#10

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-10

This one is serious, and I’m not in a good mood over it, but I think this has to be one of the great, terrible Dream Songs. Not so dreamy. You can’t go to that first line without thinking of this one, and it’s clear Berryman’s reference is deliberate:  “Southern trees bear a strange fruit.” (If you’re not familiar with the great, gutsy, terrible song of Billie Holiday, here’s a link. Listen to the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs ).

I think the line “the administration of rhetoric” is such a bitter and brilliant moment. [Note: All the online versions of DS 10 have an error in lines 7-9. The correct version is: "It is in the administration of rhetoric, / on these occasions--not the fathomless heart-- / the thinky death consists."] No point in detailing the “rhetoric” here—in brief: whips, fire, all of that—but to call such a thing rhetoric is to understand that it was always—and still always is—about message-sending, a communication, a certain mode of atavistic language meant to broadcast meaning far beyond the focused gathering and the soul at its center. (That’s exactly why so many photos survive.) Berryman simply nails the problem with that: “However things hurt, men hurt worse.” These things are driven, at least in part, by broad sociological (sociopathological) currents of rage, pain, despondency. But as bad and infuriating as this might be—however broadly and unfairly things hurt—it’s not as bad, it’s never as bad, as the man’s suffering at the gathering’s focus. Choose to ignore that he’s a man, then a mob can justify its “rhetoric”—and that’s the sin.

We do still see it around us. Shootings of young black men all over the country, all over the news, Parisian cartoonists gunned down just a few days ago by analogous promptings. A student, an African American woman, once told me a story of a prof at another school who told her to her face how much he was thrilled to see black girls like her making something of themselves. She left that school as soon as she could. She asked to talk about it because she didn’t fully understand what had happened and why she felt she had to leave. I think we worked out some understanding of it. My student taught me something about how stereotypes work and the damage they do, and I’m grateful to her for it.

So, yeah. And I have to say, as hard as the subject matter can be, there’s a grainy beauty when a poem prompts a moment of understanding, like Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” or Wilfred Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”—there are more, these come to me now—which Dream Song 10 is kin to. These are not poems you love. But I’m grateful for them.

#9

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-9-annotated

The point of this blog has always been that it’s meant to generate more energy in the writing than it costs—a bit of psychic economics, there. So far, so good, by a broad profit margin. But I had underestimated a few things going in. One is how obscure and fragmented these poems really can be. I can deal with that, and I’ll communicate what I gather from them as best I can. I don’t need to get it all—no one does. It would take too much weirdly obsessive energy. Another thing I’m just dawning into is the monumental scale of this work as a whole. I’ve taken on big projects before. One day at a time gets you through it. The main thing I underestimated, though, is just how abject a character this Henry is. I got fed up with it yesterday and had some fun at Henry’s expense. Berryman, I’m seeing already, will hit a theme three or four times from several angles before he lets it go. That’s something you only see in reading the progression like a story; it doesn’t show in an individual reading of a single poem. Lusting after young women was one motif, and there were three of those poems in a row. This trope of middle-aged men lusting for younger women is real enough and there’s no use pretending. I doubt illustrations are necessary to support the point, but my casual online reading over just the last week turned up several perfect examples. My theory is that it’s a way of men reclaiming something squandered when they were younger. For the young women, perhaps there’s material gain involved, an entrance into power structures, and is Henry Kissinger’s dictum that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac more than the infuriating bullshit it sounds like? Whatever. Castration followed, and I hope we’re done with that for now. The symbolic significance of it is powerful enough, though, and there’s a point to it as well. Henry, here at first, is being systematically desexualized. Neutered. I think we never find out explicitly what happened to him, but we don’t have to. I’ll watch for subtle hints. What we know for sure is simply that he’s an everyman schmuck who is being victimized by power, and all we really need to know is that most of us are in one way or another; that’s why he’s relevant. Men are victimized, women are victimized, the land is victimized, animals are being systematically wiped out, and lately, the political and social structures we worked so hard at establishing as a corrective to historical tyrannies are being deliberately and systematically deconstructed—as we stupidly sit there and watch it happen and even vote in favor of it. Thus, Henry’s relevance to our historical moment has some potency, if you will. Henry is being crucified by his author, to put it bluntly. Out of the depths of his pain and humiliation, one should then expect something redeeming to arise, if the symbolism of crucifixion is to hold. (The Romans certainly never had that kind of symbolism in mind, and except for one monumental exception, and a number of lesser martyrings, their meaning of crucifixion is the one that held sway.) We’ll see, but whether Berryman sees us living in an age that provides for this kind of redemption from an everyman schmuck is going to be a problem. It won’t be the story of Christian redemption retold, that’s for sure.

In this poem, #9, Henry is fantasizing. It’s not such an attractive fantasy to be cornered by the SWAT team, but as a fantasy it offers what Henry doesn’t have, a momentary, even if doomed, influence on events in the world. You’re the reason power mobilized! They even found a young woman to beg you to give up. They use her love for you as a weapon. This means you’re more for that moment than inconsequential schmuck! You’re human after all! —Well, okay, but it’s still just a fantasy. “He slipt & fell” is a line that connects this poem in particular to the broader themes of the whole, a reiteration for the 10^th time of whatever that something was that dropped him into his existential predicament. The poem then moves quickly into a characterization of his fantasy as an act, and he tells himself, or is told, to knock it off. The last lines are important and introduce something new: His fantasy is driven by a remaining desire for power, a reclamation of influence, where even the fantasy of it feeds the desire for it. “Let go.” This is a command, the imperative injunction from author to his character: The only way forward into life is to accept your status as a nobody in that life, absolutely and without reservation. The ego finds this impossible to accept, so it creates fantasies of power to compensate. The insistence here is to let go of all of that. Better to live in a world of genuine abjection than to fantasize some fulfilling replacement, which ultimately will destroy whatever wounded mote of the self is left.

#8

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3611

More about the depredations of power, and yeah, yeah, yeah, for heaven’s sake, I get it. And what is with this testicles thing? Some guys, you know, they buy a shiny new red Ferrari, maybe have a meaningless affair. Others write Pulitzer Prize poetry and figuratively castrate their characters—over, and over, and over. To each his own, I guess. Here is my response to all of that this morning:

Nuts

No more ifs, or ands, or buts

Fuzzy gráy squirrels loves their nuts
Acorns, beeches, butternuts
Walnuts, hazels, macadamia
Filberts: squirrels go crazy over ya,
Almonds, pecans, cashews too
Crack ‘em open, then they chew
Sparkly bulging victim’s eyes
Gnawing down that oily prize
Who’s a squirrel without his nuts?
Weakly clamb’rin’, chatt’rin’ putz
Runnin’ from the neighbor’s mutts
Out the tree and on his head:
Nutless rodent…
Cat food…
Dead.

KZ

#7 'The Prisoner of Shark Island' with Paul Muni

http://genius.com/John-berryman-dream-song-7-the-prisoner-of-shark-island-with-paul-muni-annotated

The actor Paul Muni didn’t have a role in the 1936 film, The Prisoner of Shark Island, but we’ll let that slide. In that film, loosely based on the life of the physician, Samuel Mudd, the main character sets John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, completely unaware of the murderer’s recent historic activity, and is subsequently convicted of a crime for it and sent to prison on Shark Island. He earns his freedom later through heroic service controlling a yellow fever epidemic on the island. It reminds us all that you can’t keep a good man down.

The plot is really about the consequences of blundering into the path of roused and furious power. One’s innocence is utterly inconsequential and actually quite beside the point. Contemporary examples abound.

The poem is about aging, feeling out of step with the times, and yearning for the signal comforts of a played-out youth. In Henry’s case, in movie theaters, paying a nickel to watch pulp Westerns on Saturday afternoons. Hashknife Hartley was a cowboy/crime fighter hero who righted wrongs that black-hats perpetrated on the ranch, fighting off the dirty rats and winning every time. That’s what makes it so satisfying, and it tells a kid that’s what you can expect. Problem is, the dirty rats are tricked out in white cowboy hats these days, they’re the sheriffs and lawmen, and they’ve got star badges on their vests and loaded six-guns in their holsters, and when they draw them they use them. Your innocence doesn’t matter quite so much as maybe it did in the movies.

The rats are real now, and they're in control, and who the hell wants to learn that?

#6 A Capital at Wells

6  A Capital at Wells

During the father’s walking—how he look

down by now in soft boards, Henry, pass
and what he feel or no, who know?—
as during hís broad father’s, all the breaks
& ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer
back to the flying boy in mountain air,

Vermont’s child to go out, and while Keats sweat’

for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate,
and Ethan Allen was a calling man,
all through the blind one’s dream of the start,
when Day was killing Porter and had to part
lovers for ever, fancy if you can,

while the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out

was failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt
inscrutably was growing, toward its end,
and a starved lion by a water-hole
clouded with gall, while Abelard was whole
these grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.
 

I figured there would be days like this. I had a student once who just stared at me through the whole lecture on the second day of class, not taking notes, with such an incredulous look on her face—are you kidding me? Are you frickin’ kidding me? The note of a drop came from the registrar 30 minutes after class was over and I never saw her again.

Much of this one is obscure to me. Reading Berryman’s biography and the intro to his collected poems may help clear up the references, but there’s no chance of that today. Do we get some of Henry’s backstory? I don't know if this resonates with Berryman’s bio, who is from Oklahoma. His father committed suicide, which was terribly hard on the son. There is going to be more than a little of that.

Vermont, Ethan Allen, Wells a village in Vermont near the New York border. Ethan Allen, strong prosperous farmer, Vermont hero, hated New York and New Yorkers, and that drove his Revolutionary War escapades a lot more than patriotism or his orientation toward the British. He was quite ready to join Vermont up with British Canada if the New Yorkers didn’t back off. The Green Mountain Boys were guerilla raiders against New York as much as they were patriotic heroes. Fathers, manhood. Abelard was Heloise’s teacher, then lover, then husband, father of her child, then her family attacked and castrated him and sent her to a convent—for the rest of her life. Tragic lovers in life, they are buried together.

Aside from the thicket of references I can't quite penetrate, there’s a downward movement here—a pensive sauntering on a boardwalk, meditating on father-figures and their influence, the ambivalent legacy of an over-glorified, complex hero, into lust, then murder or a duel, the guile of an institutional cabal, “Chinese doubt,” the starved lion--the gall of his rage irrelevant--a further erosion of the ideal of strength and manhood, finally into castration.

Proffer your grapes of stone?—no thanks. But in the most bitter of violations, they can be taken.

#5

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3581

A poem in babytalk—“wif”—or in a parody of blackface patter—“sats in de bar”. “His wife is a complete nothing” is not about any wife of Henry, of course, it’s his life that is a complete nothing, but the pun on “wife” still has to be dealt with. The flat but devastating declarative statement, with that one babytalk pun—his “wife” is a complete nothing because: His life is a complete nothing and he has no wife in it either. Women in our lives can be bad or good or both—cold, nagging, petty, manipulative—but also, and more often, supportive, warm, caring, fun, stimulating. Henry, alone, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, is simply and devastatingly alone, with none of the complications, good and bad, a relationship with another person brings. The last three Dream Songs, 2, 3 and 4, have been about sad, misplaced yearnings and pathetic attempts to connect with women. That’s already over, and while I actually found myself impatient for the last three days with the whole movement in this unfolding drama, it actually comes and goes pretty quickly. He’s just alone. The language comments on something else, also, Henry’s emasculation. Reduced and faceless, he’s babified and marginalized, disempowered and rendered meaningless. At odds wif de world & its god, and despite the invoking of St. Stephen, there’s nothing spiritual about this god. The god in question is the looming god of sexualized capital and power, the force that deforests and rapes, that lays off en masse and removes mountaintops, that creates adjuncts and 40-hour work weeks that starve, children chained to coal cars and textile mills, and it is the force that will murder union organizers, that invents the term “human resources”, and then pays CEOs hundreds of millions in benefits packages. These poems are about humanizing the long unfolding catastrophe’s aftermath, and they’re disturbing. They insist—or I’m insisting—that human-rendered disasters have human consequences on human beings, and the poems intend to look those consequences in the face. The thing that hurts? “It’s the thought they thought they could do it.” It's a key line from the first poem.

On the plane, in the second stanza, his vision of the Virgin descending from a cloud onto a mountaintop sets the plane turbulently bucking—such things are not allowed. We are mostly all Mr Heartbreak, the New Man. We are born into this state, into this crazy land. George Carlin, in one of his most bitter comedy routines (all over the Internet), rails against the power I’m speaking of and tells the audience, “It’s a big club—and you’re not in it.” “The 1%” is a term we’re all familiar with, and we’re familiar with the implications. Henry represents the 99%. The particular ramifications of that status vary infinitely because we’re all infinitely unique. Life is never simple, and the countermeasures, rewards, fulfillments are also real and have their own power and they matter, but the consequences of the predations of power in the end are of a familiar pattern, pushing on us anxiety, powerlessness, and isolation that would drag us to a dead stop. In the mirror behind the bar, asking our reflections, WTF? 

#4

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dream-song-4

 

Lust and the Forgotten Sun

East, a rumor

Of warmth-light grays the horizon
Then succumbs beneath
Our tilted orb’s brittle shadow.

Venus on the hard horizon

A spark of white-cold
Through the shimmering
Viridian aurora.
Venus in cold marble.

His breath

Snows to his feet.
His spit cracks,
Tinkling shards of glass
Before the toes of his boots.

The planet rolls beneath him

And he walks only to stay
Unmoving. Footprints recede
Over the vitreous
Surface like the blackly foaming
Turmoil of ocean salt
Behind an icebreaker
Crushing the obsidian
Cold of an unbending Arctic dark.

 KZ

#3 A Stimulant for an Old Beast

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/3561

Rilke was a jerk? Dream Songs have their measure of obscurity, but I have to think they should generally yield to pressure. The intense, sensitive young poet, Ranier Maria Rilke, born in the Austro-Hungarian city of Prague—one of the great, gorgeous cities of the earth—attracted accomplished and beautiful women, with whom he had affairs, some turbulent, and one gathers from Berryman’s allusions that Rilke broke some hearts while he lived.

Henry, here, with screwed-up lovely 23 (way too young for him, but let it go for now—she’s screwed up, apparently), can’t fathom why one would reject accomplished and beautiful women, especially with the string of luck he’s been having, the Old Beast, the old criminal.

Berryman’s Henry doesn’t have to be likeable, and he’s not always going to be. In fact, I find him a touch pathetic and sort of distasteful and worthy of a bit of contempt right now. My mood should improve. But this life of ours can wound people, which is the point, and that’s why Henry gets a pass for the moment. We need to have the festering of his wound established before we start looking for the whys of it and the way toward healing. But for now...

And by the way, here’s why Rilke was not a jerk (“The Gazelle”):

            Enchanted one: How shall two chosen words

            achieve the harmony of the pure rhyme

            which in you like a signal comes and goes?

            From your forehead the leafy lyre climbs,

            and all your being moves in sure accord,

            like those love lyrics whose words softly flow:

            rose petals laid upon the closed eyelids

            of one grown weary, who no longer reads

            but shuts his eyes to see you—swiftly brought,

            as though each leg were charged with leaps, but not

            fired, as long as the neck holds the head

            quiet to listen: as when in a green place

            a bather in the woods is interrupted…

            with the lake’s shine on her averted face.

When I lived in Hungary, I got just a whiff and a glimmer or two of the noble old Austro-Hungarian gallantry that eked its way through two massively devastating wars and a crushed revolution, and the gray concrete of forty-four years of Communist dominion. You see it most obviously in the wonderful architecture, and there are traces in the language and the customs. (Kezét csókolom, which is something only a man says to a much older woman, means “I kiss your hand.” On a bumpy streetcar, women would sometimes lean on me for support—baffling at first—but I’m a man, and therefore strong. During one of the very first Hungarian classes that I took when I was at IU, my teacher,  Judit, [a lovely person with whom I became good friends], just off the plane from Budapest, made a comment about women as flowers that the American female grad students in class did not find remotely enchanting or amusing. That kind of thing.) “The Gazelle” is not a modern poem, but it’s lovely, and looks to me as if it comes from an effortlessly gallant and erotic sensibility, from a culture that encouraged such a thing in an artist.

Rilke rises out of Henry’s poor tormented subconscious like perfumed bubbles through chilled champagne, and Henry is sick with jealousy over a world that is so lost to him it might as well have had dinosaurs trundling through it. But the poems bring back just enough, like those fragrances that always seem to come wafting around corners in Paris. Rilke was a jerk because he didn’t appreciate the erotic treasures that studded his life. (He died miserably in a sanitarium of leukemia at age 51, but that’s not the point.) Rilke’s youth and beauty, timeless now, merit the jealousy. 
 

Do something, Henry. Write a poem. I’m not even kidding. Go help somebody. But, no, not yet. Whatever happened still too much just happened.

#2 Big Buttons, Cornets: the advance

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_2_Big_Buttons_Cornets_the_advance_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

Didn’t nobody ever said these pieces and parts gonna be easy…

Fruitful analysis on its way? Um…er…No. Who knows this go round what the experts says…

Scene: The jane is zoned? Uh huh. Henry appears out. Henry’s out.

Nice try, Henry. The jane she drunk or stoned, not much company, escorted along an abandoned strip mall on Sunday night. Falling off heels through a miasma of powder and perfume, long way down.  Who she is? jane?  Jane. “Skip us we, sugar.”—Jane not feeling up to much this desolate and long empty evening. Likely might have cost him more anyway. (Chimes in then the black feller, following everywhere Henry like a floating angel, with commentary…We’ll come to know him too.)

Henry’s evening remains chaste. (Same’s hers.) Henry losin’ his grip, but we knew that. Back to your hole, Henry.

#1

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dream-song-1

What they actually did, to Henry, perhaps will show up in this long progression of poems, and what “they” means will become clear. It doesn’t matter yet. But the thought they thought they could do it? There’s the issue. Before the outrage happens, before the hurt endured by one Henry after another in the world arises, the extravagant arrogance of power imagines it first. Imagines an action and won’t imagine the consequences, or does imagine consequence and rationalizes it away, or just doesn’t care. That’s the appalling state of things that Berryman invokes, right off the bat. We still see it everywhere, in outrages as diverse as that Kentucky mountain blown to smithereens for the coal inside, or that bank deemed “too big to fail”, the tyrant assumes power, this Black Site is established, that Senator sponsors a bill written for him by a conservative think tank, those jobs of half the town are shipped to India, this piece of information is attacked or buried if it’s thought to threaten the stockholders’ profits. There’s a long, long—long—list of this kind of thing that could follow. The marvels and grace of the world compensate, but an outrage can march into some everyman Henry's orbit, and often it destroys people.

            I’ve known of this poem since I was twenty-three, yet I have to confess now that this first one is making me nervous. I’m going to immerse myself in this kind of thing for a year? Really? Comfortable as I am, ensconced in all my privilege? I’ve been reading the news the last couple years, though, and it bothers me enough and puts me sometimes in a bad enough mood that I’m feeling it’s time to try and make something of it. And I don’t forget that I’m vulnerable too, like Henry was, and it scares me. I’m looking to Berryman for some guidance, maybe, although he was overcome by the end. He drank to excess and eventually ended his own life. Nothing to that extent, but I’ve hid the day and sulked, and it can make me wicked and away. I’m a good artist, I can write, I have places to go and the company of dear friends where I can find peace, I believe that my abilities as a teacher have never been better. This all means something. But the news keeps coming. It’s a wonder, all right, the world can bear & be. But Berryman here is right: this Henry character should have come out and talked.

            I’m thinking of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as depressing a thing as you’ll ever read, most of it: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” (Or when will I be thrown in the street? Or how long till we all fry together in the warming climate?) Faulkner claims, though, that humans won’t just endure all the evils they heap upon themselves, they’ll prevail over them “because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.” We’ll see if any hearts get lifted. But I guess all I’m saying here at first, is that even if only a few friends, through nothing more than a sense of duty, listen, I intend to come out and talk.