#20 The Secret of the Wisdom

http://www.eliteskills.com/c/19451

I know that the day’s temper will likely always affect the reading of these Dream Songs—they’re so fragmented, sometimes they reflect what you bring to them like shards of broken mirrors. But something graceful is surely shining out of this one. Yes, we get hurt, and yes we stupidly strike out, and for sure we screw up all the time (Henry), but despair needn’t be the only reaction to our failures, and we needn’t loose “a pelican of lies.” We have not listened! The poem is a plea. And so: a villanelle. Beginning with Dream Song 20’s ending. Same title. The final lines tend toward an aphoristic pronouncement, which the iconic “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” villanelle, by Dylan Thomas, also does, and which the villanelle form seems to lend itself to. So. This is for the Sisters of Charity, whom this Dream Song has put me in mind of today:

The Secret of the Wisdom

We hear the more that sin has increast

The more grace has been caused to abound
We circle together our passage in feast

With daylight arising clear in the east

Struggle is marked by broadcast sound
We hear the more that sin has increast

It weighs on all, the great to the least

So we work a commitment to gather around
And circle together our passage in feast

Whether through crying heart’s pain is decreased

We trust at our table that grace is found
Yet still hear the more that sin has increast

Believing full well the wage of the beast

Grace is to motion for lives on the ground
Circling together our passage in feast

And may a day come when trouble has ceased

The more grace has been caused to abound
Hearing no more that sin has increased
We’ll circle together our passage in feast

KZ

#19

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-19

There's a story here. A momentary triumph, and some measure of financial success. Henry gets a check. That's far enough for today. 

"John Berryman," was actually the alter-ego/pen-name of John Allyn Smith, who changed his name after his father's suicide. His mother had been having an affair, his father found out, and coupled with financial trouble, this prompted the father to take his life. He shot himself outside of his son's window. This devastating psychological shock led the boy eventually to a career of major literary achievement and much other trouble--constant affairs, serious alcoholism, erratic bahavior, depression, eventually suicide. He was by all accounts an amazing, inspiring teacher. Still, it's not a happy story. I got interested because some of the Dream Songs truly grabbed me, and because I was sure there are parallels between the psychological anxieties of 60 years ago and today. In casting about through the criticism on B. this morning, looking for a way into #19, which will yield some meaning without a background story, but not enough to satisfy me, I ran into this, by the critic Adam Beadsworth: "They [The Dream Songs] bear witness to the latent psychological damage caused by the combination of repressive state policies and the epistemological uncertainty that plummeted into American consciousness with the detonation of nuclear weapons in Japan. The instability of his gnarled syntax and ruptured grammaticisms, combined with the anxiety, avarice, guilt, and depression endured by his protagonist Henry, allow Berryman to forge a metacommentary on 1950s and 1960s political and cultural ideology that testifies to the latent pathologies of containment culture without naming the names of its promoters or exposing its author as seditious." Well, I had figured as much. It's satisfying to see my conviction validated in critical terminology. (This is fairly light as far as that stuff goes.) The idea is that societal pressures on the individual prompt a resultant, tormented syntax in response. John Berryman, actually, is as much a fiction as Henry House. They flicker into one another in the poems, their faces exchange, they're mixed up in a complex, half-mirrored funhouse, and behind the whole scene is the real man, who doesn't show himself directly, but glimpses flit in an out. This all strikes me as a tormented but sophisticated and literate response, and it fits its time. John Barth's short story, "Lost in the Funhouse," is offering me some metaphoric guidance here. It also uses the funhouse as a model for the mid-century's existential predicament, and it proposes as well that flatfooted earnestness will always lose its way through the bewildering complications of the postmodern condition. There's nothing flat-footed about the Dream Songs. But I cling for now to the hope that something genuine--earnest--will be revealed. It's always there, actually. But I've heard already from a couple of close friends following the blog here, that they don't really like the poems--too opaque, too difficult, and when some meaning does finally glimmer through the tormented syntax, it's not very interesting. (Others, to be fair, are totally fascinated.) My defensive response to those who don't like the Dream Songs--it's not about Berryman or the Dream Songs, really. It's all about what I do in response to them. And what you do. They're triggers. Some days will be better than others. Today, I'm just feeling reflective because the poem itself leaves me cold. This is going to happen now and again.

Nature writing, the branch of literary study that caught me from the very beginning of my study of literature, can be lots of things--earnest, furious, frightened, dreamy, and plenty more. But it doesn't seem to have to deal so directly with accusations of sedition, and that permits it to speak more directly. (Whether anyone listens is a different matter.) I think that's because the issues of power that it critiques, and the arrangement of the adversaries, offer it a way of stepping aside. The Cold War didn't offer that. In the immortal words of George W. Bush--not a sophisticated nor elegant thinker on his best of days--regarding a subsequent world-encompassing conflict: "You're either with us or you're against us." That doesn't leave you an out. Critique the dominant power and you're automatically the enemy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, of the literary or any other kind, is always about engaging with or protecting the ecological systems that support everything else, including ones enemies and including the power that is devouring those systems. Environmentalists have been successfully marginalized and branded as kooks, and while still a potent force, for every victory you can name off, five or fifty defeats undermine their victories, many of them completely out of the public consciousness. It's a difficult time. I'm only interested in the Dream Songs insofar as they tell me something universal about the human condition--they're doing that--or can shed a light on our particular moment, now. That's really why we study history in the end. Just some wanderings here today. Plus, my computer is going haywire and will need to be reimaged. I'm writing this in an email to myself, in a ridiculous tiny font. 

If you have any thoughts, let's have them! Tomorrow's Dream Song looks like a good one.

#18 A Strut for Roethke

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-18:-A-Strut-for-Roethke

The poet Theodore Roethke died in 1963. Like so many of those mid-century poets, it seems, he was a hard drinker, suffered serious mental health issues, and never made it to old age. Roethke had a heart attack while swimming and died in the pool. He was 53. #18 is Berryman's tribute. Rather than analyze the poem, I've reread Roethke this morning, a poet I'm not very familiar with. He was known in part for his series of the so-called "Greenhouse Poems," reflections on his early years, with plants and nature taking on symbolic significance. (His father owned a large nursery, so plants, trees, flowers, and greenhouses were important aspects of Roethke's upbringing.) Here, then, is a poem about death and life, extinction, and the emerald ash borer.

                                                 Ashes

Beetles green, an ecstasy
Of worming, barking
Through great ashes.

Insect blossoms
Orgasming inflorescence
Of woodsing grubs.

A forest of holes
Cracking fissures skying
Hard open blue.

Wet trunks punking
Woodpeckering
Manure the floor.

Dry trunks dustify
Debarking and burning
Ashes to ashes.

A forest of holes
(                    )
Ashes to ashes.

KZ

#17

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3550

My friend and colleague, Father John, explained to me once (I’ll paraphrase) that sin is simply the absence of progress or motion. We were working on a project together about the French philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the universe unfolding in a continual process of evolutionary becoming, with the far-distant future Omega Point waiting as an inevitable cosmic outcome, where it all will come together in a holy and grand spiritual apotheosis. The Big Bang’s spiritual end-of-the-line, the Big Holy Implosion, you might call it, The Big Godly Bam-Bam. The development of conscious intelligence in creatures like elephants, whales and of course, us, on Earth, was a major step forward along the way, according to Teilhard, and the “noosphere,” the enveloping layer of all the thoughts, emotions, knowledge, and communication generated by the biosphere, has recently emerged from that and is comprising another critical step forward. The Internet is likely on the verge of taking on a role as meta-planetary über-consciousness, another step forward which is right in line with Teilhard’s predictions. So turns out we’re fortunate enough to be living in a critical and momentous moment in terms of the evolution of the cosmos. Henry’s psychological stasis from this point of view amounts to sin. Stuck, in retreat even, he hinders in his small way the Teilhardian evolutionary unfolding, and thus in #17 Lucifer perks up and finds this all quite interesting. Henry futilely tries to rationalize this as something positive in the first stanza: “my madnesses have cease” and Henry is “the steadiest man on the block.” Keep talking, fella. The Emissary of the Nether Regions smells you for you his own.

Berryman was a deeply religious person, who believed at the time of the writing of the Dream Songs in a God that was all-encompassing, transcendental, omnipresent, and all of that, but also abstract, and more theoretical than actual. By the time he was finished with this epic project, or soon after, he had grown into a belief in a personal and immediately present God who sometimes directly affects the lives of people by interceding in their particular affairs. I’ve already become impatient with Henry’s stasis and retreat, his becoming “wicked & away” as he’s described back in #1—which suddenly now resonates in a brand new way: “away” is right absolutely in step with “wicked”; they’re holding hands. But it’s very early. Here in #17, we get the first real invocation of the religious and spiritual implications of Henry and his embodiment of the broader human condition, and the way toward redemption is pointed out. Henry’s not ready to step through that door yet. If you’re not moving forward actively and spiritually into life, Berryman seems to be saying, then Lucifer may quite understandably stop by for a chat. And as that suave Personification of Stasis tells Henry, “tho’ hard,” what he’s been tossed for his lot so far is small potatoes. Henry has those “busy teeth” gnashing away anyway (I love that phrase), and is mired for the moment in a motionless self-loathing. When confronted with the support and spiritual sustenance offered by a list of prophets and teachers, he dives under their “oaken arms” for now, shirking their guidance. Laziness is a sin too, and so is cowardice, and so is willful ignorance, and these are all conditions that Henry is fervently embracing in his psychic desperation. Okay, Henry, if you must, but when we slide into that, we are hindering the progress of the evolving cosmos. We sin.

#16

http://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-2594

At first I read this as another statement of the Everyman crushed by a privileged elite. (I suppose I may have a Marxist streak.) The reference to Sealdah Station, in Calcutta, and the “possessionless / children survive to die” encourages that reading right off. But “they” hang Henry’s pelt on the wall—he’s desired, a trophy, so probably this is about a different kind of possession, about hanging onto or hanging out with persons of celebrity and fame. Henry, the character, is never going to encounter the kinds of personal complications that celebrity brings, but Berryman himself did. Prestigious teaching positions, travel to high profile readings for real money, television interviews, drinking with the likes of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, and other high powered literary personalities. All this came even before his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. The line between Berryman and his character is so fluid that you have to stay alert to who’s who and when.

I’ve seen the barracudas he mentions, gathered in some art gallery drinking daiquiris. Daiquiris! This sooo dates the poem! It’s wine or cosmopolitans or fruity martinis these days, I suppose, although I’m hardly a barracuda myself nor do I attend their feeding frenzies that often anymore. I’ve only ever skulked around the edges of a few. The scenes I tend to frequent these days are hot, humid and green and feature genuine water-breathing bass and catfish rather than metaphoric barracudas. But I digress.

It’s the issue with fame: the making of image can take over. That’s sort of the issue with lying too, so there is a similar kind of ontological intricacy to both concepts, and Berryman mentions them in the same poem for a good reason. Celebrity is a public mask and while a mask may project something legit, it can also deceive. Really, you win literary fame by writing your tail off, and that’s all that’s supposed to matter. There can be a healthy correspondence between public persona and private substance. Mentally healthy people negotiate that all the time. But if the persona outstrips the writer, then it all devolves to bunk pretty fast. A book on Hemingway I read once (don’t remember which one) had a scene where someone points out James Joyce at a table in a café, alone, and H. thinks immediately that he’s coasting off the heights of past glory and responds with contempt. I’m allergic to glamor anyway, but if literary fame should ever come (not holding my breath, here), I’ll go to the soirées and try to act charming. I think you just write and questions of truth, image and honesty will take care of themselves if they ever have to. The only reason I’m taking this on in the first place is because the poem does. It makes me nervous. So, fine. Celebrity poet. My pelt hasn't grown much gold yet, so nobody's setting traps for it.

#15

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3548

We learn in Berryman’s biography, Dream Song, that this poem comes from a story told to B. by Saul Bellow years before he wrote the poem, about a “Polack” woman in a Chicago bar who told some guy to flake off. Bellow’s take on this moment was that women were better, braver than men. B. figured they understood loss better than Henry, who drank to deal with whatever trouble came, or retreated into the past, or simply shunned the human race. It’s all right there on the surface in the poem.

Maybe so. I don’t care. I just find myself glad the pejorative “Polack” has faded away. I remember nonstop, endless Polack jokes in school when I was a kid in Toledo. My dad and my uncle had a store of them that they told over and over (and over—same ones) and that were consistently hilarious, apparently. Even as a little kid, I thought Polack jokes were embarrassing. Lech Wałęsa’s heroism once and for all put a stop to that, seems to me. But in Midwestern cities like Toledo and Chicago, immigrants from Eastern Europe had to endure a generation of marginalization, prejudice and ignorant jokes before their children were fully acculturated. So it goes.

A “foehn” is a warm, dry wind that rolls off the lee side of a mountain range. (It’s of German origin, with a pronunciation halfway between “phone” and “fern”.) The foehn is much more interesting to me this evening than anything else in the whole poem.

The Foehn

His teacup rattled in its dish.
The paper rustled. “They claim no rain
Has crossed the mountains yet,” he said.
“We’ll have to spray or else the foehn
Will turn the wheat to dust again.”
He leaves the table. “Guess I’ll learn
To let them driest fields alone.”
She clears the plates and rubs her head,
Hangs her apron on a hook.
Dinner later, of beef and grits,
That Edna recommends. “I wish”—
She turns— “that ornery sun would look
Another way. I wish to see
Them mountains break to awful bits
And then the rabbits gnaw the parts.”
He cocks his brow and smiles a touch.
“Guard your strength my dear. Our hearts
Are God’s, and all this land is God’s.
He’ll blow His weather as He will.”
“Lord knows that we don’t ask for much.
All I know’s I wish to be
At rest in shade when done’s this life.
Hell is got a burnin’ breeze,
And so’s this ranch, with dust to fill
Our silos more than wheat.” He nods.
What’s a man without his wife?
He thinks. He needs her strong, like trees
That bear the beat of time. He fits
His cap, and turns to take his leave,
Then stops. “I hope you never will
Decide you might go weak on me.”
She gains the porch then bends and sits,
Her sewing draped across her knee.
She sets herself a time to grieve
The girl who grew, then hoped, then aged,
Who thought herself alive and free
Then ended in a farmhouse, caged—
Strength evolving in her breast
The best to serve her needing men
Waiting later for her rest,
To finally sleep ‘neath dreams of when
The dustwinds swirl around and 'round
While the burning foehn pours down.

KZ

#14

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/Berryman.14.html

Pretty much every modern poetry anthology from the last 50 years has this poem in it, so if anyone is bored with Dream Song 14, I sympathize. Sometimes I worry that “Life, friends, is boring” might be going the way of “Then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.” I’ve taken on the challenge of discussing that poem with 19-year-old guys, lined up along the back row with their ball caps low over their eyes, arms crossed, daring me to call on them. My approach was generally along the lines of, we’re talkin’ daffodils today, fellas. But yeah, it does take a committed Romantic sensibility anymore not to roll your eyes at Wordsworth’s old-fashioned couplet. But 14 avoids weary Romantic earnestness—quite the opposite—and I probably needn’t worry.

This poem captured me as an undergrad, and as I mentioned in the introductory post on this blog, it remains a go-to standard for me to this day. I have it memorized. At first I just thought it was funny, and I figure most teens or twenty-somethings can relate to the comic invocation of boredom. The presence of Henry’s mother carping at him, and his smart-alec response, appealed to my newly post-adolescent sensibility as well. What has kept me interested technically is the repetition of “bored” and “boring” and “bores”, seven times to be exact, along with “a drag” thrown in for variety, and the dismissive, push-away hand-wave and eye-roll you can’t miss with “the mountains or sea or sky”. There are other repetitions, “literature”, “flash & yearn”, “people(s)”, “Inner Resources” (capitalized, which is funny). Here’s a poem I wrote way back in ’97 and published in ISLE, only the second thing I ever published. It has nothing in common thematically with 14 at all, but the repetition of “green” was in my mind all the way and grew straight out of my familiarity with 14 and “bores”, which sort of afforded me the permission:

              Burial Mound

Where the path loops around that sycamore,

near the soggy creek that feeds the river,
you might find it if you don't look
too hard. Damp leaves of fringed phacelia and water-
leaf wash over a vague mound, green waves that lap
against the hump of a dreaming whale. Damselflies
tremble black and green through the humid air.
In the office up the hill an archeologist
says a woman lies buried here, bones on a bed
of flagstones. He uncovered her himself and left
her undisturbed: a necklace of drilled shells
around her neck, fish-bone needles,
a stone awl, beads, a green copper
pendant in a pouch by her right hand. 

But for some fat raindrops that slap the dark

greenery around, it's as quiet here now
as that pause when you let slip a secret you've cherished,
and your friend's eyes—her humid green
eyes—open in wonder and she peers
into the bare center of your only face,
saying, I had no clue. What will you do?
You shrug and know the thing you will do is re-cover
that little mystery with the dark loam
of the forest floor. Nettles and jewelweed
will fill the hollow, and the roots of box elders
will fix it under the leaves and humus,
and the secret flesh inside will fade and molder
alone, leaching out to the black, dank earth
that feeds this lush growth of inscrutable trees.

So, artful repetition is something I absorbed through 14. But I’m most attuned now to the way the poem effaces the speaker. Life, the tranquil hills, we’re told by our mothers and endless other droning authorities who repeat the same goddam platitudes over and over, is filled with peace and beauty and wonders, yadda, yadda. Screw that and your Inner Resources. Tell me that, he’s saying, and I’ll tell you how bored I am with it all. Henry, middle-aged adult, is reverting to simple adolescent rebellion in this movement. His being bored is one thing, his being told not to admit he’s bored bores him and makes his boredom worse, and this pushes him backward past adolescence toward diminishment. The full effacement comes to fruition in that odd last stanza. A dog has gone off into all that (boring) damn natural wonderment Wordsworth and his happy ilk do so go on about, and the speaker is reduced by it at the end to mere physiology—heart pumping (ho hum), brain churning (big deal), wag. In the end, what really bores Henry is not the world. He’s bored with himself, but more than that, he’s bored with his boredom. That’s the real problem.

The French poet, Baudelaire, took on the more sophisticated but related concept of “ennui” in Les Fleurs du Mal—The Flowers of Evil. Ennui becomes a symbol for a kind of Modernist damnation. Wordsworth, in his day, was already worried about the effect industrialism was having on the human spirit, which is partly why he and the other Romantics were compelled to write against it, asserting most fervently how his heart fills with pleasure at the memory of a field of daffodils. In other poems, like “Resolution and Independence,” he questions that approach. “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Baudelaire sixty, seventy years later takes that same despondency and madness and runs with it. Hardly in wondrous tune with all the wondrous wonders anymore, he’s left bored, bored with himself, filled with ennui over the world and the condition of the world, and his boredom with his boredom, his ennui with his own ennui—his Modernist rejection of the spiritual wealth of the world—spirals in on itself and leads into a metaphoric damnation. The thing about Baudelaire’s persona is if he’s damned, then by God he’s damned proudly. Henry, like his contemporary, The Incredible Shrinking Man, just diminishes until he's gone: Wag. (But I still think the poem’s funny.)

 

#13

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-13-annotated

My doctoral dissertation included an analysis of Peter Matthiessen’s intense and necessary novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. He is my favorite writer. In that novel, Martin Quarrier is an Evangelical Protestant missionary who travels to the depths of the Amazon to try and convert the warlike Niaruna to Christianity. When he and his wife, Hazel, step off the plane, she proclaims to the few gathered stragglers welcoming them and to the thousand miles of unexplored rainforest before them, “The Mart Quarriers have arrived and they mean business!” As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that business is exactly what she means. The missionaries themselves are out to make a profit in souls, and while Martin himself is not aware of it, they were also invited there by Peruvian officials to tame the “savage” Niaruna in order to clear the way for timber and mineral extraction on the Niaruna lands. Religion, government and business link up to achieve a common purpose, and that is partly responsible for the eventual destruction of the tribe.

“God’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business.” Riiight… The thing about religion, as opposed to spirituality, is that it’s at least partly a human political construct. It follows then that it’s sometimes pretty screwed up. God, it should be clear, is not Henry’s enemy. Religion is the enemy, and more specifically, the authoritarian impulse in religious institutions. The poem from yesterday (#12) is about that—its presence haunts and watches. Here, it gets linked with commerce, which exerts a tyranny. (I love the double meaning in that phrase “a cornering”: It refers to both an existential entrapment, but also the aggrandizing of commercial control.) Let’s see, do we see still see religious precepts linked up with business and politics, ever? Of course we do! All you have to do is listen to contemporary conservative rhetoric where Christianist fundamentalism covers for corporate influence almost constantly. Rick Santorum is one obnoxious example. The crusader for values also advocates that we “cut the corporate tax rate for domestic manufacturers from 35 percent to zero”, and I do not believe that he has the welfare of workers in mind. But there are hundreds more. John Kasich was sworn in yesterday for his second term as Ohio’s governor. It’s not too much of a partisan political stretch to observe that he has been stridently anti-labor and anti-environment in his policies (he intended to open Ohio’s state parks to fracking until the general outcry forced him to pause). The Toledo Blade from this morning reports that, “The inaugural address that launched Gov. John Kasich’s second term on Monday leaned more on moral, even spiritual, precepts than on the presentation of a detailed policy agenda.” My point: The undoubted integrity of concepts like “spiritual values” and “faith” get coopted as rhetorical tools that further a radical conservative political agenda, and that’s all about “economic growth” and an upward redistribution of wealth. In short, it’s still all about power.

One of the many reasons I’ve taken on this project of responding to the Dream Songs is that they, and Berryman’s political undertones, resonate so loudly with this  political moment 60+ years down the line. I want to understand the immediate now, because I’ve been having trouble with it; I want to try and find a way of coping intellectually and spiritually with the injustice that is so nakedly apparent right now. Mario Salvio, in his famous speech on the Berkeley campus in 1964, proclaimed, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” This was Berryman’s moment too, 1964, and while as a personality I tend to suspect he was probably a bit too self-involved, his Henry is emerging as the illustration of what happens when the machine isn’t resisted, or more likely, as Dream Song #13 claims, when it simply overwhelms. When you’re not free. The poet asserts that Henry tried. Now he is Berryman’s passive, victimized alter-ego, what might have become of him had the writer chosen to not fight back—to write back. To illustrate and to witness. Broadly, I get the point of Henry already, and I have some 370 more Dream Songs to go to drive it home if I haven’t. But, the ins and out, the details, are fascinating—and it’s still very early. If there is redemption to come, thank you. If there isn’t redemption, then I intend to more fully grapple with why not. As Thoreau told us, if life turns out to be mean, then he would publish its meanness to the world. There is at least a measure of redemption in that.

#12 Sabbath

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-12-sabbath-annotated

About the pressure of religion on the poet, with a creepy, haunted, midnight tone throughout. The first stanza, skulking about, being followed. “Tes yeux bizarres me suivent”—your strange eyes follow me. There is the isolation and fear that comes from being an outsider. Watched. The second stanza, the famous poets, Coleridge Rilke Poe, absurdly shouting unheard commands down the centuries. Instead, “toddlers are taking over.” The direction of adults, passed along through their literature, falls on unprepared ears. In the third stanza, “snoods converge”—snoods are hair coverings in general, and are associated with married Jewish women as well, and there is the movement through the graveyard by the “kirk”, a Scottish word for church, so Christian and Jew are invoked equally and exert similar pressures on the “weary-daring” man. I suspect most sensitive, artistic poet-types understand “weary-daring”—it takes verve and energy to resist the weight of the dominant culture’s crush, but that energy comes in waves, in moments of inspiration or fury. In between, there are more moments of exhaustion to endure. Resist the religious press and you risk a branding as witch. But, just watch. (I really like this one.)

Word of the World

Why venture
Out at night?
Voles creep through a dry lot and gather
Stacking coarse grasses
Near the throats of their burrows
An oily rat arranges soggy turns
Of cardboard and plastic bags
Just so, just so—there now, there now
Just so, so
In a corrupt alley
The brown shards of beer
Bottles, and the razor bright pull-tabs
Never cut his fastidious feet
Glinting under rich sodium pink
And arabesques of scarlet neon
Glare and broken
Sparkles offer shifting
Cover from the piercing
Murder of felines and owls
Whose standard bright eyes
Shine with the radiation
Of incandescent power
Quiet, alone, careful
Alley dwellers push and pile
Verses of dried grass
Rats stack trash stanzas
The garbage men rumble by
Their brooms and their trucks
The diesel fumes that settle on lots
That send mindless electric roaches
Scuttling to their cracks
Voles gather weeds
That grew and grew
And died and died
And rubbish blows
Like leaves fallen
From the tall city’s forest
Into abandoned corners
Where word of the world builds.

KZ

#11

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3546

Access to the universe of information available on the Internet helps with interpreting Berryman’s references. This poem uses as a metaphor the balloon voyage and famous turn-of-the-century disappearance of Saloman August Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, three Swedish explorers who attempted a journey to the North Pole in a balloon in 1897. Their system of drag ropes and sails for steering the balloon were totally ineffective, and they were at the mercy of wind, frost, and a sinking balloon. They landed on pack ice, made their way through great hardship to a deserted island, and ultimately died there. They subsisted on the supplies they salvaged from the foundered balloon and the polar bears that stalked them constantly, several of which they were able to shoot. When their bodies were discovered by walrus hunters 30 years after they disappeared, their diary and the photos they took were remarkably preserved, and their fate became known. Strindberg was likely killed by a polar bear, and he seems to have gone down shooting. The other two died side by side under a tent made from their balloon, possibly from exposure and exhaustion, more likely from the massive vitamin A overdose that comes from eating polar bear liver, and also from trichinosis they contracted by eating undercooked or raw bear meat. It is also quite possible that they deliberately overdosed together on opium to end their extreme suffering. The bodies of all three were devoured by polar bears once they finally died, so in that way did things come full ecological circle.

The poem tells us that we are born into the safe beds of our mothers but that doesn’t last. Our hearts break, we are tormented by the various incarnations of bullies, monsters and blockheads out there waiting for us, and in the midst of it we dream of flying away to some kind of patriotic fame. Sometimes it happens, much more often the bears are waiting. “Up in pairs / we go not, but we have a good bed.” The would-be heroes lie together in a final tormented iteration of the first bed they were born into, but they still die alone.

This poem is supposed to be depressing, but nah, you don’t get to ruin every day this year, Mr. Berryman. A balloon voyage to the North Pole was incredibly foolish. The bears were hungry. Lighten up. I have said what I have to say.