Comments on: The Last Book I Loved: Dream Songs

By: m. maslow

m. maslow — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:32:03 +0000

Wow.I want to comment, but I am still contemplating. I have been looking at this book on the shelf. I’m going to now take it down and look at it with the benefit of this elucidating piece of writing.

By: J. Boyett

J. Boyett — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:08:11 +0000

Thanks for the wonderful essay. Aside from its intrinsic merits, and from spurring me to finally check out the Dream Songs, it provided some distraction from the hip-hop karaoke bar across the street from my apartment here in the South Bronx–”Hell talkt my brain awake,” indeed.

By: Alicia

Alicia — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 22:28:01 +0000

Lindgren’s piece is full of wonder and praise for “the strange beauty of this half-understood work”…reflecting the ambiguities and tangled web of our lives. Echoing Folse’s comment, thanks for sharing this.

By: Mark Folse

Mark Folse — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 18:05:43 +0000

“… it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.” Just: damn.

I agree that one of the remarkable strength’s of the work is that it speaks to us in our youth, when dissolution, womanizing and skirting the suburbs of madness seems a fine pastime with or without the excuse of poetry, and continues to speak to the reader into their 50s (my age) and I expect, beyond. A book that endures the decades is likely to also persist through generations. It takes a soul of iron to read it later into life, to bask in the power of it’s open pages and keep the ghosts inside the box. It is the closest to poetry as incantatory magic of anything else I have ever read.

Thanks for sharing this.

By: Chaucie

Chaucie — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 17:07:01 +0000

Your piece attracts my desire to attempt to stretch my mind around Berryman’s work, albeit this prosaic mind tends to work better with poetry that is more accessible than the kind that chases after remote allusion. Nevertheless, the “scattered phrases” you quote from Berryman may not seem so formidable as to completely deter my attention; I’ll give it a try.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:45:30 +0000

“The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist; it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.”

I haven’t read any Berryman–in college, I was too busy cranking the real Exile on Main Street to bother–but reading this makes me think that I should. OK, I just bought it, thirteen bucks, here in two days…

By: Ron Kolm

Ron Kolm — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 04:36:01 +0000

Mr. Lindgren has written a wonderful piece; a cogent arguement for a perhaps less than cogent collection of words. I’ll borrow a copy from the bookstore I work in and check it out again, but I remember wanting to like this book so much when I tried to read it years ago; I can’t remember which critic had touted it — might have been Leslie Fiedler — but I came away from it thinking that it was another one of the many ‘crimes of the beats’ — or perhaps an injured passenger leaping off the Ez Po train just before it derailed. I did enjoy Mr. Lindgren’s prose, and the generous way he shared probably very personal portions of his life.

By: Anitta

Anitta — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 02:40:30 +0000

A beautiful meditation on Berryman’s poetry. I like this idea of “first and a half person.” It’s funny that Rosenthal would say one has to “forage too much on our own,” especially as a critique. I always think of poetry in John Stuart Mill’s definition of the poet speaking to himself, and we simply overhear, listening for what we can catch from behind the door or through the wall (or behind the trees and bramble when you’re foraging through the thicket). Mill was really comfortable with poetry as an exercise in isolation, solitariness. I haven’t read Berryman’s Dream Songs (or any of his poetry) but that the first person becomes first and a half leads me to believe that there’s a lot of people in Berryman’s isolation. You can only be “too alone” if alone itself doesn’t quite mean alone, just one, just you. And if there’s such a thing for Berryman’s poet as “too alone” it seems to me doesn’t want to be too much on his own. And maybe this is the appeal of Berryman’s poet. That he’s not Mill’s first person poet talking to himself, addressing no one, whom we must overhear lest we intrude upon him. He’s the first and a half person, trying not to just be talking to himself, and so the reader feels free to share his isolation. If so, he sounds like my kind of poet. I’ll have to check him out.

By: Deacon Warner

Deacon Warner — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 18:45:54 +0000

Great piece! I’ll be digging out my copy of Dream Songs to forage through this weekend.