#376

http://clinicpresents.com/berry-christmas/

I have friends who are furious with me for making them read all this work I’ve been doing over the past year, either because they can’t stand B. and his work, or because they resent being dragged into this stuff by the nose whether they like it or not, with our otherwise dear friendship the brass ring I’m tugging on. (Sorry…) Other friends just tell me, nope, not doing it. I love you, but I’m not going there. Fortunately, enough others are into it that I don’t feel like I’m engaged in these explorations utterly alone. But critics and scholars have generated an avalanche of rich critical prose about his work, which must mean something. There is an enormous body of critical work devoted to Berryman. (By the way, to see B.’s opinion of “rich critical prose,” check out DS 170 again!) I’ve dipped into the criticism now and then, mainly to see if it can shed some light on the obscure references that the poems so often make use of, and of course the biography helps in placing the confessional work at some moment or other in the poet’s life. But I haven’t taken the criticism on in an organized, disciplined way. This is on purpose. My time is limited, and my patience with professional criticism has limits too. I always begin a blog post by running a search on the poem, occasionally finding it online so I can link to it (like this time). In doing this today, I ran across a good critical paper by a poet and critic who places The Dream Songs in context with Yeats (a reasonable approach) and the overall Irish visionary tradition (also defensible). This critic has this to say about B. and The Dream Songs in general and DS 376 in particular:

Berryman presents an alternative variation on the aisling, in which revelatory experiences illuminate the manner in which one experiences loss in everyday life, rather than distance one from it.

 This approach remains prominent throughout The Dream Songs, appearing in a number of poems within the collection.  Also apparent in "Dream Song 370" and "Dream Song 376," Berryman's tendency to allow the everyday to intrude upon the visionary often prompts the speaker of the poem to negotiate the two.

So, here’s my question: Visionary? Really? And my answer: Rich Critical Prose has an element of creativity about it, I suspect. I do think the critic is pushing pretty hard to find the visionary lurking somewhere in DS 176. Concerning The Dream Songs overall, I think the aisling, which this person defines as “revelatory experiences [that] illuminate the manner in which one experiences loss in everyday life” is really interesting and applicable to B.’s big poetic cycle overall. There is much of the everyday, much of loss, and the visionary is there. It’s an unhappy vision, to be sure, but in the end it has taught me much. But I still think this one poem fits more perfectly on a blog which presents it as a “little Christmas poem.”

Here’s what the poem does: The scene is set at Christmastime, after a chimney fire (that really happened) threatened to burn the house down. There is a reference to Christian Gauss and Antoni Gaudi, a critic/professor and the great Catalan architect, who both died suddenly. Gauss just fell over from a heart attack one afternoon, and Gaudi was run over by a streetcar. The allusion is that his three marriages first driven by "pride power loneliness" arose just as suddenly. Then this pronouncement: “The fair lose more, having them more to lose / & the good & the geniuses.” Regarding the writing, a sympathetic critic might call attention to a strategic syntactical disjunction or something like that, or another reader might just think the writing is unforgivably lazy. Depends on where you’re coming from, I suppose. But it does seem to me as if the line was tossed off, and once the words hit the napkin, there was no appeal to correctness to be had. How about the content? Visionary? Or a bit of a shallow cliché? Instead of “only the good die young” or some such aphorism, you get “The fair lose more, having them more to lose.” I like it well enough, especially because there’s a clever, quiet pun on “lose more”: They lose more often and they lose more substance. But “clever” is not “visionary.”

My point is not to criticize a critic, who is doing good work and makes a valuable contribution, even if maybe the statement about DS 370 and 376 seems just a touch breathless to me. This is about B. and criticism. Criticism builds on the work of creative artists, but it also builds on itself. When the latter happens, the whole critical body can start to get a bit top-heavy. Some of the Berryman criticism occasionally seems self-referential as opposed to Berryman-referential. That’s likely what motivates B.’s “fragrant” response from DS 170. He couldn’t care less what certain critical people think of his work, though it also needs to be pointed out that he was oversensitive to what select others—poet/critics—thought of his work, to the extent that if they didn’t like it, he declared them enemies. So, I’ve avoided a lot of the criticism. There’s the kid in the fable about the emperor and his new clothes? He speaks up, notes that the king kind of looks naked to him, and the whole carefully crafted regal textile orthodoxy comes crashing to the ground. This emperor is naked! The innocence of the kid provides for this. If one of the king’s yes-men, the generators of societal orthodoxy, were to speak up the same way, he might suddenly find himself chained to the wall down in the castle dungeon. When it comes to B. and criticism, I think of myself as the kid. Avoiding too much of what has become a body of orthodox hagiography safeguards that orientation. I think he can be really good, even great at times, but also he can be a lazy schlep. Well, he was sick. Not always great. Naked, wearing nothing but his crown.