My relationship with John Berryman’s Dream Songs, like the songs themselves, is murky, complicated, obscure in origin, and not easy to explain—not even to myself. One signpost of great art, it seems to me, is that the meaning of its greatness shifts in relation to the reader over time, and my appreciation of The Dream Songs has deepened and evolved—as I expect it will continue to for the rest of my life—in the two decades since it first came to my attention.
In my twenties I knew that Berryman was, like me, an alcoholic, and that he committed suicide in Minneapolis in 1972, and being at an age susceptible to the romantic myth of the doomed, hard-drinking mystic, the messy glamour of the dissolute—before I came to know (that is, in real terms, hard terms, blood terms) the cost of that myth—I was intrigued. I knew too that he was considered a brilliant and impenetrable poet, an impression that was confirmed by my first casual glance into an edition of 77 Dream Songs on the shelf of my boss’s office in Cambridge.
These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses. The whole thing was messy, hallucinatory, and impossible to resist; it was the Exile on Main Street of poetry, and I was hooked.
As the shadows over my own life lengthened, scattered phrases accrued talismanic power. “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back,” begins number 45; then, “I’m too alone. I see no end” and “Lightning fell silent where the Devil knelt.” “Hell talkt my brain awake,” says Henry, the mysterious semi-protagonist, at one point, and it seemed as fit a phrase for my existence—insomniac, deeply unhappy—as any. Safely on the other side of life again at age 32, I was given for my birthday, by my parents, a very nearly mint-condition first edition of the complete cycle, the celebrated Farrar Straus hardcover from 1968, featuring Charles Skaggs’s bold white-pink-and-green typography. The interior design, which follows the template set by the brilliant Guy Fleming for the original 1964 edition of 77 Dream Songs, is austere and beautiful, with that slightly antique feel of openness and clarity that seems particular to book design of that era. (Someday I would like an expert in the history of typography to explain to me how this is so). I have it in front of me now, paging through it as I try to capture, clumsily, the strange beauty of this half-understood work, to anatomize its appeal.
The Dream Songs collectively is many things: a record of a consciousness, a song cycle, an ongoing formalist experiment, a journal of an imaginary insanity, a high-modernist word collage, and an elegy for a generation of poets. The work as a whole is death-haunted, with each successive passing of another poet or peer—Jarrell, Roethke, Schwartz, Williams—bringing a yearning elegy, grave and often touching, as the poet bends his soul towards the haven that they have found and that he will gain only through force of self-violence. As the songs pile up and the years pass the prosody becomes starker, cleaner, marginally more transparent, yet somehow purer in its despair: the world’s longest and most eloquent suicide note. There is also an engagingly quotidian quality to the work, as in a journal: occasional mentions of the outside world, of presidents, the Cold War, the Congo, Vietnam, peek through the whirling kaleidoscope of the poet / narrator’s brain, like a slideshow of the darkening sixties playing in an adjacent room. Other songs seem to hint acidly at the growing professional and academic demands of Berryman’s career. All of this is filtered through a blurry, argumentative stream of voices that is extremely difficult to decode, Berryman’s own note—Henry is “not the poet, not me”—being of limited assistance in the matter.
Better minds than mine have tried to identify a consistent schema of speakerly identification for the Songs, which seem to be narrated from a kind of shifting first-and-a-half-person, the half-person being the poet’s unseen companion, who addresses him as “Mr. Bones” in the rhythms of a not entirely convincing African-American patois, and who may be a schizophrenic counterpart of the narrator and/or Henry. What is to my mind undeniable about the poems is the sense of mystery, of the uncanny, of a shifting, fully inhabited interior consciousness, however opaque or inaccessible, that they convey. Not everyone agrees: the great postwar critic M. L. Rosenthal, for one, thought that The Dream Songs was a step backwards for Berryman, calling it “work we must forage (in) too much on our own.”
It’s an interesting word, “forage,” and apt, for to my mind, a mental “foraging” is in fact the primary experience of reading, especially work so dense and demanding as Berryman’s. And the fruits of my expeditions into the verbal thickets left behind by this brilliant, sad, unlucky, intense man, are a paradoxically heightened sense of freedom and gratitude, an attentiveness to the air and light around me, the twinkling of the city at night, a hunger for “tasting all the secret bits of life.”
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9 responses
Great piece! I’ll be digging out my copy of Dream Songs to forage through this weekend.
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.
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.
“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…
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.
“… 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.
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.
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.
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.
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