#120

http://www.best-poems.net/john_berryman/dream_song_120_foes_i_sniff_when_i_have_less_to_shout.html
 

The poet Robert Lowell had given 77 Dream Songs a less-than-glowing review, claiming that the reader often chafes at the Dream Songs’ obscurity and “relentless indulgence.” Sometimes I would have to say I agree with this. Of course I was about seven or eight at the time, so B. wouldn’t have cared about my opinion then, and he’s dead now even though I’m not, yet, so my opinion now doesn’t matter either (likely), but B. was stung by the accusation from Lowell. Thus, DS 120 is a response to Lowell’s panning of the masterpiece.

Paranoia had become one of B.’s operating modes, possibly brought on by relentless chemical modification of his brain matter. He was still writing Dreams Songs at a feverish pace. Also, his legacy mattered, I think, and it gave him a thin skin in response to bad reviews from the poet colleagues upon whose high opinion he depended. Most were obliging, because many of The Dream Songs are amazing. But I sympathize with all that sensitivity. I’ve had the experience when one of the few times I felt I was artistically hitting on all cylinders, someone came along and tried to destroy the results. In my drawing class in college, I nailed the self-portrait we were assigned. It was exhilarating to feel it flowing. I left it in the studio overnight, and some self-appointed art critic defaced it. “This sucks” he wrote across my face. Well, artists can be as conservative as anybody else, and “conservative” in general, as far as I can tell, includes destroying anything that threatens the conservative’s fantastical sense of rightness and decorum. Most artists, or artistes, hide it by couching their conservatism inside a broader avant-garde orthodoxy. Brian Wilson—a truly great and ground-breaking artist—had a gathering of high-profile rock stars over to his studio, got everybody stoned, and had them all singing complicated harmonic rounds of “Shortnin’ Bread”, which I think is a hoot. It think it was Iggy Pop who stormed out, fed up with such ridiculous nonsense. I’ve always thought that story is hilarious: So much for the crazed sensibilities of the freakazoid rock star. Break the mold of his rock orthodoxy and he gets all sensitive about it—much like Santorum, Huckabee, and Michelle Bachman: Cut from the same cloth, just woven in different patterns.

I do wonder if The Dream Songs didn’t eventually settle into their own self-styled orthodoxy. If such an orthodoxy were questioned at all, then the conservative poet would lash out in defense. The genuine innovator might not be so sensitive? That’s probably not fair. Blanket statements about what to expect from an artist are narrowing in themselves, a move on their own toward a critical orthodoxy. I can be shy, timid, unsure, clumsy, and even stupid, but if I ever feel myself shading toward conservative, then it’s time to shake things up a bit.

♪ ♫ Mammy's little baby loves short'nin', short'nin', Mammy's little baby loves short'nin' bread ♫

 (Uh-oh. I don’t mean to get all minstrelish here. You have to draw the line somewhere.)

#119

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12168

Hmm. Begins with a reference to the (famous?) burgeoning scraggly beard, which got shaved off on occasion, sure. Well, look, it’s hardly an auspicious start, promising one of the great English language poems, but whatever. “Shadow & act, shadow & act”. Is this an oblique reference to Plato? (Doubt it.) Something akin to yesterday’s poem, the call, and my response? The cowering person projected via holographs and megaphones into persona? (Not quite seeing that.) It feels deep, and it’s repeated, so it seems important, but I can’t reach it. And then comes this:

Better get white or you' get whacked,

or keep so-called black

& raise new hell. 

I've had enough of this dying.           

I’ve had enough of this dying too. On this day today, the city of Baltimore is nursing some grievous wounds. Yet another black man killed while in police custody, his spine broken in three places. Go ahead, explain how he wasn't mistreated if his spine was so shattered. Ten thousand protesters in the streets for days, then the riots broke out, fires and looting, phalanxes of riot police subject to cascades of bricks, some injured (but no broken spines), and now here come the news agencies because this shit is juicy. Better get white, or you’ get whacked? I’ll say.

Except the poet is still talking about his beard. “Dying” doesn’t refer to ceasing to exist amongst the living, it refers to the chemical changing of one’s hair color. And we get back to the beard again in the third stanza. “It’s easier to vomit than it was, / beardless”. It reveals a steely-eyed bitterness in this one coming through for me. There are other images and messages in the poem, but this matters most to me today, as Baltimore smolders.

Because here’s the thing: “Better get white or you get whacked” and “dying”: They’re not about a beard either. The pun on “dying” is deliberate; the puns on “white” and “black” are deliberate: race or hair color, depends on your angle. They give rise to a metaphor. The “tenor” of a metaphor is the root-level image or concept being conveyed, the “vehicle” is the substitution that carries the tenor. The tenor is sometimes only communicated through allusion—you can’t prove it in a court of law—but poetry doesn’t give a damn about law. Nothing on this poem’s surface, the vehicle, is legally about anything other than grooming habits on a poet’s ugly mug. But put “black,” “white,” “whacked,” and “dying” together and the alternate meanings of the words, each with a radioactive aura, reinforce each other into a tenor about race and violence. The radioactivity grows to dangerous levels: You bet this poem is about race and brutality.

At the end there: Alcoholics vomit pretty routinely, don’t they? So there’s that. But how about one more subtle, implied double entendre? Rather than “I’ve had enough” of this “dying,” I’m sick of all this dying. There’s the poet’s comment on he why thinks whacking a black man because he’s black and you’re angry is behavior that’s acceptable. Get it? Myself, I could never, ever be a lawyer because my brain is not wired in such fashion. I’d rather empty outhouses. But, times like this, they prove their worth. Sic ‘em on the brutal tenor of violence and apply one last metaphor: You’re going to the big house. The Vehicle: The “big house” is defined as a larger-than-average domicile. The Tenor: prison. Where murderers belong.

#118

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_118_He_wondered_Do_I_love_all_this_applause_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Two things are happening here. One is that fame and the trajectory of the pubic literary career have brought the attention of beautiful young women and the attention of a curious audience, and it seems clear that both are attracted not by the substance of the artist/person but by the aura of fame that radiates from his person. As far as his response to the women, there’s always the temptation. As for the rest of the audience, their stupid questions drive the speaker to thoughts of homicide. Thus, the person gets cut off from genuine relationships and isolated in the midst of increasing attention, because neither of these modes of attention are responses to the intrinsic personality of the man. It’s all about the lure of the public persona as spectacle, which while it grew from the art, which grew from the person, it has now taken on a separate existence, like a shell or clothing, and that’s what the public is flocking toward. It insulates the man from the world and increases his loneliness. He reads his poems over and over from a nook in the wall behind him, a frightened creature in a hole, projecting his image as a holograph and his voice through a megaphone.

I’m fairly certain that this poem ends with a reference to Kate, his third wife, a beautiful young Irish woman he married less than a year after they met. (Even if it turns out not to be about Kate, the implications about love from one woman that this poem deals with would still be in play.) I insinuated some bafflement a while ago, about why such a beautiful young woman would marry an alcoholic more than twice her age. The answer to that question is right here. For one thing, age doesn’t matter in the end. More important is that she’s perceptive enough and wise enough to peer through the blubber of fame that adheres to his person and insulates him from social relationships like a layer of opaque fat, and she responds to the isolated human man quivering away back there. She waits for an opening, sun glinting through the overcast, and when the moment arrives, she will touch him. Why? Hard to say. Perhaps in a world populated by too many dull men and violent blockheads, the art convinces her that a soul is pulsing in there. Waiting. Maybe even somebody worth rescuing.

I do think a remarkable soul was there, and in the end, despite my reservations and impatience—I’m a blockhead myself, I admit it—it was probably worth looking for on her part. Of course, he kept drinking, because stopping that wasn’t an option with the addict, and Kate eventually became less his wife and more his nurse and caretaker. And if she was perceptive and hopeful, she was probably also naïve and starry-eyed too. He describes her at one point to a friend as “a volcano”—a reference to a passionate sexuality. It’s reasonable to think she was probably as starved in her way as he was, and probably just as insulated as well, by her appearance (her beauty) and by social strictures inflicted on sensitive, alive women. Love is what this poem is about. This is a love poem, not necessarily from poet to his love, but about it to the rest of us. Let me tell you something that happened to me: Somebody figured it out. She doesn’t touch him yet in this poem. But she sees, and is waiting to. That in itself is an amazing thing.

#117

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_117_Disturbed_when_Henrys_love_returned_with_a_hubby_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Oh well, my first response to this is to roll my eyes and say, so what? Get over it. But, no, people have these desires for each other, don’t they? I know that, and old flames don’t die out just because we or he or she move on, and remember, the poet is giving immortal form and substance to those instants of emotion that normally flash like dragonflies through our pathetic heated hearts despite whatever taboo or convention they transgress. So, okay. I guess.

Of course, this kind of thing looms more devastating once you’ve declared yourself a schmuck. But it’s all artifice, isn’t it? But if you live the artifice, it’s not artificial any longer. Have at it.

She was ever so close to his pain once, they were delicately in passionate love, oh my God, she’s strong and beautiful and so tragically married, he loves her still, hey, there’s a squirrel out on the lawn!

#116

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-116:-Through-the-forest,-followed,-Henry-----made-his-silky-way

The Dream Songs are called “Dream” Songs because B. tapped his dreams all the time for material. In the old filmed readings available on YouTube, he mentions this often. For example, in a reading of DS 7, he remarks that the actor Paul Muni doesn’t actually appear in the movie Prisoners of Shark Island, but, he says, this doesn’t matter because it’s only a dream. So there’s often a dream-like, surreal weirdness about The Dream Songs, which recalls stuff as disparate at Tyrone Slothrop’s journey down the toilet bowl in Gravity’s Rainbow, which has to figure as one of the most surreal scenes in all of literature, to Salvador Dali’s melting watches in The Persistence of Memory, one example of what he often called his “hand painted dream photographs,” to ex-Senator Michelle Bachman claiming just recently—apparently in all seriousness—that President Obama is bringing on the rapturous biblical end of days. (Hard to say which of these twists our perceptions of reality the hardest, but my vote goes to the ex-Senator from Minnesota, who strikes me as every inch as loony as Daffy Duck.)

DS 116 has all the earmarks of a reported dream. The overtones of paranoia—Henry is “followed”—the references to Indian stereotypes, which fall into The Dream Songs out of nowhere, and that reference to a “worst enemy”, a being shivering with power and held together with wires. A surreal nightmare image if I’ve ever read one. If Indians in dreams mean something to a non-native American, it probably has something to do with associations with the primal, something like that. And it is complicated by the history of wars and genocide that wrested this continent away from its original inhabitants, aided by disease which tipped the scales early. This has buried something deep in the non-native American psyche. It’s a complex mixture of fear, fascination, hatred, and respect, and a dream image would carry expression of all of that.

I had a quite surreal waking experience once that taught me something about that complex assemblage of emotions we carry with respect to Indian peoples. I had been backpacking by myself for a few days in the Red River Gorge area of Eastern Kentucky, which is loved locally for its scenery, wildflowers, fantastic cliffs and rock formations, and this area rivals Utah for rock arches and natural bridges. It’s also a top destination for rock climbers from all over the world. It gets rugged and remote in a hurry too. Like in the Smoky Mountains, hike thirty minutes away from the traffic jams and you might not see a soul for the next week. I had been wandering mainly alone for a few days, just the occasional encounters with backpacker types who are always pleasant and friendly. On the way out I hadn’t seen anyone for two days. Then I saw something that for a few seconds was so strange and out of place that my first thought was that I had to be seeing a ghost. Walking quietly through the woods—off the trail—was a young, fit guy outfitted in full historically accurate Shawnee dress—deerskin leggings, moccasins, silver ring in his nose, a feather and quill roach on his half-shaved head, face paint, and a red blanket tucked in complex folds around his waist and over his shoulders. Something much like this. The only detail missing was that he didn’t have the Shawnee treatment of the ears—nearly all Shawnee men cut their ears and worked the outer fleshy rim out into long loops. But, this guy had the look down cold otherwise. I don’t even know if he was of Indian ancestry or not. He was also carrying a musket and had a couple other weapons, club-type things, tucked in his belt. It was an astonishing enough sight on its own, but I experienced this uncanny time-warp sensation where I understood exactly what a white guy alone in these same woods two centuries earlier would have felt encountering a Shawnee or Cherokee or Lenni Lenape (aka Delaware) man in the same circumstances. As long as they weren’t actively at war, it was probably okay, but you needed to be on your guard, and there was now work to do to establish an interpersonal trust, and there was more than a little trepidation and fear involved with both parties. This was not a calm and peaceful time and place; it was rife with tension, for obvious reasons, and it would have been a dangerous moment for both of these people. I felt all of that in a split second.

Well I stood there for a sec, with my mouth open, totally dumbfounded, trying to figure out just what the hell I was looking at, then the guy broke the spell. He said, “How’s it going?” and walked over to the trail, smiling, and shook my hand. Normal dude, playing dress up in an Indian costume, out in the woods, but seriously into it. Turns out there was one of those historical reenactment events going on—Civil War buffs do it all the time—where they were refighting some frontier engagement from the French and Indian War or War of 1812 or the American Revolution—they all caused trouble out here in the forests. Pretty soon, here came more of them, frontiersmen and Indians, all dressed, laughing, taking photos, telling stories about their girlfriends and wives and kids, their insufferable bosses where they work. Most of them were a bit older and softer and more overweight than the real historical frontiersmen, who would have been hard, tough and wiry, in their twenties, thirties tops. Still, everything fell back into place, into modern history-nerd order.

It was a moment no one would ever forget. It brought me the same strange emotional complexity B.’s dream brought, but the thing about a dream is that, as soon as you wake up, no matter how scary or weird it was, even if it had you screaming out loud in your sleep, you say to yourself, it’s only a dream. It settles down. It was just a dream. We know what to expect from our dreams, which is that the rules that govern them aren’t the rules that operate when we’re awake. But we can still learn a lot from our dreams if we let them teach us. I do from mine. That’s what prompts us to talk about The Dream Songs like we do, as if they have something to teach us as well. But this experience out in the woods came fully awake, and because it caught me utterly off guard, and was so anomalous anyway, it triggered a flash of feelings and understandings that are normally only available in the weirdness of the dream world. But they were real in a way dreams aren’t, so I feel now that I understand in a very intimate, actual way something that few people could share. I know what it’s like to meet an Indian alone in the woods, in a time and place when their culture and very presence are under assault, and they’re fighting back with everything they’ve got, as of course they must, and it’s all nervous and anxious and more than a little bit dangerous. That’s the broad political context, though. On the footpath, it’s just him and me, and if we choose, we can keep all that at bay, and rest for a bit and talk and share some food and help each other get where we’re going.

#115

http://www.eliteskills.com/c/20050

I suppose this thing happens once a literary reputation gets established where you write to an audience instead of to yourself, or to teachers and mentors, or some phantasmagorical crowd of future fans, abstract posterity, or at best to a patient and select group of friends. I wouldn’t know. And let’s face it, when it comes to establishing a reputation, who you know is important as how talented you are. You need both. B.’s circle of friends and acquaintances included nearly all of the subsequently anthologized mid-century poets. He met them at readings and conferences, through his visiting professorships, and all these social engagements opened further opportunities for sharing ideas, networking, and more than a little serious hard-core drinking. Talent is only one half of the ticket in. Once you’re in, you don’t even have to behave yourself. I read that one famous writer punched B. in the mouth because B. ran his hand up the guy’s wife’s skirt. She was just so hot, I guess, he couldn’t stop himself. But the point is, the groping, getting socked in the mouth, it’s all in good fun once you’re in. What did she think? Jerk, I expect, or, boys will be boys, maybe. She might have just thought it was funny.

An interesting circumstance arises in this poem, because the Pulitzer winner, the poet who has been granted entrance to the select circle of literary renown, observes a talented poet not yet of the elect, and even more baffling, doesn’t seem to care. She works in a bakery, minds her own business, writes poems that flash, gets rejected constantly, and if or when she does see some success, she’ll probably remain indifferent. “Her indifference / to the fate of her manuscripts / (which flash) to a old hand is truly somefing.”

“Somefing,” huh? There’s somefing to unpack here. On one hand, there’s a pretty strong implication that publicity, fame, reputation, public career, these are the drivers at this point for the poet. He’s actually being pretty frank about that in this poem. Supposedly, the root inspiration for Berryman’s art was to somehow compensate for the emotional wounding he received as a boy, but the compensation didn’t come from expression or art-making per se, like with Emily Dickinson. She may have had posterity in mind when she bundled her poems and tucked them in a dresser drawer before she died, but it’s also clear she benefitted from the making of her poems for their own sake. There’s no reason to think B. was never at all motivated by the satisfaction of making something, like a boy building model airplanes, but he’s also suggesting that on its own would not have been enough. The psychological compensation of poetry making for him came through achieving fame and publicity. Publicity, leading to a satisfying egoistic puffery, starts to become the point. B. had people lining up to tell him Dream Songs were the best poetry being written at the time, brilliant, genius, etc. etc., and sure, maintaining that stream of accolades would have to become a motivation. It probably even takes over as far as creative motivation. (Again—conjecture. How the hell would I know?) But he also admits all through The Dream Songs that he’s aware of the hollowness of this kind of business. Maybe he really is aware of the hollowness, or maybe it’s a pose. It could be both. So, about the baby talk. The baby-talk BS of “somefing”, probably dropped in the poem out of little more than habit, functions as a way of the narrative voice cutting itself down to size. The baby talk, and the weird and buffoonish blackface stuff, which I figure is calculated to cross the line of racial propriety, the sexual exhibitionism, it all is embarrassing on purpose. Perhaps as nothing more than a way to undercut the swollen, egoistic persona, but I also do tend to think it’s just as well about feeding that persona, inflating it further. It’s all received as so honest, so artistically confessional, right? How brave. Maybe. And maybe it’s all a great ambitious psychological Ponzi scheme. When it inevitably collapsed, then the game was up: Suicide, the great double-down. And who can argue with that? It’s a payment in pure solid gold, the interest from which supports a reputation into posterity. Or at least that’s the gamble.

 I know in DS 114, from yesterday, a poem loaded with it, I was totally annoyed by the baby talk and I rolled with a little bit of snark and just had fun with that. Maybe today I have a better handle on the point. But seen from the stance of my default earnestness, I find this pose of relentless self-inflicted humiliation embarrassing, and I don’t trust it.

There is genuine value and satisfaction in the earnest act of making—model airplanes, quilts, tree houses, literature, all of it. It has to be what matters first. A real poet will—astonishingly enough—sell bread in a bakery. Or teach English. B. says he figuratively “knelt” before that. Perhaps such a gesture was the real measure and illustration of how far fame had pushed him from the unsullied example she was living?

#114

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5623

Have you ever felt whirped out? Ever whip out whines afore? Ever feel weft on your own? Then twy The Dweam Songs! That’s right, now you too can console your wounded humanity and assuage your deepest insecurities, brought on by your very own habits of bad behavior, but none of that need matter anymore! The Dream Songs will vindicate decades of foolish social iniquity through obscure, self-indulgent, but artistically constructed rationales that justify every mistake you’ve ever made! The Dream Songs were developed by a highly trained literary artist, and certified by the Pulitzer Prize Committee and the qualified experts of the National Book Award Selection Board. Nine out of ten writers and literary critics agree: The Dream Songs will compensate for your most embarrassing social gaffes, your most destructive alcoholic black-outs, the most insulting sexist innuendos, all turned into brilliant social commentary and profound confessional artistry—practically overnight! Your students will be dazzled, your colleagues awe-stricken, and your ex-wives may even stop clamoring for money long enough to shake their heads and admit that your sad, indefatigable genius still makes them secretly love you! And how about those girls, eh? With baby talk, blackface minstrel patois, and frank confessions of lust, self-doubt, and shame, you’ll be the envy of every poet in the academy! Try The Dream Songs—you’ll be glad you did! Buy a book of them today!

#113 or Amy Vladeck or Riva Freifeld

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_113_or_Amy_Vladeck_or_Riva_Freifeld_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php
 

Valerie Trueblood is now a writer, and she was one of B.’s students. Amy Vladeck and Riva Freifeld and “Miss Kaplan,” Ellen Kaplan, were all also students whom B. appears to have been thinking of. Whether they approve of having been immortalized in a Dream Song as a subject of B.’s ruminations—can’t say. Trueblood wrote and asked why she was so “honored” in one of his poems, so there’s that. He responded that he had seven readers of his poetry and was hoping she’d be number eight. Actually, he had been thinking of her a lot. I guess that’s okay. Sure, I think about my students all the time, and more often than not I care about them. We cultivate relationships of a particular kind with them, after all, and they’re beautiful and kind and smart, many of them, just the kinds of people anyone likes to be around anyway. He wrote letters to these students. By all accounts he was a dynamic and inspiring teacher, so sure, that’s probably it. Were they, are they, embarrassed by this? I wonder. I wonder if I might be.

Knowing what we know of the poet, I harbor creepy suspicions about what the significance of naming these women, his students at the time, was all about. Maybe that’s not fair and I should leave it at that. But the poem is not without its humor. The body is foul, cried God. I don’t buy that myself, except that the body certainly does have the potential to lead to trouble, and I think that’s the point. Alcoholism is lots of things; one of them is a physical dependence. Sex is lots of things, not all of it physical, but that’s where it begins, or ends, all right.

“For many years I hid it from him successfully”—so, what is the antecedent of “it” here? It’s not clear. Is it the body, or is it freedom of soul? Whichever it is, God has it, up in the “spiritual” of space. Why the emphasis on the “ritual” there? It’s open-ended, but I can’t help but turn to thoughts of sex and desire, the ritual aspect of it all, but up with God in airless space where it doesn’t get any play.

I think the point is that, look, his thoughts of these students probably are shading into a closeted lust that he’s not above opening the door on. Older, more decrepit than he used to be, God took away that freedom of body/soul that he once loved to exercise, to his shame and discredit, but what of that? That’s just grist for the poetic mill. At least he lets these women off the hook. If God had bound up his lusty excursions, in other words, incapacitated them, then God’s “declaring war” on these young women amounts to a roundabout and absolute testament to their—what? Innocence, purity, chastity? Something like that. Nice girls, in other words. They’re all still alive and working and writing, I think. Probably with a valuable collection of complicated memories of a teacher not shy about letting his wounded humanity show in his poems. That last line about Miss Trueblood, though: God shouldn’t have demanded of her, or imposed upon her, the virtuousness she exhibits. It’s an oblique expression of hopeless desire. The line between artistic courage and shameless exhibitionism isn’t always fixed.

#112

http://www.everseradio.com/dream-song-112-by-john-berryman/

There’s not much worse of a feeling than when you realize that you let down a person you care about. I don’t have access to the specifics on this, but I can pretty much tell you what happened: On his wife’s birthday, B. was drunk, or somehow otherwise incapacitated, and the greetings, cake and presents, the expressions of love and appreciation appropriate to the occasion, well they “clung to the roof / I mean of my mouth.” Meaning they didn’t get out and as far as she knows never existed in the first place, and he found himself sleeping out in the dog house. If you love someone, and fail this way, the guilt and shame are tough things to haul around for the couple days after when they’re on you like anvils in a backpack. (I’m just conjecturing. This has never happened to me.) A poem in apology is meant to help ease the awkwardness and hurt. Apology poems are pathetic little things, though, and they’re usually miserably inadequate. Asking art to address specific sociopolitical conditions and fix them is bad enough. Art isn’t meant for that, though it can occasionally fulfill that goal. This is worse and is almost always a failure.

I wrote an apology poem once. I even subtitled it: “An Apology.” This grew out of the embarrassment of dropping the F-bomb in a committee meeting once, which you’re not really supposed to do. Even though it was attached to a discussion about environmental outrage, which we all were in tune over, I was embarrassed. Nobody else cared, and if they did at all, I’ve been forgiven—I think. But it was a moment where I had to look inwardly and make a little bit of a fucking adjustment. Here’s the poem.

One other thing. I posted this sonnet on this blog once, in response to #31. I just neglected to mention that it’s really more an apology poem than an environmental fury poem. So here it is again in this more forthcoming context. It’s one of my favorites of my poems, though it does have that pathetic little apology poem drawback. I tried to overcome that with a good measure of righteous fury. (One of my best poet friends didn’t like this one, but she was wrong.)

Only One Word (An Apology)

I watch the great green mountains disappear.

Arctic wells nose down like roots, drilled

So tankers slide through melting ice, filled

With oil, and oil, and oil, and oil. I hear

The frackers’ injections, that crack shale

Till burning gasses rise like burning wind.

The green of hillside forest cut and skinned

Away, blasted, scraped, sickly, and pale.

Murder burns the language used to fit

My thoughts to word, when forms bubble like spit

From a dusty throat, like gas from shattered grounds,

And superegoistic caution sounds

Like shame: Puts finger to lips and warns me to quit…

Goes quiet...(…shush…)…but there’s only one word for…(…shhh…)…it…

 

KZ

#111

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-111:-I-miss-him.-When-I-get-back-to-camp

Been thinking about what to do with this one all day, on a busy day. I tried to look into the sources I have—nothing about DS 111. What I expected. I was thinking, maybe I might say something following from yesterday—what’s the point of this one? Does it have a point? Not feeling that.

Now I think it’s about dogs playing cards. Which is pretty darn funny, except there’s that little business about “digging up” the old canine friend, whom the speaker had shot dead. I like this poem.

If there’s a triggering event for this one, it’s out of reach. There doesn’t have to be. It’s macabre and funny at the same time, a witty riff on the campy images we all profess to think are ridiculous, but secretly chuckle at, of a party of dogs playing poker or bridge or pinochle, crazy eights or go fish. The references to card games are varied.

And now, a confession: I just read Dream Song #111 again and the whole scenario hove into view. Hint: it’s not about dogs playing poker. Sheesh!

Tundra, blubber, dogs, cards: Think shipwrecked polar explorers. They shot the dog(s) out of mercy or desperation, starving as they all must have been, waiting for the ice pack to thaw. When starvation gets bad enough, you dig out the corpse of the frozen dog from the tundra and dig in. This is not a funny poem, it’s a desperate poem, and look, it takes time sometimes for these obscure poems to sink in.

Is it about Shackleton’s famous Antarctic expedition, ill-fated but with, miraculously, no loss of life? Or Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition, the result of which every last man who set out in his company died miserably? Perhaps Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition of 1845? B. seems to have had a fascination with tragic polar exploration—DS 11 is about another one.

That stuff about the dogs playing cards? Heh heh. I’ve deleted such false starts before, embarrassing and misguided. But today, it’s a lesson. Read close, my hearties! These poems can be tricky fun, and they catch you off guard, and day to day, I’m sometimes tired. Today, yes indeed, tired, and been busy, and I’m tired. But it was a good day, and my head feels hollow, like a cantaloupe. That’s not a bad thing, if you’ve earned it.

Tired, yes, but, I’m not frozen in the ice pack either. Tonight, soon, I will say thanks to my soft warm bed, knowing I’ll get up and do it all again tomorrow. Routine is a prison, but get caught in some absurd extremity, and you’ll find yourself yearning for that familiarity you’ve forsaken. Believe it. There’s the metaphor of this poem right there, Henry. Frozen in some God forsaken tundra of the soul. Empathy rises in me, but you behaved like an idiot. What did you expect? Robert Falcon Scott raced Roald Amundsen to the South Pole, got there to find he’d been beaten, then succumbed to exhaustion and starvation in an Antarctic nightmare because his ponies all died. That was stupid, stupid, stupid. The last words in his journal were: “Great God! this is an awful place.” Amundsen, on the other hand, studied polar exploration with Greenland Eskimos, lifelong experts, took their advice and used sled dogs, and his only comment on reaching the South Pole first was that the trip was uneventful and sorry, kind of a bit boring. There’s the difference in a nutshell between an adventurous stupid life and a dull, competent, successful one.

So, I’m feeling grateful for my moderate triumphs today and my moderate comforts too.

#110

http://www.eliteskills.com/c/14576

I can’t track down the specific incident this poem is referring to. It’s frank about its subject, though. A child, it seems, was horribly drowned, and the NYPD let the perpetrators off the hook, an incident in Berryman’s more widespread accusation of frames and cover-ups.

In 2015, police corruption has been prominent in the news, especially with the seemingly unjustified use of bullets against black men. This is enabled by cover ups, a code of silence amongst police officers, and a blanket public tolerance of police misconduct, with lots of causes: Racism. (You think?) A brainless belief in American exceptionalism, i.e., we’re the greatest country in the world so these kinds of things can’t happen here and if you think that you’re a nattering nabob of negativity (thanks, Spiro Agnew) or some liberal elitist out to destroy the forces that protect the America we love. Fearful and/or cowardly officers, with some justification due to the absurd culture of radical gun ownership spreading through the country they’re forced to confront. And don’t forget simple murderous psychopaths mistakenly given the prestige and protection of a uniform and a badge, and which as a society we have trouble admitting the error of.

Depending on who I envision reading it, there are various responses I could make. More precisely, the language one might use would have to suit the audience: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; systemic militarization of police forces coupled with inadequate enforcement of consequences and a culture of corruption. The man is freakin’ out.

I’m sheltered from it. I’ve had Cincinnati cops get snarky with me on one or two occasions, but they didn’t Taser me or shoot me, in part because I was polite and white. On other occasions, I’ve had cops let me go. (I got pulled over after a trip to the vet because I was speeding. I admit that. But I also had an outstanding parking ticket that I never knew about that I actually could have been arrested for. With a crying baby and a moaning cat in the car, he let me go. He could have taken me in and really, really wrecked my day.) But I admit that charges of police misconduct infuriate me as much as anything I can think of. Well, I resent power: I don’t like administrators, supervisors, people telling me what to do in general. But I haven’t moved to a heavily armed compound in Idaho over it either. These positions in the social order are all necessary, so I smile and do what I’m told because I understand it. But abuse that power? I want the abuser fried. (Freudian type-slip: I meant to type “fired” and it somehow didn’t come out that way. We’ll let “fried” stay. This happens to me at times; it’s normal when you type faster than your editorial superego can keep up.)

So, an angry political protest poem, about a specific instance of police misconduct, who swept the murder of a child under the rug. I’d be mad too. But what does this poem actually accomplish, I wonder? It appears to want to accomplish something, not just exist in some state of timeless beauty. There isn’t room for much specific prompting toward justice in publishing a poem, probably published a year or more, at least, after the alleged crime was committed. There may be district attorneys and prosecutors current with the latest in literary poetry, but I suspect they’re few. It’s not like a letter to the editor or to a Congressman or something like that. It has to have a broader agenda. I saw a painting in Paris once, now housed in the Musée d’Orsay, by Honoré Daumier, titled The Thieves and the Ass. The painting depicts a brutal murder, while the victim’s donkey is led away by an accomplice. I’ve often thought about this painting, and this poem reminds me of it. Obviously, the painting isn’t about seeking justice for the murderers who killed someone for the paltry prize of his donkey. It’s fictional anyway. The painting is a universal statement about human brutality, and there is more than a little bit of spit mixed in with the oil paint on this canvas. It’s a broad indictment of the stupidity of violence, and the presence of the donkey in the background underscores how “asinine” violence is in general. This painting came from an artistic sensibility who didn’t hold back on expressing contempt. The point is to pierce sentimental conceptions of life, France, justice—you name it—and display corruption and violence, as it really looks, for all to witness. I haven’t studied Daumier, but I would expect him to be an idealist on some level. He might paint such a violent scene to simply accuse his fellow degraded humans, a simple expression of spite and contempt (seems at least possible), but I would think there’s a further expectation that illuminating sin with the hot light of truth can have the effect of drying it up, like a trickle of dumpster juice that oozes out of the shade of its dumpster into the hot sun. It stops smelling at least. This gesture would rely on recognition of a fundamental impulse toward justice and the common good in most people. Without that, there’s no point in such a painting, other than the satisfaction of releasing spite, like hawking out a loogie.

B. is up to something similar. Art can on occasion have some kind of immediate sociological effect: John and Yoko singing “All You Need Is Love” on TV from their bed, or novels like The Jungle, some of Bob Dylan’s songs. But I tend to think it’s most effective over the long run, slowly changing attitudes and conceptions at a deep level. Picasso’s Guernica, with all its depiction of horror, was meant first to comment on this immediate level, since in 1937, when he painted it, the Nazi Fascists were just getting their war machine rolling. But the painting is most effective as a reminder to people of what certain of us are capable of, and as a warning against the next opportunity for inciting woe and chaos. B. is working as part of the counter-culture in his poem, criticizing police corruption broadly, even though the vehicle of his message is a particular incident. Of course, the lesson maybe wasn’t effective over the long run as he might have wished, but artists and those of us interested in justice at all levels will keep exposing and criticizing the donkey thefts as we learn of them. It’s one of art’s values.

#109

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5618

For some reason this brings to mind Donald Hall’s “My Son, My Executioner”. Although, when your wife tells you you’re “worthless” then you’ve started dying before the birth of the baby, methinks, and unless she’s vindictive and hurtful herself, you’ve quite possibly earned it. There is a meaning buried in this line: “My pussy-willow ceased. The tiger-lily dreamed.” It has something to do with sex and affairs, with a pun or two involved I’m pretty sure. We know the story by now. Here is a quote from one of his biographies, that sums up his world back in 1951: “As he came into his own power and women responded to his intellectual and physical energy, he had found himself craving and hurting them. Afterward, when his head had cleared and he could survey the damage, he had felt intense shame. Then he would take pity on himself with gin and whiskey, first hating himself and then promising to reform. At such times he had no difficulty identifying with the Tempter, carrying hell with him wherever he went.” Riiight. By the 60s, nothing had changed except that the abuses, self- and outward-directed both, were taking a merciless toll, physically as well as emotionally. Thus, “worthless” probably was a word with some sting. Words like that sting most when you believe them yourself at some level. In 7^th grade some kid, the school bully’s little pal, called me exactly that, and it did not sting, although it did incite an intense urge to pound the little creep’s teeth out. Discretion is the better part of valor, and for better or not, my memory of that eventuality includes a tagline marking it as fantasy. Too bad; he was an asshole and deserved dentures at age 12.

Well, the approach of a child is supposed to be a happy occasion. “Dread we our loves”? It seems this line can reach in a couple directions: Dread we the consequences of our affairs, and dread we the awareness of our end that our newborn child triggers, and dread we the dark underside of relationships, when the terrible truths of which intimacy awakens awareness can become weaponized. Here’s the reason I likely wouldn’t have gone out drinking with this guy: Power and intellectual and physical energy be damned if you use it to leave wreckage in your wake. Artistic and intellectual power is not a corollary of that kind of business. And it’s not out of fear of being the next casualty. I just don’t like it. Maybe I should have more pity for somebody like a deathbed Picasso: Among the very greatest artists in history, and with more than a few ruined lives in his wake as a result of his possessiveness and vindictiveness. From the account I've read, he was tormented by self-loathing at the end and terrified of what he thought he knew was waiting for him. Nah: You made your deathbed, now lie in it.

So, all right, I’m not in a receptive mood this morning for what is striking me as narcissistic whining. It’s just a mood. It’s raining outside. I’m going to go stand in it and let sky-water rinse this poem off of my upturned face.

#108

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5617

I like this line: “Fabulous calls / to duty clank.” There’s such a cold, clanking finality about it. Addicted as we are to heat and electricity, disrupting cold brings duty to a clanking halt. There will always be the child in me who loves hearing on the radio in the morning that school is closed because it snowed six inches last night (that’s all it takes in Cincinnati). You roll over and enjoy the warmth under the covers, and screw it now, let it snow. Those holes shot in the schedule mess up my classes, though; they’re a professional pain. This poem also touches on those moments in the snowy cold—world of black, white and gray, piles of dirty slush and snow in the street, trees with bare branches tangled like morning hair just off the pillow, your breath that was still warm and alive in your body a second ago dies and dissipates in frozen vapors, the snow creaks under your feet like old floorboards—and you think, how can this be the same place where warm rain dripped off of the green foliage last summer? Where you could smell the writhing soil, the breath of bushes, the cut grass of the lawn? It’s not the same place! I can’t be in the same place! And the answer, of course, is that place is a meeting of space and time. The space may be analogous, but time’s seasons have utterly progressed. Henry of course drops a woman into the memory, when he melted her honey, whispered warm things in her ear, and she leaned in his direction. It’s simple and erotic, a lovely image, filled with warmth. It reminds me of the bather at the end of Rilke’s “The Gazelle”:

                      as when in a green place

a bather in the woods in interrupted…

with the lake’s shine on her averted face.

Of course, in the incarcerating Asiatic cold, it’s part of that same kind of distant summer memory as well. It all adds up to a metaphoric contrast between the poet’s now—sterile and frozen and alone, even if populated by Ivy League duties—and a dreamy summery past filtered through a nostalgic scrim, with all its warmth, and women’s attentions. Flowers and fragrances, honey, and isn't it so beautiful when a woman tucks her long hair behind her ear and she leans it closer to hear your whisper?

#107

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_107_Three_coons_come_at_his_garbage_He_be_cross_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Another pretty straightforward narrative poem, complicated only by that line, “I've given up literature & taken down pills,” which is likely the real point anyway. What I think it means is that being forced to lay off the hooch equates to laying off the literature, the two being linked in this persona. I would be open to another interpretation, but I’m more interested in raccoons today.

Raccoons were getting into the dog food in my father-in-law’s garage. We heard them out there one night and he asked me to shoo the varmints out of the dog food. I went out with a flashlight and found 14 raccoons—I counted them—mom, dad, and 12 half-grown rascals. There weren’t going to leave until I started yelling, which moved them along in a furry wave. They all climbed up the same tree together then just sat there watching, waiting for me to leave.

My son and I were camping under a rock overhang in Red River Gorge, KY. We heard something in the middle of the night rummaging through my pack. Thinking it was a mouse, we got the flashlight ready, illuminated the culprit, and saw a raccoon emerge and tear off, carrying the smoked sausage we were saving for breakfast.

The coons were wreaking havoc with the garbage cans, and they were drinking the juice out of the hummingbird feeder at night—like throwing back a beer before bedtime, it seemed. They smashed three or four of them, too. Not to mention that they voided their bowels in the same corner of the deck every night, so we were getting ankle deep in raccoon shit back there. I declared that if they were on the deck, they were fair game. I bought a live trap, baited it with peanut butter, and caught more than a dozen over two summers. If you let them go nearby, they come straight back home, so I took them over the Ohio River to a secluded park near the Little Miami River and turned them loose there. I can’t imagine that it’s anywhere close to legal. It was interesting to watch how they responded to being trapped—some were shy and terrified, some nervous, some ferocious and angry, some were sweet and quiet. Their individual personalities were a result of their intelligence and their personalities. But they all ran off in good shape, and best of luck to them. I don’t want to kill raccoons, but they were getting too thick back there.

On quiet summer nights I often slip silently into back yard just to see what has come out of the woods—deer, owls, skunks, foxes, opossums, and of course raccoons, all emerge and hang out there, or sleep, scavenge, or otherwise cause trouble. I like to go to the flowers and watch for sphinx moths, which are impressive in the moonlight. One night two young raccoons were on the driveway scavenging sunflower seeds the birds had kicked out of the feeder. They didn’t see me. I heard their mother coming up along the hedgerow, and she knew right away I was there. She crept close to them, barked something in raccoon that I completely understood just from the tone of her voice: “You kids get back here!” You could see them look up, look at each other, and go, “Uh oh.” They hurried back to her, and I heard her giving them an absolute tongue-lashing all the way into the woods, and I’m quite sure the message went something like this: “There’s an adult human—the most dangerous creature on earth!—standing not ten feet away, and you two boneheads are eating sunflower seeds? Are you crazy?” How do I know this? Here’s how: “it seems, and is, clear to me we are brothers.” Parents berate their misbehaving children to teach them lessons. Raccoons are absolutely not furry little people with masks. Their experience of life on Earth is very different from ours. But as warm-blooded, intelligent mammals we share much. There is more going on with animals than we know how to give them credit for.

#106 28 July

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-106:-28-July

This is a narrative dog poem, straight up. The poet’s pup got bullyragged by the local canine Brutus, and thus came a vet visit, bandages, a period of doggy convalescence on the screen-porch. Who on Earth doesn’t say, “aww” to that? I grew up with beagles, rabbit-focused hounds content to mind their own business—i.e., twin obsessions with kibble and cottontails—but not exactly pushovers in a dogfight either. In the end, as Huck says, “There ain’t no harm in a hound, nohow.” Nowadays, it’s all cats and fishes in the pet dept. at my house, and we make friends with some of the local yard fauna, especially deer, hummingbirds, and Lazarus lizards (a Cincinnati specialty). Here’s a catfight poem, from some feline bad blood in the household that took a couple months to settle a while back.

                                                   Cat Fight

When you’re at peace in the window

Personal sun caressing your golden fur

The politics of insects and autos

The concatenation of birdly affect

On display for your satisfaction

A lavish production

Regarded from the royal box

And a cat jumps to the window

Outside, no odors to identify

But somehow still present

Representative of that vulgar polis

That no sophisticated feline need suffer

Then of course you are to attack

That which comes to your claws’ reach—

Your sister, your housekeeper,

Your food, your own reflection:

This thing may die for you

Or run, or it may fight back.

You may find yourself injured.

In that case, hide under a chair

For some weeks and hiss

At what irks you. Spit,

Knowing that rage sanctifies suffering

And hatred is its own reward.

In your isolate splendor

You will retain purity

And the loose cats

Of the debased world outside

Will shrink to motes

Of dust in the lights

Of your awful yellow eyes.          

KZ

#105

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-105:-As-a-kid-I-believed-in-democracy:-I
 

This piece of political commentary was written before Watergate, obviously, so the characterization of Nixon as “alert & gutsy” seems odd to say the least, but perhaps he was alert & gutsy. He was also a treasonous thug when he secretly sent an emissary to the North Vietnamese in 1968, asking them to hold off on the Paris Peace Talks until he was elected, sabotaging the cease-fire being brokered which would have gone to the Democrats’ credit. This cost countless lives, and likely tipped the balance on the election. This was also flat-out a crime, and Nixon was subsequently paranoid about leaks and established what he called a “plumbers unit” to keep them in check. These were the same people behind the Watergate break-in that eventually brought Nixon down. Good riddance, but along the way he did tremendous damage to the country. B. may have thought Eisenhower was a dope, but Eisenhower seems to have had some old-fashioned integrity. Here is Hunter S. Thompson writing in Rolling Stone on Nixon in 1994, the year he died: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.” Yikes! Thompson’s eulogy is hilarious and so filled with contempt and spit it’s really worth a read: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm “Universal contempt” indeed! How on Earth did such a figure get elected president of the United States? It’s a rhetorical question. Since then we’ve seen an empty-headed Reagan and a differently styled empty-headed George W. Bush achieve the same station for no less mysterious or crooked reasons. You can say this much: Whatever devious claptrap debris Nixon had clattering around in the dumpster of his head, at least his head wasn’t empty.

Eisenhower doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect. But probably most politically aware, progressive, intelligent, artistic academics would align against any Republican, period, even Eisenhower. In an earlier Dream Song, B. laments Adlai Stevenson’s loss. It would be nice to have him back. Politics these days seems to have some relatively bright, competent centrists on one side (Obama, the Clintons), and the lunatic fringe yanking things way to the right on the other—pretty much name any prominent Republican. Their inventive variations on the theme of whackadoodle would be hilarious if they weren’t perpetrating such societal vandalism. What’s inexcusable is that they’re doing this in service to an unimaginably rich and powerful cabal of billionaires who are really the ones calling the shots these days. They’ve forged a way around the democratic safeguards and are ripping things to shreds and selling off the pieces. Times like this, it’s tempting to think maybe a king would restore some semblance of order.

In a “Film as Art” class, once, I took a poll among the students, all guys, for a film they suggested we should watch. The Matrix won, and unlike B. who reports nixing Gone with the Wind in favor of War and Peace, we went with it, in the spirit of educational democracy. Bad idea. After studying and seriously discussing The Matrix, I now officially despise that phony-baloney movie. So much for democracy. Gattaca was much better. It’s not an overrated idea, exactly, but democracy doesn’t work in every conceivable instance. I’m with B. on that.

#104

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_104_Welcome_grinned_Henry_welcome_fifty_one_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Happy Birthday, Henry. If he was turning fifty-one, that means this was written on or about Oct. 25, 1965. He didn’t make it through the next decade, unfortunately. I believe he was done. We can buck up to abuse in our youths, but the body and its dependent spirit wear out earlier than planned if they’re not cared for. For example, the hearing in my left ear is starting to fade, and I suspect it’s due to a couple long-ago rock concerts and a couple projects involving power tools. To be more specific: Rick Derringer, at Riverfront Coliseum about ‘77 or ‘78 or so, who was opening for a headliner my friends dragged me to, maybe Rush or Peter Frampton. He turned the volume up way past the threshold of pain—not music, an aural frontal assault, sinuous noise-power. Unbelievable. Villainous. I was furious, livid, and if I ever hear “Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo” or even “Hang on Sloopy” to this day, the radio switches right off. No thanks. Then there was the canoe I built in grad school, the gunnels of which were fashioned with a belt sander. Did I use earplugs? Um, no. (I do now when I use power tools.) While my hearing has been hurt, I do hope my spirit is still fairly strong, despite the spiritual assault I put it to by just showing up to a Rick Derringer concert. Ugh. The point is, the body will eventually succumb to the degrading assaults we subject it to, alcohol abuse being an excellent case in point.

This is ground B. has been over lots of times. Hammered from above, hammered from below. Body and spirit. I’m done blaming him for his own hammering, but the consequences of his extended behaviors did lead to lots of time drying out in the hospital. It’s still tempting to imagine the relationship between body and spirit as the body functioning as foundation for the brain/mind, from which in turn emerges the spirit. This is probably a conceptual relic of the Great Chain of Being—God the Father over it all, the angels beneath him, the sainted elect, then us: sinners, then the innocent animals, mindless plants, the lifeless rocks. If there’s really any cause to separate these frames of reference in our state of being, our ontological make-up, then I would rather think of them as intermingled, non-hierarchical. We are holistically what we are, all together, folded up at once. Deliberately cut yourself, you’ve cut your spirit. Live a life full of lousy choices, lies, self-abuse and skullduggery, and your face reflects that. You’re responsible for your own face. Keep that in mind when you look in the mirror on your next birthday! Then you can set about younging yourself through wellness and righteousness.

#103

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-103:-I-consider-a-song-will-be-as-humming-bird

Well, here with under four weeks to go until commencement, I’m feeling the annual end-of-spring-semester doldrums, and I’m groggy from a brief but sweaty nap to boot. So I’m feeling simpatico with Henry’s touch of self-doubt and his lapse of inspiration. This Dream Song was written on New Year’s Eve, as 1960 rolled into 1961, as far away now in the past as King Henry VIII or Brachiosaurus, it’s all the same. I was 2 years old. I actually have a couple memories from that near that age, but they’re not relevant here. I have no memory of the 1500s, so maybe those two ages are different after all. And, no, time doesn’t run backwards, but it’s a cool enough poetic project to imagine so.

One thing Henry has going for him is that he is “desired.” I have friends and family, and I’m grateful for that, but word from the farthest West hasn’t spread much on my account. But perhaps with diligence that’s not yet out of reach. I just want to be a working writer, like him, write books and stuff. I will keep singing, for what it’s worth. I would like my poems to be fresh as bread, still as a cat in a window, a crow in the snow.

It’s a nice Dream Song. I don’t like all of them. This one is human and approachable, there’s a melancholy about it, and I’m down with melancholy. Joni Mitchell wrote that there’s comfort in melancholy. New Year’s Eve is supposed to be a party moment, a celebration of the new, but I’ve never gone with that, and clearly Henry wasn’t in that mode on his New Year’s Eve either. Quiet gatherings at home are best. I feel that melancholy in new beginnings. Rather than New Year, spring right now is in incipient mid-April flower and coming on fast. An April spring and New Year’s Eve are two of the beginning moments in the yearly cycle. (The new school year in late August is the third.) Eliot claims that April is the cruelest month, but that’s mean. But the breeding of lilacs out of dead ground, conventionally la-la time, does have this sad underbelly. Like when you look at a newborn baby and think, don’t worry about it for now, Sweetheart, but you started dying today. Enjoy your span, that’s all. Make something of it.

I’m outside on the front porch, the light is just balanced between blue twilight and gold lamplight flickering on up and down the street. The traffic noise rises and falls, and it just went full quiet in its ebb. No clattering air conditioners yet. Robins are squabbling in the silence, and there are assorted others songs and chirps. There is rain in the warm humid air; a quilt of gray clouds is oozing forward. The irises I planted last fall are pushing upward. Irises care nothing for melancholy. The rain is pushing a breeze forward, that just this moment arrived. Time to go inside.

#102

http://www.eliteskills.com/c/14634

Yes, it’s time to send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece and the Parthenon where they came from and where they belong. Greece’s wisdom teeth, extracted without its permission.

This poem is mainly about Delphi, though, which was renowned even into Roman times for its collection of statues, many of athletes. They’re all gone, I guess, destroyed or distributed among museums the world over. Delphi’s site was chosen by Zeus, who had determined it to be the exact location of Gaia’s navel.

 

Delphi

Zeus determined the location

The exact spot of the navel

Of Gaia, Earth mother-goddess,

And so directed that Delphi

Grow there, in her praise:

Temples, statues, theaters, baths,

Clustered in their little valley

Soft lint in the bowl of Gaia’s belly,

Who reclined languid and sensuous

Over the horizons, one graceful

Arm stretched above her head,

Gazing with a shy smile at the sun,

Letting us share her love, letting

Us build and grow,

And in our borrowed strength, we grew

And descended and thrust

Deep into her. Gaia’s inquisitive

Surprise will pass, fleeting.

Her fever will cool.

She’ll gaze skyward

Again, decorous and ravishing,

Clean, and fragrant of the musk

Of sleek civets, and ambergris,

The blooms of unbroken groves

Of plums, and olives, and peaches,

And gorgeous sweet cherries. 

KZ

#101

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_101_A_shallow_lake_with_many_waterbirds_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Here’s a dream song, all right. I know that some people’s dreams, and people’s psychological intricacies as well, are endlessly interesting to themselves, and they love sharing. Especially if they’ve ever been in therapy, then look out. I learn a lot from my dreams, and I had a powerful, life-changing dream once that I shared too much. Telling it for the wrong reasons robbed it of much of its power. If I ever extend a dream to someone else now, I enforce the twenty-second rule.

This dream takes place on the grounds of a “lunatic asylum.” I’m glad that phrase has gone out of use. When I was a kid, living just east of Louisville, ’67-’69, on a clear day from our treehouse, we could see Lakeland Asylum a couple miles off over vast stretches of cornfields, officially known as Central State Hospital, formerly the Central State Asylum for the Insane. We knew it simply as Lakeland, the mental hospital. The buildings were razed in the 1990s and a state park was established on the site, but it was a fully operating hospital when we lived there. The park is okay, I guess, but the rest of the area is trashed. In those days it was a lovely, quiet rural area, now it’s a brutalized wasteland of shopping centers, parking lots, gas stations, Applebee’s, Wal-Mart, ad nauseum. The hospital and its grounds were famous for being the most haunted place in Kentucky, for those into that kind of thing. Now they’re haunted picnic shelters. The real horrible fright comes from the Home Depot built in the pasture across from our old house.

My brother and I and a couple of our friends would ride our bikes down the country road to Lakeland, where we bought sodas and candy in an old, old general store there. The smell of a general store with bare wood floors is special and unmistakable. It’s nearly gone now, but it was common until general stores started disappearing in the late 60s, replace by Stop N Go, 7-Eleven, and now of course every gas station is filled with chips, candy and sodas. The Lakeland store was staffed by the patients of the hospital. We went there occasionally, but I remember one incident clearly because it was a bit freaky. The clerks and cashiers were mentally disabled, some of them severely, with ill-fitting clothes and funny haircuts, and while their eyes weren’t actually twirling in their sockets, it seemed that way to a 9-yr old because the people weren’t quite adhering to standard etiquette regarding eye contact. But they were quite friendly and welcoming, happy to see us, and while a visit there was sometimes a bit unsettling, it wasn’t usually scary. They had a kind of urn that dispensed “Hot Dr. Pepper.” I never tried it, going with cold orange soda instead. Years later, once microwaves became common, I tried heating Dr. Pepper. It lost its fizz and made an explosive mess. Not good. But they were always so eager to have us try their Hot Dr. Pepper. A Snickers bar in Kentucky then was 11¢, a dime plus a 10% sales tax. I put one on the counter, gave the clerk a dime and a nickel. He took the coins, opened the heavy ornate gold cash register with the pull of a big handle, it churned and rang, and he gave me two quarters change. “No,” I said. “Give me four pennies for the change.” He gave me four pennies. “Here, these are your quarters.” He took the quarters and exchanged them for three nickels, taking my hand in his, turning my palm upright, dropping the nickels in, then closed my fingers and patting them with a big smile. “No, the right changes is four cents. Four.” I held up four fingers. He took the three nickels back and gave me four dimes, closing my hand again, patting it and smiling at me. “Really, the candy bar is only eleven cents. Here take the dimes.” “I don’t want to steal from you,” he said, the first time I had heard him speak, his voice low but oddly muffled and raspy. The woman in the store with him, who had been watching the whole time, came over and said something that I couldn’t understand a word of although she seemed furious, like she was about to spit at me. I remember her hair: Dark, not too lengthy but curled under, with straight bangs cut too short. She was fairly tall and it made her neck look too, too long. She had a moustachey shadow on her upper lip. She kept talking, I didn’t understand a thing, until finally I caught what sounded like, “Take your fucking money and buy something else.” I had my correct change of four pennies and had dropped the four dimes on the counter. She reached into the register pulled out a whole handful of quarters and made me take them, and I got scared because she was still just furious. I got an Orange Crush out of the cooler, actually a big red metal Coca-Cola tub filled with melting ice, shyly gave the man a quarter, who took it smiling at me like always, then I dropped the handful of quarters into my pocket and took off on my bike. I came out over four bucks ahead on that deal. I told Dad about it that night, and he explained that the store was not about making money, it was occupational therapy for the patients. I gave him all the extra quarters, and he took them back to the Lakeland general store—I assumed. He may have kept them for all I know. The place is gone now. This is all just a memory. Memories of dreams and memories of experiences are much alike.

#100

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3544

The language in DS 100 is straightforward, a song in praise of the poet’s mother and her strength. Much is made in The Dream Songs about the suicide of B.’s father, though there is actually reason to believe it might have been something else. He was shot through the heart, and died instantly, but oddly there were no powder burns on the body, which would have to be present from a self-inflicted wound. The suspicion that it was a murder apparently isn’t an idle one, but there had been a rash of suicides in Florida at the time and the police didn’t pursue it. The two main suspects would be his wife or her lover, who she eventually married. (B.’s father’s lover had taken all the money she could get from him and run away back to Cuba, so she was in the clear.) The death happened on the day his parents' divorce was to be finalized. Much drama was involved, whatever happened, including a hysterical screaming match the night before. Nowhere in The Dream Songs does this possibility of murder arise, though. One critic notes that the closure a murder permits, as opposed to a suicide, wouldn’t have given rise to the kind of strung-out anguish that the poet drew from. He said in an interview, “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. I hope to be nearly crucified.” I don’t know. I’ve run into this kind of claim before. It’s almost a cliché. There’s something to be said for the artistic stimulus of happiness too, and frankly, melodrama bores me a little bit. I mean, sure, there are passions and adrenaline, screaming and yelling, and the body gets all revved up. Obviously, cultivating a lifelong emotional ordeal worked for him. Who am I to argue?

But, if it was murder, and if his mother was involved? That puts a different spin on “the goodness of this woman / in her great strength, in her hope superhuman,” doesn’t it? That gives rise to a situational irony on the woman’s “hope” that B. pretty clearly didn’t intend in this poem. Oh well, never mind. Nobody’s mom is perfect. (Except, mine’s pretty close.)

#99 Temples

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-99:-Temples

I can’t find a specific reference to a historical incident from the 60s when a murderer and/or terrorist with a submachine gun cleared out the Durga Temple, a Hindu shrine in India. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, especially given historical tension between Islamic and Hindu groups in that part of the world. I didn’t have to, though. This poem is about a contrast between history and contemporary life, how sometimes the contemporary erodes or even erases history. It’s easy to do: Burn books, destroy a temple, tear down a statue, execute scholars. Happens all the time. A Middle East terrorist group hit the news just a couple week ago, not for its infamous public beheadings, videos of which have circulated over the Internet, but for deliberately destroying shrines and statues in territory it has conquered. “It is very dark here in this groping forth” indeed. The darkness, in our groping forth, thrives on both sides of law and social orthodoxy, too. No one but the most vicious and committed ideologue would support something like a ritual public execution, but the Web on this day today is filled with a video of a black man being shot in the back by a police officer, and it takes only the most committed of ideologues to argue that this hasn’t been happening too often in the US. At least the video prompted immediate action, and this may yet be brought under control. Without the video, it might not have been so easy and could well have been swept under the rug like so many other similar incidents have. The point is that the moving forward through time of the world we’ve constructed is making for a perilous and difficult passage, and our attempt at hanging on to what was valuable about the past can get stomped—by violence, but also by apathy and by rhetoric and lies.

 

“Look on without pure dismay.” I find that difficult to do. Earlier this week my son chastised me for being negative when I heard a lying politician on the radio telling lies again, and I pointedly, promptly, and with admirable and succinct efficiency deconstructed the lies for my 19-yr-old son, still so young and wide-eyed and eager to absorb all he can about the complexities of this degraded world that I’m able to teach him. Well, actually, he rolled his eyes, turned up the volume on his earbuds, said, “What does ‘weaselspeak’ even mean?” Then his phone announced a text and I lost him.

The mention of the submachine gun “shoots” the poem and the regular Dream Song form, in fact fragments it into a number of disarticulated chunks where we would normally expect to find the second stanza. The poem re-forms around a comic fusion of past and present: “The slave-girl folded her fan & turned on my air-condtioner.” Dreams of sex follow, until Henry’s guardian angel, or whoever he is, rolls his eyes at Henry’s nonsense.

Is it so dopey and inexcusably nostalgic to yearn for the past? I look around at the 19^th-century American city I live in, some of which actually remains remarkably intact, and I think—yeah, okay, there was filth, stench and squalor everywhere, and the streets were ankle deep in horseshit (not an exaggeration, either), and you could die from lockjaw if you cut yourself shaving, and woe to you if you got a cavity in a wisdom tooth, or if you were female, of African, Asian, Irish, Native American, Jewish, or Italian descent, which made your life ten times more difficult than a guy like me—but at least there was no such thing yet as plastic. So what I want, like Henry, in my way, is to inhabit a world of modest cities with lots of clean food and hot showers, populated by attractive, articulate and artistic citizens, that smells like soap, that is never too hot or too cold, that has ornate Victorian architecture on every block, and that doesn’t have air pollution, no Interstate traffic jams, no oil spills, no fracking or mountaintop removal, thriving communities of wild animals living out their innocent lives in the vast wilderness, no real estate agents dropping pre-fab arrangements of gray houses on soybean fields. No plastic. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. But right now you need to be dreaming to find your way to that place. Might as well ask that sexy, happy slave-girl to turn up the air conditioner and bring us a sweet lemonade.