#132 A Small Dream

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12060

“A small dream of the Golden World” is another of B.’s statements comparing the here world with that other world—after death, dreams, the spirit realm, even. We see him being a dad here, with two daughters, one whining from a nightmare. A common parental predicament is to settle down a nightmare-frightened child. But, is there that sense of love, peace, and all’s-well-with-the-world when Snookums finally drifts off to sleep? Actually, there’s this: “While I pursue my path of sorrow.” So much for domestic tranquility.

Sorrow was his chosen lot, and two young daughters apparently didn’t cause it to lift from his furrowed brow in delight. What comes instead is the pronouncement of a personality at war. “Bodies, bodies to be carried a mile & dropt” would be hard to pinpoint the exact reference for without some driven act of heroic scholarship, if there is a foundation for it at all, but for sure there are intimations yet again of both the relationship or non-relationship of body and spirit, along with an acknowledgement distantly that struggle against a bitter enemy—warfare—comes down to putting holes in the enemy’s body or otherwise violently interfering with its normal functioning so that it stops working, which has the added benefit as well of stopping all the rest of the personality attached to it, all the insults, hatreds and desires that emanated from it.

Of course, poets don’t generally shoot their critics, no matter how bitterly they may hate them. An even more effective weapon is laughter. In the hereafter, from the frozen slush of his soul (a pretty good image, that), may his bitter enemies be doomed to salvoes of laughter, which is to say mockery and derision. Maybe that the stuff of a critic’s worst nightmare.

This is all dream-gas, imaginative wishery, putting him in league with his little girl’s dreams and night-terrors. He has much in common with her after all.

#131

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5640

I’ll set you on fire along with our babies? Well, he doesn’t mean it literally. This is coming from the depths of some intense emotion, images of fire resolving into images of water. Maybe he is insane, but all artists are a bit, maybe. He took it and ran with it. Let pass from me this cup—daughters, children, are a draw on our energy and emotions. They give back more than they cost, but for the infirm, the insane, there may not be much to invest.

But I have other things on my mind today, and it’s my blog. We’re at the beach in North Carolina, and here is the poem I wrote today after a long walk on a gale-force day.

A  Leak in the Ocean

Sometimes it’s enough to just be there

For a moment. A gale from the south

Pushes stinging waves of sand

Raindrops crack against my hood

Like June bugs on a windshield.

Still, this empty beach beckons.

No sensible human dares

Venture out on a day like this,

Leaving the shore to hunkering gulls,

Willets and sandpipers probing the wet

Sand. But so often the correct

Decision is to turn from a warm

Cottage, calm and strawberries waiting,

And let a fierce Atlantic gale

Have you. Boiling and roaring swings

The ceaseless surf, its sticky molecules

Of life coalescing forms of foam

The wind scatters. A bluefish jumps,

Then others, a school of silver nightmare

The croakers and spots, the weakfish and drums

Shrink in terror from in whatever dreams

Their maker has descend on the roiling

Bubbles and currents of sleep offered

Such gentle fishes in the surf.

I stand buffeted, alone,

With wind and leaping fish, violent

Water, the wind-savaged gulls

Who don’t care that I open my trunks.

Salt for the salt sea, organic

And lively as the ocean brine,

The gale vaporizes the drops

That add their moisture to the spray

Bathing the bluefish who jump then blow

Away, amazed, maybe, that the thin

Windy storm is more potent

Today than the compressed mad

Maelstrom from which they spring.

The wind pushes north up the beach.

Rain soaks the atmosphere, and I know

Why the blues are jumping: Their limits

Have broken down. Churning sky

And storming crashes of gray water

Confuse the elemental differences

Till the ocean foams with bubbles

And the air is driven with the storm’s

Wild water and that warm trickle

I leaked in the mix. If fish

Can fly today, then I might breath

Their element as well, head

Beneath the waves and chase the croakers

One last terror to consider

Before they sink amongst the broken

Shells. But blues’ teeth are sharp.

I’ll keep to the streaming sand, safe

From voracious bluefish gnashing the surf.

KZ

#130

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_130_When_I_saw_my_friend_covered_with_blood_I_thought_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

On a vision from a dream, one of those dreams that teach us what we really think. The dream vision is of a friend covered in blood, and it’s a wish that he would move on. It’s about success, apparent and real, about the relationship between the appearance of outward, worldly success and a life that more substantially makes somebody happy. I guess the spectacle of the miserable success is common enough. That’s what the “large strain of moving” means, I think—out doing what you do, book coming out in paperback (symbolic of successful life and career activity), but the activity just stretches him further on that rack of his own making. B. wishes all that quickening, life-supporting blood would flow away, leaving him “crisp.” (From the point of view of language and words? “Crisp” is a bull’s-eye. Wow. Nailed it. The image invokes dryness through loss of blood-moisture first, but also with an undertone of having been burned: He’s burned out.) He wishes the friend would bleed out, get it over with and dry up, which would actually be a mercy to someone whose life is a torment. You only wish this on someone if a) there is no hope of change in life, and b) you believe that the dying is not an end, but a change in itself, a continuance. But does maybe faith in an afterlife allow someone to abandon hope of change in this life a bit too easily? That’s the reason for the religious taboo against suicide, which has been religion’s way of addressing this issue. Your religious duty is to stick it out at all costs, play this life out to the last drop of blood.

B.’s not addressing that taboo at all, though. There’s a desire for death lurking here, and the final “spring up & go” is an ironic twist on what death often seems to be. Not an ending, a ceasing of life’s activity and motion; it’s the moment where you get up and finally start moving. It’s a faith in an afterlife all right, but I also can’t help seeing it as a rejection of life’s possibilities, a confirmation of despair. A poem like this, a dream vision, and an instructive one, is teaching, but it’s also doing something else: It looks like a preparation for suicide.

I’m not judging. Our whole society is edging slowly away from the orthodox Western taboo against willfully ending life—death with dignity, doctor-assisted suicide, unplugging the machines. Hospice. Disease, age, substance abuse: one of these will put each of us to the question. Facing that fact can ennoble death by leading us away from the fundamentalist fetish of clinging to life with absolute, unbending conviction, denying or enduring the torment of living if that’s what it has come to. On the other hand, it’s also wrong to make it too easy. Is this poem pushing for that? I only slightly suspect it, just a bit. But I get it. When the time comes to let go, let go. Still, dreaming that wish for someone else, in the end, may not only be a wish for his pain-releasing death. It may actually be a wish for his growth and change, yet, while there’s still time. So is this poem a death wish or a desire for growth? Doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s both.

#129

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5638

A dream, it seems. Triggered by an earlier experience? Perhaps. But may be just a dream.

But, this has me thinking about death, because B. wrote the poem and now I have to. There have been some moments when I was close by a death, but I’d rather keep them to myself.

Here’s how I want to think about death right now: The poet/artist Willliam Blake was with his brother when he died. He saw his spirit leave his brother’s body and rise up and out of the room—smiling and clapping his hands with joy. Blake, like most people of his time, was a firm, no-doubt believer in eternal life after death. This wasn’t just belief, this was a vision. He saw it. Blake had the gift, they say. On my trip to England last summer, we visited the Tate Britain gallery. I had wanted to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but that wing of the gallery was closed for some work under way. I was disappointed. But what I didn’t know was that Tate Britain has a William Blake room, which more than made up for glimpses I was able to steal of the Rossetti paintings we originally went there for. Blake painted in watercolors, so they’re delicate and light-sensitive. Tate rotates them—a brief showing then back to the dark for years. By total chance, I got to see both of my two favorite watercolors by William Blake: His portrait of Isaac Newton, which was thrilling in itself, but even better was the portrait of the ghost of a flea, which is one of the creepiest images you’ll ever find anywhere. Blake was quite an amazing figure.

I’m not quite ready to uncritically swallow Blake’s vision and its message that fleas are inhabited by human souls who had possessed a bloodthirsty nature. There are more fleas alive in the world right now than humans who have ever lived anyway, so some of those bloodthirsty spirits would have to be doing double and triple duty inspiriting the fleas of the world. Blake himself was surprised by the image, though, with its monstrous human form, holding a cup to receive the blood he drinks. But so many people are convinced about life after death.

I have a good friend, an academic and writer and critic, who studies Appalachian folklore. She got to go to Paris as a grad student and present some research she had done, stories she had collected, about the common experience so many people have had of being visited by a loved one in a dream, especially a parent, once they’ve died. I had this experience as well, and I can say that it gave me a lot of comfort. My father—in the dream—is with his mother, my grandmother, and they’re at peace and they’re happy. There’s a doubting part of me that can still chalk this up to some kind of psychological self-hoodwinking, where the ego assuages its grief at the loss of a loved one with myths of an afterlife with God and other loved ones passed on. I’ll have a hard time ever totally letting go of this. But that hasn’t taken over either. A few dreams I’ve had have been more than the run-of-the-mill phantasms of the night our brains churn out to try and put our chaotic lives into some semblance of psychic of order. This was more. He told me to take care of my mom, and he was not sad or unhappy. Quite the opposite. I do kind of think after that that mom will join him one of these days—doesn’t have to be soon. He’s not experiencing time like we are if his spirit is indeed still consolidated in the afterlife, so he’s not in any hurry. Her life is lively as ever, perking along with energy and engagement. (Happy Mother’s day, Mom!) I don’t need to believe one way or another—we will die and our psychologies soothe that terror with myths of eternal life. Or, we live eternally. I can hold onto both for now.

Blake had no doubts about it. Neither does B., at least on the surface. The body is cold, and to touch it, even in a dream, is shocking. But he also states flat-out that “Christ waits.” The spirit will leave the body behind. That’s the problem for me: Eternal life absolutely supposes that those things of the spirit, the human aesthetic and the spark of empathy, the you-who-you-are reading your computer screen through your two bright eyes, these things are fundamentally apart from the body? I’m not quite so sure. Keats called it “negative capability,” the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time. In his words: “That is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

So enough with the irritability of reason tonight. Blake painted Newton doubled over under the pitiless burden of his reason. Blake saw the ghosts of fleas walking the night, and Blake’s newly dead brother rose to heaven in ecstasy. In dreams, we drift to a place halfway between heaven and flesh.

#128

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5708/

“So help me Jesus” is funny, if Good Friday is ever an occasion for humor. Good Friday always brings images of crucifixion to mind, which are just awful and make me squirm—that’s the point, of course. I was raised Catholic; I’m stuck with it. There’s the problem with bodies: On one hand they’re foundation for the mind/emotions/spirit, or all wrapped up with these wonderful things, and there’s the pleasures that come from having bodies, like sleep, sex, athletic health, a full belly, sensory wonders like Chanel N°5 in a woman’s hair, an oboe playing Mozart, the twittering of a house wren, Chagall’s stained glass in Rheims cathedral, and this chocolate muffin and good coffee I just finished for breakfast, and so many of the other gifts with which life festoons we physical humans. But then there’s crucifixion, being burned at the stake, not to mention the lesser parade of ills we more fortunate still must endure—hangnails, constipation, headaches, cuts and bruises, nausea, sore throats, acne, bee stings, diarrhea, yeast infections, hemorrhoids, sunburn, hemorrhages of the left ear, and columns more. We don’t necessarily die physically first, but that’s most often the case.

While we live, we have our senses. We have, for example, our ears. I have one that’s dimming, on the left side. No bleeding. I’ll get a hearing aid one of these day if I can ever afford a decent one, moving me one more step along the path to cyborg. If it takes a machine to keep me tuned in, then so be it: I’m grateful to live during a history when electric machines are following biochemical brains—eons behind, but on the move—up the road to complexity, with sentience the faraway destination and goal. The ear is a sensitive little machine itself, so it’s not so far-fetched that we might devise another machine to support its activity when an overworked bio-ear starts wearing down, the twitching responses of microscopic hairs and intimately imbricated nerve cells that rush information to our waiting nervous consciousness grow coarsened through the assaults of lifetimes of noise and poison. So isn’t it amazing how those murmurings we detect—snippets of dim language—resolve into voices that communicate: back-stabbing plots, embarrassing secrets, nasty gossip, confessions of misbehavior, plans and schemes, declarations of admiration, desire, love? Our intricate brains construct so much from such subtle nuance, and it takes a well-tuned set of sensitive ears to gather all that vibrational minutia. Working ears, like eyes and skin, start physical, then here it comes! Aggregations of form and meaning emerging, like radiant organizations of crystal forming out of dense chemical brine. We’re so miraculously sensitive. My cat trills once and I recognize her affection, knowing I may touch the softness of her luxurious fur. A lover signals with a barely audible mmmm… inviting that next touch. Please. Songbirds in the morning stake out the space and pattern and relationships of their lives with sound, and in listening, we discover ourselves enmeshed as well in those same elaborate patterns.

#127

http://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/dream-song-127-again-his-friend%255Cs-death-made-the-man-sit-still-john-berryman-poems/
 

Finally happened upon a very brief mention today that B. wrote 5 elegies to Randall Jarrell—DS 90 (obviously), 121 (ouch! How did I miss that?), 126, 127, and 259. So after pulling my hair out yesterday trying to figure out who the elegy was for, I got it wrong. Not T.S. Eliot—Randall Jarrell. Today, it’s still about Randall Jarrell.

One thing: It’s almost unbelievable how I got 121 so wrong, and it happened because I missed the reference to Randall Jarrell on the first line of the 2^nd stanza. Kind of hard to miss, but I did it. Some are thinking, “I don’t like Berryman and don’t read the poems anyway,” and others are thinking, “I’ve haven’t yet understood more than a dozen lines anyway, so what does it matter?”, and others are thinking, “This kills your whole project. The blog is invalid. What a bonehead maneuver.” It was like Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, where there is this critical piece of evidence in the form of a letter hidden in a Paris flat, which the police can’t find because it’s perched right there on the mantelpiece in plain sight. They’re looking under carpets and behind the wallpaper, but they don’t see the letter on the mantel. Yep. I knew I would probably miss a few things along the way, but this one is big, and a bit embarrassing. Oh, well, nobody’s watching… I have half a mind to go back and do 121 over, and I may just do that yet. It was a pretty spectacular rant, though, but totally spinning out of control. I can’t believe I missed it. Oh well… What worries me now is that the topic I hit on, in my misreading of the poem, says too much about something in me I maybe should have kept to myself? I need to put a paper bag over my head for a day and then try to forget about it. But, you know, take out that reference to RJ, and my response adds up to a consistent, persistent, focused, coherent, incisive, and insightful wrong reading! A brilliant screw up! Magnificent malarkey! Astonishing!!! (I think I’ll just tack this onto 121 and forget about it.) Feeling sheepish.

Embarrassment slides easily into regret then to grief. So, to move on. This poem is not hard to decipher. It’s plain, an expression of grief for the passing of a friend. It’s appropriate, doesn’t stretch any personal or societal boundaries of propriety, and is a simple statement that the writer is in grief. Same with yesterday’s 126. Not much to bellyache about. Bow my head and acknowledge that grief merits respect. Today, we lost someone at my school. A member of the grounds crew for 30 years here. He loved nurturing plants, took care of the campus with dedication and made it his baby, and was killed last night at home on his farm in a tractor accident. There was a simple and elegant prayer service for him today. He was widely liked. The trees, the flowers and the lawns on this campus were Jeff’s poetry.

#126 A Thurn

http://www.occupypoetry.net/dream_song_126_a_thurn

“Thurn” is not an English word. Thurn und Taxis was a German noble family that was prominent in the 16^th century German postal service—which I first read about long ago in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, an odd, short, and really cool novel that actually engages with postal service intrigue in 16^th century Europe, of all things, though there’s more to it than that. The Thurn und Taxis family grew into a long-lived line of German nobility and built a number of castles with their wealth. Thurn was a German variant of the Italian torre, for “tower,” and the details of the poem would seem lend credence to “tower” as the definition: It’s a meditation on death and legacy in contemplation of a marble grave marker in a place with many of them. More to the point, though, is who is lying beneath the grave marking the elegy?

The mention of the “Abbey” and the mention of Ben Johnson, and another Johnson, (maybe James Johnson, soldier and “Governor” of Quebec [he commanded the garrison for a time in the 1700s], or perhaps William Johnson, Sub-Almoner to King Charles II)—all three Johnsons interred in Westminster Abbey—place this poem in contemplation of somebody’s memorial in Westminster Abbey. It’s driving me crazy, but I cannot find a reference to who it is. My best guess, but who I think it must be, is that it’s T.S. Eliot, who died in 1965, and whose stone in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey was unveiled in January, 1967. That’s the right time frame, and the references to the person’s “grandeur & mettle” seems to help (Eliot was a grand figure and probably mettlesome too, literarily speaking), and the repetition of “tiresome” in the 3^rd stanza helps as well. Eliot’s is a poetry of magnificent exhaustion as much as anything, a modernist who dramatized the decline and dissolution of Western society’s strength, virility, relevance, and outright viability.

A thurn, then, is a tower, and the poem is an ode to the passing of a towering figure.

(This is a short post, but I’ve never had to work harder to unpuzzle a Dream Song, and I’m still not convinced beyond all doubt. I’m utterly exhausted…. In the words of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock: “I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”)

#125

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5705/

B. wrote this on a June afternoon in 1966, after signing up students for a summer course in Western masterpieces at the University of Minnesota. Apparently he saw them as a frivolous group of lightweights. According to B. in this poem, the initiation of old for being known as a bard entailed more than his students understood. It involved more than just writing. Probably you had to know how to play a harp and use a sword, and the freezing immersions of initiation he mentions tempered one’s resolve and one’s soul—all that kind of high-barbarian romance. Now, it’s all light and dry, as he claims, and maybe Poetry claimed a few young wannabes in the beatnik’s turtleneck-and-loafers uniform, though no one actually read their work. That’s still probably true: Poets mainly are read by other poets, though there are still careers to be made in literature, and the initiation for us isn’t that darned easy either, even if it’s different. Poets mainly have to be academics in order to eat—at least that’s the primary route our culture offers. Latin American cultures offer their poets positions as ambassadors, or at least they used to, which is kind of cool. But it takes a special kind of crazy commitment to write a Ph.D. dissertation, even an MFA thesis. A number of people do manage it, but it’s never easy. If hardly anyone one reads Ph.D. dissertations, well, neophyte bards sharpening themselves immersed in freezing bog water didn’t have much of an audience either. The point is to toughen up. Our culture inhales artistic expression anyway, we’ve just developed forms other than poetry: Rock, folk, country music, Hollywood films, television, computer games, Vine videos on YouTube, comic books, and plenty more. Much of it is schlock, but much that is artful and brilliant arises out of any form. And I’ll guarantee you as well that many an uninspired bard made the mead-guzzling blonde warriors in some oaken hall roll their eyes and groan at the clichés and bad verses being foisted off on them. Maybe they poured flagons of ale over the bad bards’ heads, I don’t know, swung axes past their ears or shot at them with crossbows. That’s still not as bad as a form rejection slip.

That last stanza: “I say the paralyzed fear lest one’s not one / is back with us forever.” This strikes me as quite the careerist statement. If you’re not known as “one of the ones,” in other words, the accolades and recognition aren’t flowing your way, then that’s paralyzing because what’s the point otherwise? There’s a little voice in me, let’s call her Violet, who would like to pipe up and in a squeaky little voice say that the spiritual reward of making is better than an avalanche of accolades, fame and wealth, because without that, the fame is substanceless and false. But Violet is like the storybook mouse I think I remember, possibly from a Rudyard Kipling story, who swears he will cross the middle of the room one of these days, but always ends up cowering near the wall.

#124

http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Dream_Song_124_Behold_I_bring_you_tidings_of_great_joy_by_John_Berryman_analysis.php

“Couvade” is the ritual of an “expectant” father sequestering himself as his wife is due to give birth, pantomiming the birth process, mimicking a response to the birth pangs, and even sometimes (reportedly) actually experiencing them. It has been reported in cultures worldwide, though in our culture we don’t hear much about it. Perhaps it’s because fathers are often present at births now, though in B.’s time that was less common. In his day, you had an ersatz, comic form of couvade in the stereotype of the nervous father pacing up and down the hospital hallways, making a nuisance of himself, probably smoking nonstop and pulling now and then from a flask of bourbon tucked in his pocket. There are still reports of sympathetic pregnancies on the parts of fathers, of course. I know women who scoff openly, derisively, at such nonsense, so maybe it’s best to let that sleeping dog lie. Sympathetic psychosomatic hysteria be damned!

Here’s my version of the perfect Hell: Stuff an infinite lineup of freezers with meat, have Mephistopheles throw the switch on an Infernal power outage, and a week or so later, give me the task of cleaning them out, one by one for eternity, while an endless loop of Frank Sinatra tunes blare from fuzzed-out tinny speakers overhead. Sure, the stench of the rotting meat would be bad enough, but it’s Ol’ Blue Eyes that has this rendition of Perdition making my flesh crawl even as I imagine it. I simply do not get why everybody thinks he’s so all-fired great. I’ve always thought Sinatra was a total phony-baloney. The Rat Pack mystique does nothing for me. But I think my conception of Sinatra really got poisoned by the film I stumbled into one Saturday afternoon, that was just playing to itself on TV in the background until it caught my attention. The film was called Lady in Cement. Sinatra’s character, Tony Rome, a hard-boiled detective, is scuba diving in search of sunken treasure when he happens on a beautiful dead blond woman under the water, in a bikini, of course, drowned and with her feet encased in cement. This begins some sort of search for the perpetrators, and organized crime is somehow implicated, on and on—cretinous bullshit of the cheapest order. It’s the one scene that I actually stopped and watched before I switched the set off that got me. A nude model, posing in an artist’s studio. She needs a bathroom break. “Johnny, I gotta go to the bathroom.” “Shut up and sit still,” says the artist. “But Johnny, I gotta go to the bathroom!” On like that for too long, until finally it’s Sinatra who gives her permission to get off the stool and visit the ladies room. It may be the most sordid, the most infuriating thing I’ve ever seen in a film. The misogynistic derision is pretty obvious, and I’ve run into individuals in my life with all manner of variation on the same attitude. What especially insults my sensibility is that this was put to film.

Mistakes get made in the decision process of corporate filmmaking all the time. This was no mistake. This was consistent and symptomatic of a deep, culturally embedded, institutionalized misogyny. It didn’t even have anything to do with the plot. It was a scene of gratuitous humiliation of a female character. It has its predecessors. My wife used to like Doris Day movies when she was a kid, but when we watched them again, we were stunned by the messages all of them carry: The perky, spunky blonde, like some precocious child, eventually always gets shown her place, and if it takes Rock Hudson to put her over his knee and spank her, then so much the better.

Lady in Cement has been relegated to the dumpster of our cultural history, at least, where it belongs. It was made in 1968. It’s a bad movie. I wouldn’t even want to recycle it. No one watches Doris Day movies anymore, for the same reasons. These films pick up on and express something that, in retrospect, has to appear shameful. We have other cultural shames in our past, and Berryman comes down sometimes on the defensible side of them. DS 10, for example, is such a great comment on one of those cultural disgraces, and it’s the kind of thing that has kept me going. He walks a fine line on race in other ways, but let’s keep that at bay.

This one—I don’t know. It begins with “I bring you tidings of great joy” which is of course from the Gospel of Luke, spoken by the angels announcing Jesus’s birth to the shepherds. I wonder if B. isn’t rather quoting Linus from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but no matter. Either way, the meaning is clear enough. (Linus’s reading of Luke is among the most beautiful and moving moments American television has ever produced anyway.) B.’s son has been born. (In real life, his son was born in 1956, and his daughters in 1962 and 1965, so I think the poem might be a dream. Also, no matter.) But the key line in the first stanza: “Henry is delivered.” My first reaction? Uh-oh. You’ve got to be kidding me. Does this not seem like a bit of an egocentric pronouncement? Henry has been delivered? Of what? Well, okay, he’s worried about his wife and baby, and when they’re pronounced safe and healthy, there’s a relief involved. Me: Not quite buying it here. But I do get the second stanza—fathers as ancillary to the birth process, a bit player. I was present when my son was born, and except for him by and by, I was the only male in the delivery room. Two doctors, three or four nurses running in and out, mom, and the prevailing atmosphere from all these busy professional women presiding over a very difficult birth was, You may stay here, but keep the hell out of the way. Well, no problem with that. I was completely out of my depth and sensible enough to admit it. They all handled the crisis like the pros they were. Finally they handed me my newborn son, I looked into his face and thought, Oh my God! It’s my Aunt Lola!

It’s the third stanza here that takes such a weird turn. Henry has made it through his own egotistical (seems to me) couvade; it’s egotistical because it places emphasis on him. The couvade can possibly be seen as a sympathetic response to labor, but I rather think it’s a means of focusing everything that accompanies birth—struggle, pain, and especially the accolades that follow a successful birth—onto the father, at the expense of the mother. And that falls right in line with the misogyny I’ve been worrying about. John Stuart Mill wrote an essay called “On the Subjection of Women” where he wonders what has given rise to the subjugation of women. He thinks about men’s early response to women through their mothers and writes, “He sees that she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect on his character, of this lesson?” Men are thrown into an existential bind from the beginning, according to him. And the observance of the elemental importance of childbirth later on only reinforces the bind. In other words, everything in my world shows me that women are to be subject to my command, yet my observations seem to show that she is superior in many important ways. The response to the conundrum is to resent that which causes it. I think there are probably some issues with Mills’s thesis, but give him some credit. He wrote that in 1856. One would like to think that by 1966, or so, some progress in questioning the root-level assumptions that Mills makes, and that carry forward, might have been undertaken. Not yet for everybody. The growing pressure of feminism, a revolution of sorts, as I touched on a day or two ago, would give rise to a counter-pressure. Humiliate her. Do violence. But don’t let her think she’s getting her way. And in the case of this couvade business, steal her thunder. Take the accolades and make them yours, not because you deserve them, but because you think you should deserve them.

And the castrating business, and prying the severed “dongs” along with her teeth from her mouth with a crowbar? Whew. That’s difficult, difficult stuff to contemplate. Well, at least the agony of the couvade is better than that other ritual he comes up with, where women will, you know, do that thing they’ll do if you just relax long enough to let them…

Oh, horse hockey! Why even mention it? I got fed up with the castration business before, and who on earth are these people anyway who are so insecure in their manhood that they fear castration and do violence as a kind of pre-emptive defense against the fantasies they’re so terrified of?

It’s bigger than our intrepid, cowering poet, I’ll say that much. Kerouac’s On the Road is full of condescension toward women, a few of Hemingway’s utterances, like “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, are inexcusable, and the post-war literary landscape, especially, is full of this stuff. And then there’s Hollywood. And the Rat Pack. It’s the counterforce, in action, isn’t it? Eventually, feminism in its next wave made some strides, and I hope I can say that it has influenced my conception for the better regarding what it means to have been born a man. So, I have trouble seeing this poem as anything other than a shining monument, one of many similar cultural artifacts, to a broad, deep, male-gendered cowardice.

#123

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/5632

All artists have been here. Some days you’ve got it, and some days you don’t. Here’s Over the Rhine, one of my favorite musical acts, on this phenomenon: “And it's got nothing to do with me / The wind blows through the trees / But if I look for it, it won't come / I tense up, my mind goes numb / There's nothing harder than learning how to receive.” You can try what Hemingway suggested: Write one true sentence. (Isn’t that just so Hemingway, by the way?) Sure. OTR suggests it’s about learning to open and receive, which assumes something arriving from either outside of your consciousness or from below it. A modern, post-mythological take on the presence of the Muse. Hemingway soldiers on, forcing the creation anyway of a “true” result, no matter how small. You can think of it either way, or, like me, just build small abstract sculptures out of paper clips, thumbtacks, and the little springs that fall out of ballpoint pens when you screw them open.

In writing as much poetry in the past four months as in the 25 years previous, I’ve found that writing poetry is actually much more difficult and much more taxing than writing prose, and when you finish a poem, you have to understand that there will be a few days of emptiness before the well fills again. In spite of my impatience with the sociopolitical impropriety of B.’s chauvinism from yesterday, he was still a heck of a prolific poet, and a very good one. He was zoned. But the zone only means that you’re ready to do the work. You still have to push, and it’s heavy. The zone provides a context in readiness for the work. The effort is up to you. Discipline and preparedness make you more fit for the job, but it takes the same effort. He was driven to work his ass off.

The problem is that if so much of ones sense of self-worth and justification for eating is predicated on that work progressing, then the inevitable days that arrive when the work refuses to unfold feel like death more than for most people. It should be healthy to on occasion just say screw it, and go mow the lawn. B. would mostly get drunk, believing that the rush of booze through his veins carried the inspiration along with it. Booze forestalled imaginative death, in other words, even as it hastened the onset of the physical one. There’s the problem right there in separating the body from the spirit. From what I’ve heard, heroin-addicted be bop jazz artists were big into chemical inspiration, finding out they were mistaken only when it was too late. It has always seemed to me that if you listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” closely, a great, great song, you can hear the cocaine just streaming through it. Maybe the booze did motivate Berryman, or maybe just believing it did made the difference. However it happened, he worked hard. This poem has a kind of paradox woven through it. It moves seamlessly from blockage or exhaustion into death and decay, and the movement is understandable for one whose life really only matters when the work is progressing. To not work is death. It leads to a really nice moment in the poem: “These men have access. Sleepless, in position, / they dream the past forever.” They have access, now, don’t they? B., with death figuratively looming as well, finds his inspiration in writing about not having any inspiration; he finds life in death approaching. He writes about not being able to write, and it resulted in one of my favorite Dream Songs so far.