being sexualized—by their chosen lovers. Maybe when on the search for a chosen lover, or maybe even for the thrill of attention in certain circumstances. Still doesn’t give anyone the right to attack or shame or blame. Maybe learning the difference between “chosen lover” and “creepy jerk” when you’re awake might help keep the dream-noose stowed in the sheriff’s closet. Guilt punishes the guilty when the guilty sleep.

#235

http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2007/01/16/berrymans-dream-song-235/

Ernest Hemingway’s father committed suicide, and ultimately three of his sons, including Ernest, did as well. It’s normal to fear death, but there must be a special anxiety that something like depression or other mental illnesses will inexorably lead one to suicide if one’s father did it and if you fear the illness runs in the family. There were factors behind the Ernest’s father taking this action, including financial troubles and a troubled marriage. Hemingway finally attributed his father’s suicide to cowardice, but along the way he turned totally against his mother, blaming her and proclaiming her in a letter as a great American bitch. He wasn’t nice about it. It’s not pretty stuff, but the suicide of a parent is a devastating business on the children left behind because of the emotional havoc it can wreak. It didn’t help that Hemingway was an addicted alcoholic, either. I like The Sun also Rises a lot, but it’s surprising, when you look at it from this angle, how much attention is paid to drinks and drinking in that slender novel. The ‘70s came up with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. The ‘20s were about sex, booze and jazz. Still a pretty potent threesome. When Hemingway took his own life with a shotgun, he was done with life. He was getting elderly and tired, couldn’t do most of the things that had brought him so much pleasure in his life, but a life of heavy drinking, not age, had most to do with that. His wife and friends knew what he had in mind, and had him almost constantly under guard. He got away, though, and he did it. For B., who claims the news brought him to tears, it must have been a scary thought. I think because he knew why Hemingway did it and that he was developing similar circumstances in his own life.

B. would have us believe that his father’s suicide was the thing that made his life resonate with Hemingway’s. I believe it was the drinking. B.’s biographers are pretty clear that Berryman’s father was murdered, his death almost certainly not a suicide, and Berryman knew it at some level. To come clean with admitting that threatened two foundational things in his life: A decent relationship with his mother, and the use he made of a father’s suicide in his work. So, he may well have struck a pose that he eventually depended on maintaining, and in The Dream Songs there has only been one subtle reference so far, that I can recall catching, where one might detect even a hint of his knowing that his father’s death could have been something other than the official suicide. So the corresponding emotional state that he might have with Hemingway regarding their fathers may well be forced or even false. But there’s no reason to doubt B.’s tears in that Indiana dining room. Why the tears? When someone dies, and we grieve over it, we’re often grieving for ourselves. B. didn’t have quite Hemingway’s drive for adventure—war and combat, big game hunting, marlin fishing, bullfighting—but he did share Hemingway’s driving appetite for sex, and his driving need for drink, and like Hemingway, he channeled much of this drive into his work and crafted an impressive string of successes with that. But he could also see where it led for Hemingway and where it was leading for him, and fathers didn’t have as much to do with his suicidal anxiety as he claimed. It wasn’t directed as much outward onto a lost father, it was more inward, directed against the alcoholic self.

I don’t mean to seem unsympathetic or harsh: suicide or murder, either would be disastrous for a kid to have to incorporate into his emotional fabric, and clearly, B. struggled with deep-seated emotional disturbances all his life. But as for what he claims, and what seems to have been, they don’t quite jive. That in itself is interesting enough. But it throws onto this poem a harsher light than the simple pathos the author probably intended and was asking for. Maybe “harsher light” isn’t the right term. I think “a more complex sadness” would be better. That there was sadness in his life is not at issue.

#234 The Carpenter's Son

The child stood in the shed. The child went mad,

later, & saned the wisemen. People gathered

as he conjoined the Jordan joint

ánd he spoke with them until he got smothered

amongst their passion for       mysterious healing had.

They could not take his point: 

—Repent, & love, he told them frightened throngs,

and it is so he did. Díd some of them?

Which now comes hard to say.

The date’s in any event a matter of wrongs

later upon him, lest we would not know him,

medieval, on Christmas Day. 

Pass me a cookie. O one absolutely did

lest we not know him. Fasten to your fire

the blessing of the living God.

It’s far to seek if it will do as good

whether in our womanly or in our manlihood,

this great man sought his retire.

 

John Oliver, the British-born comedian/political commentator, made a stir on the Web this week with his TV show commentary about American televangelists and the incomprehensible sums they pull in from their followers, and the tax exemptions they are granted because they set themselves up as the head of a “church.” For example, a televangelist named Creflo Dollar started a fundraising campaign through his televised ministry to raise 65 million dollars for a private luxury jet. “If I want to believe God for a sixty-five million dollar plane, you cannot stop me! You cannot stop me from dreamin’!” This statement made Creflo Dollar the target of the kind of massive blowback the Internet has the potential to focus, and it can be devastating. But the only real problem with Creflo Dollar’s dream of a Learjet is that he took it a step too far. The issue wasn’t with the substance of his campaign, it was simply with the audacity of its scope. Sixty-five million is serious cheddar. But these televangelists tap into a deep-seated vein of Americans’ need for fundamentalist reassurance, and being Americans, they monetize it with an astonishing greedy chutzpah and are celebrated for that. Publicity and money correlate. It’s truly remarkable. A select number of them routinely get exposed in sex scandals, money laundering scandals, all sorts of imaginative hypocrisy. Sometimes they weep publicly and are forgiven by their flocks, sometimes their careers are ruined, sometimes they go to prison. It keeps on going because the current of need for this kind of thing in the American psyche is so far deeper and so far vaster than any single hypocrite preacher man. But the smart ones keep their noses clean and use the media to garner massive fortunes. In the name of Jesus.

The people who give to the Creflo Dollars of the airwaves their precious, hard-earned money must mean well, but it’s safe to say that most of them are not thinking too critically about why they’re doing it. They might be desperate or sick, looking for a miracle (or trying to buy one, good consumers as they are), or they may actually be true believers, or most likely they get caught up in an exciting televised evangelical moment and they make that phone call now! Well, you don’t have to be a Franciscan or a biblical scholar to realize that Jesus’s true message probably isn’t stepping up front and center in these transactions. B. sums up the message as well as anybody: “Repent, & love, he told them frightened throngs, / and it is so he did.” Admit you’re a sinner, repent for it, live a life with love at its center. This is actually not that complicated. Sin, though, yanks us in all sorts of complicated directions, and the complications include intricate, finely tuned systems of hypocrisy, lies and distortions.

B. here is asking if any of the members of the throng, either today or back when, really do follow Jesus’s teachings. In the kind of move I’ve come to expect from The Dream Songs at this point, he backs away from an answer: “Which now comes hard to say.” Asking the question is as far as he’s going to go, apparently. It’s why I love DS 46 so much: Berryman dares a response in that one, and it’s great. There are layers in it that reward contemplation. But after that top forty hit, so full of sardonic wisdom—a bolt from the blue—he got shy. And I think that to merely ask the question after that performance isn’t quite enough anymore. What do you think, Henry? But, nope, not this time again. Henry’s response is to crawl back into his burrow, or into his grave, however you want to see it. He’s a smart guy, and he has his antennae out for all kinds of philosophical scents blowing on the existential breezes of existence, but he’s a coward in the end. He admits it, too. That’s what really kills me. It offends my sense of philosophical duty.

That being said, there is an implied answer, plain enough to see, so maybe I’m not being fair. Of course Jesus’s message has been misrepresented! Yes there are true believers living out Jesus’s message, but then again there are televangelists out there, preaching in Christ’s name, buying Learjets. The very substance of the New Testament itself was subject to political maneuvering in the early centuries of the Christian church and into the Middle Ages. Some stuff was denied canonical legitimacy because it had become politically unorthodox. And somebody remind me, why did Revelations make the cut again?

The ending of the poem is obscure in that it’s not clear who B. is referring to as the one who followed Jesus’s teaching to repent and love. “Pass me a cookie” is a snide, partially dismissive, partially self-deprecating, partially reverent reference to the communion host, so B. might actually be referring to himself as the one. If so, that would amount to a statement of faith, if a fairly grandiose one, but it’s pretty ambiguous. It’s more likely a “might as well go with it” gesture, not so much out of faith, but out of covering one’s ass, just in case all this Jesus-y love-your-neighbor business turns out to be the real deal. Can’t hurt, at any rate. Somebody might go ahead and remind him that God, omnipresent and omnipotent as he supposedly is if He’s really what we say He is, or what He says He is, God can see through that little ruse pretty quick. Well, look, we know what’s going on in Henry’s heart by now: Competitive scrambling for the ersatz immortality of literary reputation, a serious psychic wound that so wounded that (if we’re to believe him) something critical was killed off in his soul, replaced by permanently adolescent appetites, alcohol addiction, and self-absorbed narcissism. Something compelling about it all though. But hey, at least he’s trying in this one. John Berryman is no St. Augustine, though. But who is? Asking an important question with no intention of trying to answer it is nothing but a pose in the end. But maybe it’s a necessary step. Maybe the answer is contained in the question. If so, then it’s a dark answer, with fine bourbon and contoured seats, up in the cirrus clouds.

#233 Cantatrice

Misunderstanding, misunderstanding, misunderstanding.

Are we stationed here among another thing?

Sometimes I wonder.

After the lightning, this afternoon, came thunder:

the natural world makes sense: cats hate water

and love fish. 

Fish, plankton, bats’ radar, the sense of fish

who glide up the coast of South America

and head for Gibraltar.

How do they know it’s there? We call this instinct

by which we dream we know what instinct is,

like misunderstanding. 

I was soft on a green girl once and we smiled across

and married, childed. Never truly did we take in

one burning wing.

Henry flounders. What was the name of that fish?

So better organized than we are oh.

Sing to me that name, enchanter, sing!

 

How does the monarch butterfly know to head south for Mexico in the fall, several generations removed from the ancestor who first flew north from there? It doesn’t know. It just goes, turning toward Mexico with the same level of rationale that makes a corn plant spread its tassel and concentrate its seeds in a ring around a central cob, or that makes a moonflower open at night. There are new theories about plant intelligence out there, and they’re amazing, but they’re pretty esoteric. Plants—at least for the present literary purpose—just are. They just do. They don’t think. Same with most fish. Behavior follows from instinct like thunder from lightning: We don’t expect anything like control. It’s all bound up in a natural pattern immeasurably greater than any individual creature. Annie Dillard is all over this kind of thing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: get some caterpillars following one another around the rim of a bowl, and they just keep filing in circles until they wear out and die. It’s a bizarre and amazing phenomenon, the mindless biological machines that insects appear to be. It’s highly doubtful that any fish understands anything about what lies beyond the straits of Gibraltar, but when it’s time to migrate, they go. But I know B. well enough by now to know that he’s not even remotely interested in why fish swim to Gibraltar from South America. (Bluefin tuna do this. Maybe other fish.) The nature imagery has a purpose: The implied question that hovers over this poem is, Why in the world do we do what we do? Do we chalk it up to instinct? Of course we do! B. doesn’t even care about that per se. Instinct matters only if he can ask the question about it in defense of his own mistakes. Then instinct takes on meaning in that narcissistic context. But in the end it’s still an appropriate question: What drives us? Can we call it instinct, ever? Why did I marry this girl, have children, and we never really loved one another? Love being the culturally sanctioned emotion that pushes or pulls us, often against our will, or sometimes even our knowledge, toward a mating behavior. Hmm—thought experiment. Let’s say you’re a priest, and that adolescent boy over there looks pretty scrumptious to you. There’s the instinct. Sure. We understand that. You can’t help that, or at least your controls on what you think are tenuous. But, do you let your social conditioning against pedophilia stop you from acting? Does your fear of censure, shame and humiliation, imprisonment stop you? Does recognition of the damage you would do to the child stop you? Is there empathy for the disgust, shock, disillusionment in the kid that stops you? Turns out not always. You’re not allowed to chalk it up to instinct, though. We expect our higher reasoning functions to take control of our behavior. We expect to cultivate emotions other than lust—affection, admiration, pity—to influence our behaviors. We know though that it’s complicated. Fail in your self-control and you’re rightly judged a criminal. Unlike, say a burglar, though, once your prison sentence is over, you don’t just get turned loose. You’re branded a sex offender for the rest of your life—a permanent stigma—and the reason for this is that we recognize, legally, that the instinctual drive for sex with children is often more powerful and more motivating than the psychological and societal controls. Sex offender. They’re statistically likely to repeat, which puts children in danger. You may not live within a mile of a school, you can’t hang around the playground, your neighbors with children will be notified of your instinctual propensities and your (legally acknowledged) inability to act in a way that is not pedophiliac and criminal. It’s a bad stigma, but there is understood to be a basis for it. There is a lot more swirling darkness beneath the social and psychological veneers of propriety than we care to admit. On a less criminal level, I’ve heard—lots of times—people in the throes of some kind of passion, like love or anger, say things that they weren’t aware of, that just slipped out. Emotional instinct took the upper hand, maybe for only a moment. But these things are powerful.

B. was no legal sex offender, although he did write about noticing his young students fairly often. That’s not so bad as it sounds, really, though if you want to call it creepy to admit to it I wouldn’t argue. But this kind of thing is pretty normal in middle aged men. Most keep it to themselves and develop coping strategies. We call this being well adjusted. It’s what we expect. B. has never struck me as all that well adjusted, but at least he had drives that steered him toward women of legal age, and he could summon adequate enough compensating behaviors to keep himself out of jail. Not enough to keep him from getting busted in the mouth by an angry husband now and then, or to keep him faithful to his wife of the moment. We also need to add to his lack of broader coping strategies the concept of entitlement. He knew he could get away with it, so why not? Screw principles, I want to screw her. It works at that base of a level. So all this question of bats and fish and misunderstandings? Yeah. Except you don’t get off that easy. Not in 1964, not ever. Sorry. I see what you’re up to, and it’s not gonna work.

One other thing: Addiction motivates us, often, from far beneath our ability to make choices about our behavior. That hovers over this poem as well: I drink because I am, because the hand I was dealt features drink as motivation and solace. I can’t help it.  Me, there’s nothing to argue about here. You just have to accept that this was how it was. The only difference from him and most junkies and drunks is that he wrote about it, a justifying activity. Not buying it here, but I grant that booze is an infamously tough addiction to shake. In the end, we’re often not as smart as we wish we were. Instinct gets the upper hand. Still no excuse...

#232

[No online link available.]

Times have changed. Cute as it might be, or as one might think it is, you can’t get away with a line like this anymore: “Negroes, ignite! You have nothing to use but your brains.” Ha ha. “Negroes” were igniting in the 60s because the abuse they had been suffering for centuries still hadn’t stopped—so that’s not so funny, is it? Then to imply that they hadn’t been using their brains up to that point is completely ridiculous and insufferable. You shouldn’t even win a National Book Award with a book that has that line in it. Deal breaker. But it was the mid-60s, that stuff still had some play left, even in places where people should have known better. Cute racist puns in poetry? Go for it! The only salvation is that this is the record of a night spent eating and talking with a friend, Pascal. Such jokes may come and go, and friends will laugh or groan, but it stops there. Unfortunately it’s often the smoke-filled room where racism flourishes, plots its strategy, and passes on its tactics.

Someone asked Dorothy Parker to use a sentence with “horticulture” in it, and she came up with “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” Now that’s funny, and while that line insults whores everywhere, the joke is probably worth the risk.

After the litany of tasty food and a tasteless joke, without the “sauce” (booze), the only line in this toss-off that really matters? “One-two, the old thrones / topple, dead sober.” It’s probably not what he was getting at—he was out to topple the old-throne of sobriety on this night—but racist attitudes, from outright slavery down to demeaning jokes, is the big American old throne. The 60s took a good big chunk out of it, but it didn’t quite topple then and it still hasn’t toppled yet, and in fact there are plenty of smoking jokesters working hard to resurrect it right now. The poem ends with “The decanter, pal! / Pascal, we free & loose.” Yep. All the old habits. When you’ve been trying to stay off the sauce, but then get re-loosened enough to take that next drink, it must feel like anything goes. Hello, old friend! Did you hear the one about the Negro, the Mexican, and the Jew in the airplane?

#231 Ode

To that Boring Shit James Thompson, Seasonal

Now gently rail on Henry Pussycat,

for he did bad, and punisht he must be,

by them, & by them, & by all.

He’ll lose his place (in the book) and each thing that

ever he valued. He’ll lose his minstrelsy.

Vainly will topics call 

for cunning putting to who smashed his lyre,

drowned his harmonica, covered with foes,

and coughed with horror, & gave uts.

One word of them: (he’ll lose his scholar ire,

pereant qui . .) a voyeur, O and those

the slob’s associates 

the aggressive tease shockfull of malice, the dead-end

out-of-conflict father, the clever brother & the dull,

the nosey Jesuit.

A tribe to lose to: I lost my right hand,

she lost the honour of her word, ah well

Henry fell among .  . it.

 

James Thompson was a Scottish poet, born in 1700, lived in England, and was well-regarded in his day for a four-poem cycle titled The Seasons. “Spring,” “Summer,” etc. (I’ll leave you to guess the other two…) It’s described in an online article as having “sweep and poignancy.” The sweep and poignancy of the early 18^th century doesn’t sweep too well into the early 21^st, I’m afraid, though the loss is probably poignant enough. You get stuff like this in it, about caged songbirds: 

            Be not the Muse asham’d, here to bemoan

Her Brothers of the Grove, by tyrant Man

Inhuman caught, and in the narrow Cage

From Liberty confin’d, and boundless Air.

Dull are the pretty Slaves, their Plumage dull,

Ragged, and all its brightening Lustre lost;

Nor is that sprightly Wildness in their Notes,

Which, clear and vigorous, warbles from the Beech. 

I was an English major, and I took the British survey course like everybody else, and I loved almost all of it—Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, all of it. But this is still fairly brutal stuff. And I genuinely love Wordsworth and Shelley and Blake, from a century further on. But this puts me to sleep. Sorry. And it’s about birds too. In fact, from what I can see this entire snippet from “Spring”, almost two-hundred lines worth, is about birds.

Boring shit, though? I do have to admit that it would take an extraordinarily committed Anglophile these days to maintain her or his attention through a full sitting of Thompson’s The Seasons. We do need to remember that it was meant to be read aloud to a small gathering of bored aristocrats, with tea and fig-cakes, as their evening’s entertainment. I could probably get into that—hair gathered at the base of my neck, a fine velvet coat with long tails, lacy shirt, knee breeches and tall socks, tall windows, chandelier with whale-oil candles, enormous oil paintings of the ancestors sneering, servants and the butler, all that kind of thing. PBS throws a British-produced simulation our way fairly often, but those are still modern tales crafted with a modern sense of conflict and timing, in period costume. There truly was conflict and poignancy all over the place in those days, of course, but I do believe things moved a bit more slowly, so that “Be not the muse asham’d” has the space to work its poignancy in the ready breast there receiving. Anyway, B. isn’t bored by the poetry, he’s bored by the birds—you can count on it.

What this DS 231 poem is really about, though, might be another exercise in narcissistic self-pity, I suspect. I say “suspect” because I’m not 100% sure what it is about. These obscure Dream Songs are a lot more fun than the flat, hospitalized ones, but they’re tricky. Since the poem is titled “Ode” and is dedicated to a particular historical boring shit, once might assume that the “he” in trouble in the first stanza is the good James Thompson. But this gets knocked down right away: “He’ll lose his place (in the book) and each thing that / ever he valued. He’ll lose his minstrelsy.” James Thompson, born 1700, knew nothing whatsoever about minstrelsy and would thus have no opinion on whether or not it mattered if it was taken from him. This is Henry, palming his forehead, saying, now what’d I do? His long term reputation (in the book) has been jeopardized. As to what the actual screw up was this time? Who knows. Some scholar, I have no doubt, tracked it down, but I’m not going there, not tonight at any rate. It’s all about what Henry has suffered and stands to lose. I would like to eventually learn who the “slob” was, though.

So why the dedication and the title? Search me. Seeing the facsimile of B.’s work for the first time the other day, done on a scrap of paper, no revision, just thrown down on a napkin and pushed out to a rapturous world, makes me a just a touch less in awe of the whole Dream Song project. He’s quite likely to have started this one with all the intention in the world to write an ode to that boring shit, James Thompson, and B. gets some English prof points for even knowing who he was—I never heard of Thompson until I looked him up about an hour ago—but he might have decided it was too hard, or he was a bit, you know, liquored up and lost the thread a quarter of the way down the napkin, or he just slipped back into a more comfortable default whining mode. That’s okay. I’m pretty much done looking for wisdom from this cat. I learn a lot through peeking through and around the edges of the work, though, such as why being self-absorbed is so boring to other people, for example—but try convincing a self-absorbed person of that.

#230

[No online link available.]

[But there is a facsimile of the MS of DS 230 here {last of the 4 links, p.92}]

A memory of a visit with Robert Frost, who had insulted B. once and actually apologized for it. Two things stand out. One is that assertion that no man is great. We simply fight, and some win. Greatness is bestowed, not an intrinsic quality. Greatness comes from medals around your neck and the laurel wreath on your head. You earn such accolades through competition and victory. The second thing is that B. admits he always comes in prostrate when he compares himself to Yeats and Frost, a sentiment that can only arise from his own driving competitiveness. 

Frost was a great poet, and much loved as a poet, but his reputation as a person was that he was irascible at best and at times cruel. Who knows Robert Frost as anything but legend? I don’t. Same with Shakespeare, same with Milton, every writer we remember. Yeats? That he was consumed with a passion to marry Maud Gonne—who turned him down four or five times—was a constant heartache for the living man. He felt it as it drained him, ate at him, inspired him. Now, that passion is nothing more than part of his echoing story. If that sense of longing and unrequited passion found its way into the emotional fabric of his work, so much the better for us. But the living man’s living passion is long dead. It was his. He’s dead. Its capture in language sort of lives on if a reader has the skill, sensitivity and empathy to recreate it—but still, it’s the reader’s construct, not Yeats’s real, living deal. Still, Yeats’s work can certainly trigger that feeling, like here, if you let it. It works better if you know the feeling yourself, have been in love with somebody who didn’t return that love or even care for it. It does help to know something of Yeats’s life, but in the end it doesn’t matter that much. I know absolutely nothing—zilch—of e.e. cummings’s life, but I can’t think of many lovelier love poems than this one. We make what we do of it, and here’s someone with talent at making live a new interpretation, putting his take on it out in the world, while he was still alive, and still young and with lots of hair.

For a musician, interpretation is often an aspect of the fight. For an actor, it almost always is. For a poet, invention is the main event. B. spent time worrying, and it made its way into his work, whether he was number one or not, whether he was pulling ahead in the grand poetic horse race. This comes as well with a recognition of the competitive hubris of such a conception, and not a few “I’m not worthy” moments as well. Me, I didn’t come here to learn about this kind of thing in particular, the competition of art and creativity, but now that I’m here—I’m paying attention. It’s decorative gourd season.

#229

[No online link available.]

The rhyme of “business” with “Is-ness” is worth looking into. The is-ness arises from recognition: “‘You’re in business.’ / ‘OW’ he responded.” It’s all about the trade-offs, fame on one hand, which leads to the legacy of reputation—what most any artist wants—and on the other, the “OW”, the pain and ravage of the alcoholism that he felt was the driving force behind his reputation but that he also knew was killing him. “The subject: triumph—disaster.” Linked, like in the Asian art featuring dragons and hunting tigers of the middle stanza. When a tiger makes a kill, it’s triumph or disaster, depending on your point of view. Objectively, it’s both at once. The poem establishes pretty decisively that the poet’s life is both and that alcohol is behind both aspects of his success:

            God’s own problem, whistled the whiskey priest.

            I cannot help him. But, if he repents,

            I’ll do what I can, man.

            Like exorcize: a slow process: at least,

            unless he dies, he’ll scream with less vehemence

            and we’ll get the Devil a bus ticket.

So this art is a vehement scream, a caterwauling, and a simple inevitable consequence of his managing to stay alive. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious to cast one’s alcoholism in such cosmic/religious imagery, but it was his world he was writing about. I suppose we’re all narcissists to some extent.

 

I’ll Never Belong Here 

If I choke on phrases

Like they’re fish bones

And I forget for a moment the pluck it takes

To reach down my throat

And yank that white, curved needle

Out of my left tonsil

Let me stammer

Gagging like a freshman.

Nod, smile, radiate your encouragement—

Chalk his failure at the podium

Up to a bad day

And forget that I ever lived. 

I imagine back eight hundred years.

Flagellating monks

Tearing the skin

Of their backs over

Thirty seconds of stone

Rapture in a dank latrine. 

They lived, pleasured,

Suffered for it, sin

Paid for, they thought, in pain—

Their passage to grace—

Until only the pain mattered

Stammering joyful vespers

That stuck in their throats

Silent, finally, on their kneelers

Longing for the whip.

KZ

#228

[No online link available.]

Written in 1963 during a stay at an old grist mill in the country in Rhode Island, after having decided to take a sabbatical to work on Dream Songs full time. He confessed to someone that the real world for him was fading away, and that his life and consciousness were consumed by the work. But here there is an engagement with the world—grist mill, waterfall, a trout he caught and ate for lunch. The waterfall takes on a symbolic role.

            Each cat should seizing private waterfall,

            or rent, as Henry do. Seizure is gall,

            I guess. Yes;

            we nothing own. But we are lying owned. 

We don’t really own anything in the world, since it’s all temporary anyway, life is an extended dream. But within that stretch of dream, we have our owners—all the owners we pay rent to, each dollar a chunk of our lives monetized and cast away to buy some thing or privilege. We should all have a private waterfall of our own, but it’s also outrageous to take one and own it—“Seizure is gall”—and it’s just as outrageous to rent one. Tecumseh taught me this: “Sell a country!? Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?” Sure he did! But real estate developers came up with other ideas. You want to play in this waterfall? You buy the privilege. Heh heh heh... Tecumseh the great Shawnee fought that notion with all his considerable savvy, courage, guile, ferocity, wisdom, and desperation. He was overwhelmed. Land ownership is the way it goes around here now, and the best we have is to write snarky poems, and take the solace we can from public parks and reserves. That’s something anyway. 

            The father and the mill purveyed their falls:

            grist, grist! Still, stamping on Fate,

            he lauded his lady;

            ladies. Waders were treble at his end

            or ends. The fool danced in the waterfall

            losing his footing, ready. 

This poem is downright Thoreauvian! In the first line, “The Father of the Mill surveyed his falls.” The third stanza begins with the father and the mill purveying—making available for sale. But he’s a fool for it, losing his footing. Here’s Thoreau in Walden going on about the name of Flint’s Pond: 

Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;—so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. […] there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes—and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom.

That Thoreau can get down when he wants to! Having seen the crass onslaughts of real estate myself, I agree with Thoreau and Tecumseh in my bones. The hottest circle of Hell is reserved for developers. So you say that during your life back on God’s green Earth you stood before a redwood forest, and your spinning eyeballs triggered calculations out of your fever-addled brain that determined x square feet of standing board timber worth y dollars per hectare? Excellent! Welcome to your just reward! You damned fool… 

Consistently broke Berryman, on a half-pay sabbatical at the writing, was probably just pissed off that he couldn’t really afford the privilege of trout fishing beneath a private waterfall by a quaint and picturesque New England grist mill. But the poem transcends that pettiness if so, so okay. Tecumseh and Thoreau are still two of this poem’s guiding spirits. I’ve hooked up philosophically with both of them, but I don’t live in a world that tolerates too far beyond mere impotent philosophy their ideas or their ideals. Normally self-absorbed, internalized Henry cast an outward glimpse here and was the one who summoned their spirits, perhaps without even realizing what he was doing.

#227

[No online link available.]

Eyes rolling—at it again. Lusting for a Miss Biernbaum, from there into German, riffing off her German name, imagining he and her, in turn, on their knees, and “Down with the superior race!” The whole thing is meant to be comical. It is. Maybe a bit weirdly comical, but sure, we notice attractive people while reading poetry at them from the podium. (Margot Timmons, lead singer for Cowboy Junkies, sang “Blue Moon” to me at a concert. The whole song, never took her eyes off me, smiled back at me when I smiled at her. It was a transcendent moment for me, but once I settled down I figured she had probably just randomly lit on a particular head in a sea of heads and sang at it to amuse herself. But who knows!) Any way, the feelings behind this poem would normally come and go in a split second, but now it’s immobilized in literature’s flash. He ends it on a “phantasie” “where ‘Fuck you’ comes as no curse / but come as a sigh or a prayer.” There’s a pun on “come”, and it’s not really comedic anymore. This takes a step into the realm of subversive morality politics.

Well, I’m all for subversion. Unfortunately, “F*” is the second vilest word we have in the American lexicon right now, our two biggies descending from a legacy of Puritanism and slavery. I don’t need to mention the other, and I never use it. But the F-bomb has a lot of currency. With Puritanism having slightly receded, or having undermined itself with so much delicious hypocrisy, F* is getting more play these days than it ever has. It has entered the mainstream. It maybe doesn’t have the basso punch it used to, but there’s still some treble left and it’s almost always an attention getter. DS 46 in my opinion is one of the great American poems, and F* has a lot to do with that, partly because he couples it with “lovely”. That’s where F* should be. F* means sex first, but it gets its well-known dismissive punch from a take on sex that’s degrading, domineering, that doesn’t acknowledge the recipient’s value or even his or her humanity. “F* you.” For some reason, when I saw the movie Tunnelvision, a movie which copied The Groove Tube way back in the 70s, a line that sticks with me is a young Laraine Newman, from before Saturday Night Live, affecting a pronounced Brooklyn accent and following “F* you” with “scumbag.” It was a vile caricature, maybe the most vulgar expression possible at that cultural moment, thrown out for its comedic shock value. It worked because I still remember it. I was young and I was horrified and delighted at the same time, exactly the kid this crass, subversive (and now nearly forgotten) movie had for its target.

The thing about Henry’s wishful new take on the phrase is that his desired use is actually the most subversive use of all. It’s not about dismissal it’s about acceptance, even through the armor of taboo. A sigh of contentment or a prayer? Johnathon Edwards, who preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741, would be rolling over in his fiery grave at the mere thought of it. Forget about celebration of interpersonal intimacy, no way do we condone a rejection of patriarchal control through subversive acts of acceptance and love, we are not to intimately acknowledge Jesus in every soul of us—because we are sinners and we are not worthy. We are sinners, first and always. That’s maybe the real reason why Henry’s plaint is an outrage. There are all sorts of good reasons that cultures worldwide establish boundaries and taboos. There are promises we make, both culturally and privately to each other. There is some truth to the concept of the nuclear family as society’s bedrock. Connections like hairy old experienced geezers with vulnerable young women, or girls, even, can have or often do have serious and devastating emotional consequences. I’ve read about a pedophile organization that argues that any “love” is sacred, so any behavior done in its name should be sacred. Nonsense. You don’t use love to justify a crime. So breaking some taboos should often have very serious consequences, too. But taboos and boundaries can get overly restrictive, can oppress for oppression’s sake, distant from their original purposes and perpetuated through a thoughtless inertia, can have ulterior motives. When that’s the case, then—well, just say it. Without the phrase and the meaning behind it as part of one’s personal repertoire, we are too liable to victimization. It has a healthy, cleansing quality when used appropriately and artfully.

Well, she’s young she’s sitting there, and while he’s broken the taboo against philandering with younger women plenty of times, in this case he’s probably just ventilating those vapors and not being coy about it. While they’re connected, ultimately there’s a difference between what you think and what you do. This is thinking, it comes and goes, can’t be helped, write your poem around it, acknowledge it, move on, just don’t behave like a jerk and no one knows and no one is hurt—unless you write it out and publish it, but that’s art. But if Johnathon Edwards and his descendent ilk have something to say about what passes through our hearts and heads as we think? B. has two words for him.

#226

Phantasmic thunder shook the welkin, high.

The animals sat face to face & glared.

Henry was afraid.

Her love, which was not exactly that of a maid,

failed to assuage his terrible fears, who fared

forth in such a world. 

Arose from throats anguish. Disappeared in air

many, and many on the ground, and many at sea.

It was not a place to love.

Thumbs into eyes, enormous explosions of

what we know not, until sobriety became a vice.

‘Our breakdowns guarantee us,’ said a pal. 

I saw her in a dream, from my dream she woke,

pleasantness & courtesy & love

and all them stuff.

She had long hair, as if long hair enough

to smother horrors. What with her in the smoke

he did he will not say.

 

First stanza: “Phantasmic thunder shook the welkin [the sky], high.” Big stuff. A “her” enters the picture, and her love “was not exactly that of a maid”—experienced, not shy about taking control. The “animals” sat face to face and glared—so there is a kind of angry, intense sexual encounter about to ensue. In the second stanza, anguish, “thumbs into eyes” kind of intimate violence, and the defining lines: “enormous explosions of / what we know not, until sobriety became a vice. / ‘Our breakdowns guarantee us,’ said a pal.” Third stanza: I saw her in a dream. “She had long hair as if long hair enough / to smother horrors.” The initial promise of her is pleasant—seductive—but when it gets down to it, what he did with her in the smoke, he doesn’t say, owning that it’s somehow unspeakable.

Yowzie! This poem is filled with such an intense erotic fury, that loses control and moves into violence. Nothing of love or intimacy here, it’s all thunder and a phantasmic witch figure with whom he erotically struggles. Probably arising from some crazy dream, but with meaning. The meaning? “Sobriety is a vice” is the phrase that opens this up. The opposite of sobriety is alcohol addiction. To not engage in it is to indulge in lassitude and passivity—a contemptible lassitude and passivity. So you face it, engage it, be afraid because you know the consequences, but you still engage it. So one way to read this is to see booze personified as a kind of bitch goddess with whom the poet struggles in this booming, thunderous madness. The thing about Henry is that he reduces himself so often to mere “wag” like in DS 14, but that is what comes in the frequent strung-out afterwards moments, when the addict looks in the mirror in all the red-weak flush of humiliation and exhaustion and sees a feeble, shaking old fool looking back at him. That’s not the whole story though. This is what the other side of it is: Doing Battle. Ordeal and the metaphoric erotic test, with personified alcohol as a seductive woman with long smothering hair who must be overcome. She can be matched in the short term, but over the long haul she will win this fight, and is winning. He is dying, slowly, but not without fighting back it appears. It’s an important moment for my understanding of B., who often seems like such a pathetic sad sack, but who is really seeing himself and presenting himself as a warrior in the long run. If he’s physically and psychologically losing this fight against this “woman”, in another way she is providing for a triumph as well: As he writes, even as he’s being crushed by all this metaphoric erotic struggle, he overcomes. As a person, he is being killed by it, but as a figure, he’s winning in a totally different arena. It’s this weird psychic split, as if he’s fighting and losing over here on our physical planet, but the doppelganger from a parallel universe in a different dimension is emerging triumphant—and as a result of the same struggle. B.’s biographer notes that drinking seemed to energize him, made him more lucid. This poem shows why. A drunken binge turns out to be tantamount to buckling one’s armor and riding onto the field, except the warrior isn’t another guy in armor, it’s a demon witch, and you don’t defeat her by running her through with a sword, you defeat her by running her through with an erection. It probably explains his near sex addiction and his misogyny as well: Women present some kind of mythic struggle, and they need to be overcome. They’re not just regular people, who have everyday insecurities, and who can be hurt when used or mistreated.

Well, it comes off as pretty demented stuff, to be honest, for all the heroic posing. But, heroic posing underscores so much of human history, doesn’t it? There’s a line in Frank Herbert’s Dune, about Duke Leto Atreides: “Now, there was a man who appreciated the power of bravura—even in death.” This from one of the older Bene Gesserit, the female society of highly trained and cultivated women of stealth-power, known by the people in the world of the book as “witches.” Even in death—isn’t that what it’s about? So much of human history and psychological complication still boils down to the abhorrence of the ego at the fact that the ego will one day dissipate—the greatest of all horrors! So we invent these endless alternative after-lives—that may or may not be real. Doesn’t matter . Heaven and hell, reincarnation, the triumph of the alternate ego in the alternate realm, which takes on a reality and power simply because we create it and acknowledge its unreal reality. This all may be so. I’m also quite confident that if I’m on the right track, there are as yet unexplored pockets of archetypal darkness in this ersatz-heroic Henry/Berryman figure, too. What makes him use “woman” as an opponent? Why are addiction and “woman” connected? Something tells me that it explains B.’s marriage to Kate. He described her to someone in a letter as “volcanic”—she’s not marrying the much older man then in an infantile, passive grasping at fame’s coattails or as a father figure. She can play the role of the volcanic witch herself, more than happy to meet her husband in bed and go to battle night after night with the great experienced warrior. Perhaps the poem is even about her, though that’s only a possibility and not clearly evident from the poem itself. Eventually booze the bitch goddess overcame him physically, and though he kept writing, the writing lost its potency as his body did. But, to listen to him, it’s the best he could do with the emotional hand he was dealt. It was something. This poem’s a trip. In my estimation, this is among the most important of the Dream Songs so far. And as always, that doesn’t mean we have to like it. But I suppose there is something to be said in the human soul for the power of bravura. We don’t have to like that either. Power and bravura, all over this one. But is it all a rationalization for a failed life? Or is the cause of the failing life a struggle for a greater, alternate victory? Being a non-hero myself, I tend toward believing the former. But I’m not immune to an open-mouthed amazement at the whole crazed spectacle either.