moviesbooksandmusic

John Berryman is undeservedly underrated by the young hipster generation that alternately idolizes on the one hand Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski on the other. His Dream Songs, a long form poem that is organized as three hundred and eighty-five individual poems, was written between 1955 and 1968 in a language that many find difficult and obscurant. By his own admission he was a difficult person, alcoholic, chronically depressed, and frequently unable to sleep at night. It is not surprising to know that he wrote a great deal of poetry in the middle of the night while drinking and smoking and wishing he could sleep and function like a normal person. Perhaps that is best way to read them as well.

His private language and witticisms are not so private and difficult as the work’s reputation would lead you to believe. An individual dream song taken on its own as a separate piece is almost inevitably a difficult poem, but the three hundred and eighty-five dream songs taken as a whole are a work of genius. It is a bit like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; there’s no point in dipping your toes in cautiously, you must jump in and thrash about to get any pleasure from it. Although the language is by no means as private or as difficult as Joyce’s, I think the comparison is apt. And because he was a difficult person and a depressive alcoholic there is a tendency to red tragedy into every phrase. That is a serious error. There is a great deal of humor and playfulness in his work, and it must be remembered that tragedy is but a plaything to a poet of any worth.

More than any other significant poet of his generation Berryman has fallen into a foggy kind of limbo. He deserves to be read and I can’t imagine that the same young people who have rediscovered Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus aren’t capable of engaging with this wonderful poet.

243

An undead morning. I . . . Shuffle my poss’s.
Lashed here, with ears, in the narrows, memoried,
like a remaining man,
he call to him for discomfort blue-black losses
gins & green girls, drag of the slaying weed.
Just when it began again

I will remember, soon. All will be, soon.
The little birds are crazed. Survive us, gulls.
A hiss from distant space
homes in the overcast—to their grown tune—
dead on my foaming galley. Feel my pulse.
Is it the hour to replace my face?

Dance in the gunwales to what they cannot hear
my lorn men. I bear every piece of it.
Often, in the ways to come,
where the sun rises and fulfils their fear,
unlashed, I’ll whistle bits.
through the mad Pillars we are bound for home.

To my way of thinking that is not difficult writing, but language at play. I think john Berryman was deserving of much wider fame during his life, and with the exception of Seamus Heaney, I can’t think of a contemporary poet who is his equal.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS