Month: January 2007

Berryman’s The Dream Songs

John Berryman’s The Dreamworks has been sitting on my shelf since the early 70’s, and, though I’ve tried to start it a few times, I think Theresa William’s
recent announcement that she was going to use it in a new course she is teaching inspired me to finally start reading the book.

There’s little doubt that the poems are hard to understand, reminding me in several ways of Roethke’s â€?”The Lost Son,” particularly in its personal obscurity. One is required to read multiple poems in order to truly understand any single poem, much in the same way that we must learn about another person’s personal life before we can truly understand some of their actions. (Of course, it also helps if you spend a little time on the internet (or in the library) reading about the author’s life.

Several critics note that Berryman is linked not only to the â€?”Confessional Poets,” but also to the Beats, and though the subject matter certainly seems confessional in the same sense that much of Roehtke’s poetry was, his style, particularly its use of informal language does remind me of the best Beat poets.

One of my favorites is the number 1, perhaps because I could hear Berryman read it here

1

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point, a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don’t see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

This poem serves rather well as an introduction to the collection, at least to the first fifty poems that I’ve finished so far. A central event in Berryman’s life was his father’s suicide when he was a young boy. Naturally enough, that event haunted him throughout the rest of his life, or at least it seems so if we are to judge his life by his poems.

There’s considerable argument whether Henry is or is not Berrryman, but if it is, no wonder he wonders how Henry can survive, â€?”pried open for all the world to see.”

Unlike many people, Berryman does not seem able to find comfort in the idea that his father has found a happier place in heaven:

48

He yelled at me in Greek,
my God! It’s not his language
and I’m no good at his is Aramaic,
was I am a monoglot of English
(American version) and, say pieces from
a baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread?

but rising in the Second Gospel, pal:
The seed goes down, god dies,
a rising happens,
some crust, and then occurs an eating. He said so,
a Greek idea,
troublesome to imaginary Jews,

like bitter Henry, full of the death of love,
Cawdor uneasy, disambitious, mourning
the whole implausible necessary thing.
He dropped his voice & sybilled of
the death of the death of love.
I ought to get going.

Instead of his father’s death bringing the narrator closer to Jesus, and that’s obviously who this poem is about, the narrator sees Jesus’ death as the foreshadowing of the â€?”death of the death of love.” From the opening â€?”my God!” which to me suggests Jesus’ words on the Cross, â€?”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” this death doesn’t seem to offer redemption, but, rather, leaves him abandoned, forsaken, incapable of love.

Stern’s “Swan Legs”

Despite finally succumbing to the cold that everyone here has been passing around since Christmas, I managed to finish the last hundred pages of Gerald Stern’s This Time in the last two days.

Unfortunately, I found it more of a struggle than I did for the first third of the book, as Stern pushes further and further into a world that I don’t particularly understand, and, more importantly, don’t identify with, whether it is the industrialized East Coast or the Cultural world of Pavarotti .

Although I did find the much-mentioned â€?”Both of Them Were Sixty-Five” where Stern describes his introduction of his mother Ida to Aaron Copeland rather entertaining, I seldom identified with most of the poems here, perhaps with the exception of this one:

SWAN LEGS

just for a second, when Mao stood up and walked
out of the theater in Leningrad the swan
stopped dancing and Khruschev just shrugged his shoulders
and lowered his eyes. Mao’s hatred of tutus
prevailed as his hatred of Russian food
and his hatred of clean napkins. Nixon and Kissinger
sat for the swan in Washington-they passed
notes between them and when they were finished reading
they tore them in tiny pieces. The swan believed
in suffering so she floated across the stage,
well, sort of floated, and so it goes; the pricks
down there in their seats they couldn’t care less, they feasted
on swan legs, they took care of themselves,
yet why should I pick on them, there is enough
feasting even without them. I usually know
pricks, the swan is lucky for such a bird
to do what she does to music, to do it to song,
her head in the air, so misunderstood and hated,
so wrongly loved; first her dark beak swaying,
and that is the violin, and then her leaping,
and that is the harp, or the comb-look at me forgetting
the comb, and the sweet potato, when I was a swan
myself, and I almost floated; the one I remember
she sang and trilled a little, that was a swan
with a voice, the thigh is wider than a chicken’s,
the flesh is dark and stringy; it was vinegar
they forced down the throat, plain distilled white vinegar,
to soften the wild flesh and kill the suffering.

Though I suspect Stern might place me closer to Mao than to himself, as a lover of some of the arts it’s hard to miss that world leaders seldom share that love. Though, considering Mao’s renown as a poet, it’s a little surprising that Stern chose his lack of appreciation of Russian ballet to skewer him.

It’s probably not entirely coincidental that literary people were so fond of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, rare American leaders that seemed fond of literature and the arts.

Of course, I’m still enough of an old-world socialist that I can identify with the lines â€?”the pricks/ down there in their seats they couldn’t care less, they feasted/ on swan legs, they took care of themselves.” Even Democrats seem more concerned with taking care of themselves than taking care of those who believe â€?”in suffering.”

I’ll have to admit, though, that I’m not quite sure what to do with last part of the poem and the lines â€?”that was a swan/ with a voice, the thigh is wider than a chicken’s,/ the flesh is dark and stringy,” but I’ve never had to completely understand a poem to appreciate it.

A Brief Break in the Clouds

As often noted, it’s been unusually stormy here in the Pacific Northwest. So when the sun broke out at ten this morning I went online and read that the sunshine should be around until early afternoon. With little hesitation, I grabbed my camera and headed out to Nisqually to try to get some pictures.

As it turned out, the sunshine lasted about as long as it took me to get out of the driveway, and not a moment longer. It’s hard to get great pictures when it’s gray everywhere you look, but at least it didn’t rain on us and I managed to get a few interesting shots.

I somehow imagined that these cormorants, sitting in the middle of the flooded Nisqually river, were talking about how big the salmon that got away was:

The muted grays were pretty typical of the day. What wasn’t gray was mainly muted brown, but when you’ve been trapped inside for weeks even browns take on their own beauty:

I’m sure a male American Widgeon would find this young lady every bit as beautiful as I did.

Thanks, alan

Pushed for time to finish home-made Christmas presents I improvised on
alan’s suggestion that I print up one of my pictures and give that as a gift.

Because I didn’t want anyone to feel that they had to remember to hang up gifts when I visited them, I decided to make up a set of cards for Dawn and Jen featuring some of my best bird and flower pictures, something I’ve wanted to do anyway but have never found the time to get done.

I really didn’t have time to reproduce, or even find, my best pictures though I obviously relied on some pictures that I’ve published here.

I’m thinking that perhaps I might try to augment my retirement income by selling cards in local shops, or through my web page.

In that spirit, and because I haven’t found a bright enough day to get out and get new pictures in the last month or so, I spent some time this morning working in the new Photoshop CS3 on this picture of Red-shafted Flicker: