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77 Dream Songs
Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
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About the author
John Berryman
145 books240 followersJohn Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972.
A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphle.
His thought made pockets & the plane buckt, followed. It was the collection called Dream Songs that earned him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968.
The two volumes were combined as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world, and he was widely read among his contemporaries. In 1970 he published the drastically different Love & Fame. It received many negative reviews, along with a little praise, most notably from Saul Bellow and John Bailey. Despite its negative reception, its colloquial style and sexual forthrightness have influenced many younger poets, especially from Britain and Ireland. Delusions Etc., his bleak final collection, which he prepared for printing but did not live to see appear, continues in a similar vein. Another book of poems, Henry's Fate, culled from Berryman's manuscripts, appeared posthumously, as did a book of essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and some drafts of a novel, Recovery.
The poems that form Dream Songs involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement. Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.
A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphle.
His thought made pockets & the plane buckt, followed. It was the collection called Dream Songs that earned him the most admiration. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968.
The two volumes were combined as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world, and he was widely read among his contemporaries. In 1970 he published the drastically different Love & Fame. It received many negative reviews, along with a little praise, most notably from Saul Bellow and John Bailey. Despite its negative reception, its colloquial style and sexual forthrightness have influenced many younger poets, especially from Britain and Ireland. Delusions Etc., his bleak final collection, which he prepared for printing but did not live to see appear, continues in a similar vein. Another book of poems, Henry's Fate, culled from Berryman's manuscripts, appeared posthumously, as did a book of essays, The Freedom of the Poet, and some drafts of a novel, Recovery.
The poems that form Dream Songs involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement. Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 112 reviews
February 14, 2021
Have your ever met a person who does something annoying, or (rather) that should be annoying, but for some reason, when this particular person does it, you don't find it annoying at all? I thought about this recently when I re-read The 77 Dream Songs, and began to think about John Berryman and Robert Lowell.
Interested in the origins of confessional poetry, I decided to read Life Studies (1959), by Robert Lowell, grand-daddy of confessional poets, teacher of Sexton and Plath. But I hated it. Every other line harbored some obscure biographical reference or arcane allusion. Worse, the argument of each poem was so elliptical that context gave me little clue. I couldn't force my way through it. It made me feel dumb, and I gave up.
Still interested in confessional poetry, I resolved to read 77 Dream Songs, a work of confessional poetry that John Berryman, Lowell's contemporary, published five years after Life Studies. Almost immediately, from the first dream song, I was immersed in magnificent language, aware that Berryman was speaking about cataclysmic loss:
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.
I liked the third dream song too, the way it relegated Rilke to the rim of Dantes' hell, Rilke the transcendent poet who was also an unscrupulous manipulator of women, particularly his aristocratic, neurasthenic patrons:
Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle and lurk,
Rilke's . . .
And then I was completely won over by this description in "Dream Song 4" of a woman at a dinner party whom the speaker is eyeing lustfully:
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband and four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.
I was hooked. There were greater delights to come—including the much anthologized Dream Song 14—but I knew then and there I wanted to read this book to the end. I did so, and would recommend it as one of the great poetic achievements of the 20th century and one of my favorite poetry collections too.
Here comes the funny part. 77 Dreams Songs is allusive and obscure, perhaps worse than Lowell's Life Studies. A dozen dream songs still baffle me, and there are at least a dozen more I only incompletely understand. Besides, the three shifting voices—Henry, Mr. Bones, and the “author” --drive me crazy. Where does one leave off and another begin? Who is saying what to whom?
All this should be annoying, and yet somehow it isn't. The music of the verse makes up for everything. The heart's cry singing in every line wins my respect and love.
You remember the person I talked about before, the person you meet with the annoying habit who turns out not to be annoying at all? Poets can be like that too. And in my experience, whenever you meet someone like that--either a person or poet--it is often the sign of a friendship that is to come.
March 13, 2012
Beginning in 1955, John Berryman wrote a long cycle of confessional poems, all following a strict form of three stanzas with six lines each. Eventually he produced 385 of them, and these were ultimately collected in The Dream Songs. But that full collection has so much material that it is overwhelming for anyone approaching this poetry, so the first selection of these poems to be published, 77 Dream Songs, is worth examining on its own.
The protagonist of the Dream Songs is a man named Henry, whose last name is never pinned down. The first poem introduces this character and the state he finds himself in: "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." Berryman denied that depictions of Henry were autobiographical, but in fact the poems are clearly based on Berryman's own anguished life: feelings of romantic and sexual inadequacy, alcoholism, the travails of life in academia, temporary relief in travels in the Orient, and sorrow at the death of literary friends like Frost and Roethke (and lingering pain from the suicide of the poet's father decades before). Over these individual achings hangs a general existential one:
"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn, / and morever my mother told me as a boy / (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no / inner resources, because I am heavily bored."
As much as Berryman/Henry's existence is plagued with doubt, his poetry is powerful. We can all identify with the loss and yearning expressed in these poems. And by applying his problem to this character named Henry, Berryman can sometimes stand aside from them and offer some humour. It is this humour that saves the collection from being grim to the point of absurdity, and the zaniness should appeal to a wide audience.
There is occasionally a second presence in these poems, that controversially speaks in the faux-African-American speech of 19th century minstrelry and addresses Henry always as Mr. Bones. This second personality is but another aspect of Henry/Berryman's own, and though Berryman is open to accusations of casual racism, he also clearly appreciates African-American English as a source of greater expressive possibilities in English. And there's another kind of linguistic virtuosity here, the confused syntax of the drunkard (and/or one half asleep -- these are "dream songs"): "When worst got things, how was you? Steady on? / Wheedling, or shockt her & / you have been bad to your friend, / whom not you writing to. You have not listened. / A pelican of lies / you loosed: where are you?"
And to quote one poem that contains all the features of which I've written, consider number 36:
"The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there? / -- Easy, easy. Mr. Bones. I is on your side. / I smell your grief. / -- I sent my grief away. I cannot care / forever. With them all again & again I died / and cried, and I have to live.
-- Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die. / That is our 'pointed task. Love & die. / -- Yes; that makes sense. / But what makes sense between, then? / What if I roiling & babbling & braining; brood on why and / just sat on the fence?
-- I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost / -- It's fool's gold. But I go in for that. / The boy & the bear / looked at each other. Man all is tossed / & lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat. / William Faulkner's where?
(Frost being still around.)"
If you like some of the mid-20th century poets who grappled with torment and doubts, and were open about it, like Robert Lowell or Theodore Roethke, then the Dream Songs will probably provide many pleasures.
The protagonist of the Dream Songs is a man named Henry, whose last name is never pinned down. The first poem introduces this character and the state he finds himself in: "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." Berryman denied that depictions of Henry were autobiographical, but in fact the poems are clearly based on Berryman's own anguished life: feelings of romantic and sexual inadequacy, alcoholism, the travails of life in academia, temporary relief in travels in the Orient, and sorrow at the death of literary friends like Frost and Roethke (and lingering pain from the suicide of the poet's father decades before). Over these individual achings hangs a general existential one:
"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn, / and morever my mother told me as a boy / (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no / inner resources, because I am heavily bored."
As much as Berryman/Henry's existence is plagued with doubt, his poetry is powerful. We can all identify with the loss and yearning expressed in these poems. And by applying his problem to this character named Henry, Berryman can sometimes stand aside from them and offer some humour. It is this humour that saves the collection from being grim to the point of absurdity, and the zaniness should appeal to a wide audience.
There is occasionally a second presence in these poems, that controversially speaks in the faux-African-American speech of 19th century minstrelry and addresses Henry always as Mr. Bones. This second personality is but another aspect of Henry/Berryman's own, and though Berryman is open to accusations of casual racism, he also clearly appreciates African-American English as a source of greater expressive possibilities in English. And there's another kind of linguistic virtuosity here, the confused syntax of the drunkard (and/or one half asleep -- these are "dream songs"): "When worst got things, how was you? Steady on? / Wheedling, or shockt her & / you have been bad to your friend, / whom not you writing to. You have not listened. / A pelican of lies / you loosed: where are you?"
And to quote one poem that contains all the features of which I've written, consider number 36:
"The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who's there? / -- Easy, easy. Mr. Bones. I is on your side. / I smell your grief. / -- I sent my grief away. I cannot care / forever. With them all again & again I died / and cried, and I have to live.
-- Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die. / That is our 'pointed task. Love & die. / -- Yes; that makes sense. / But what makes sense between, then? / What if I roiling & babbling & braining; brood on why and / just sat on the fence?
-- I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost / -- It's fool's gold. But I go in for that. / The boy & the bear / looked at each other. Man all is tossed / & lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat. / William Faulkner's where?
(Frost being still around.)"
If you like some of the mid-20th century poets who grappled with torment and doubts, and were open about it, like Robert Lowell or Theodore Roethke, then the Dream Songs will probably provide many pleasures.
February 23, 2016
John Berryman (1914 – 1972)
”77 oníricas”, no original ”77 Dream Songs” é um livro do poeta norte-americano John Berryman (1914 – 1972), um trabalho premiado em 1965 com ”Pulitzer Prize for Poetry”, numa excelente edição bilingue da “Tinta da China”, com tradução e prefácio do poeta e tradutor Daniel Jonas.
A personagem principal é Henry, ou Mr. Bones, um alter ego do próprio John Berryman, numa evidente similitude com a vida do poeta; nomeadamente, o acontecimento trágico do suicídio do seu pai, os fracassos sentimentais, com sucessivos casamentos e infidelidades, a questão do remorso, da arrogância e da tristeza, a predisposição para a depressão, e a existência de inúmeros eventos que encerram dúvidas e perguntas, num contexto de desespero, mas, igualmente, da existência de alguma esperança futura.
A originalidade de ”77 oníricas” reside, essencialmente, no facto dos poemas se agruparem num conjunto de pequenos contos, que se vão unificando num contexto narrativo “semelhante” a um romance – mas, a linguagem e as referências, algumas demasiado herméticas, impediram-me de criar empatia e de valorizar a poesia de John Berryman.
14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
A vida, amigos, é um tédio. Não devemos dizer isso.
Afinal, o céu faísca, o grande mar anseia,
nós próprios faiscamos e ansiamos,
e ainda por cima em pequeno a minha mãe dizia-me
(repetidamente) «Confessares-te entediado
significa que não tens
Recursos próprios.» Concluo agora não ter
recursos próprios, pois sinto um tédio de morte.
As pessoas entediam-me,
a literatura entedia-me, especialmente a grande literatura,
o Henry entedia-me, com as suas queixas & os seus tendões
tão anquilosados como os de Aquiles,
o qual ama as pessoas e a arte valorosa, o que me entedia.
E as plácidas colinas, & o gin dão-me seca
e de alguma forma um cão
levou-se a si & à sua cauda para bem longe
para as montanhas ou o mar ou o céu, deixando-
-me a menear.
January 4, 2022
Beautiful poetry, of an abstraction hinting at sense. Moments of clarity but much of mumbling. Above all a language or syntactical brilliance really unequalled in my poetry reading. It’s kind of a pure poetry. My only complaint is it stretches too far from meaning to the point where it becomes nonsense and one questions the sincerity of the approach. But it’s never pretentious. Maybe I need a guide like Pound’s Cantos.
July 4, 2015
I read this book on the last week of October 2014, on what would have been Berryman's 100th birthday if he hadn't died of suicide in 1972 in my hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. To me, the book's power lies in its perfectly unique, convention-busting idiom, a grammar-defying syntax that combines Shakespearean sentence inversion with a deep-dyed 20th-century urban American vernacular. The core subject matter of the Dream Songs -- the introspections of a caddish, alcoholic, depressive, middle-aged man -- maintained my interest some of the time (IMO, Larkin handled such subject matter more interestingly than Berryman did, while Bukowski handled it less interestingly). Still, it's the plasticity of Berryman's language, not the situations he describes, that make the Dream Songs worth reading. Readers with a soft spot for formal poetry will delight in how, by constantly varying his voice, his line length, and his rhyme scheme, Berryman was able to milk 77 very different poems out of one deceptively simple-appearing form (18 lines, divided into three stanzas of six lines each).
Sometimes the poems are horrifying (especially to a reader encountering them in this day and age, when the ubiquity of sexual violence is much more well understood than in Berryman's era):
...But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing. (from "Dream Song #29")
Sometimes they are hilarious:
I don't operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don't do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail---
because of my wife & son---to keep from earning.
---Mr. Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. ---Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
---Mr. Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they don't pay you. Will you die?
---My
friend, I succeeded. Later. ("Dream Song #67")
Through it all, Berryman's showman-like versatility is the most salient feature. The Dream Songs contain forays into a variety of topics tangentially connected to Henry's (the protagonist's) life: literature, music, travel, sports, politics, spirituality. And then there's the marvelous use of language, both naughty and knotty at once. I do believe it's a shame that "Dream Song #14" ("Life, friends, is boring...") is the most widely anthologized of the bunch, since it doesn't do justice at all to Berryman's genius for verbal experimentation and syntactical acrobatics. (Moreover, as "Dream Song #67" proves, Berryman had the capacity to be much, much funnier than the corny "wag" pun at the end of "Dream Song #14" has misled many casual readers to believe.) No one "Dream Song" could do justice to Berryman's genius, though; it's the cumulative effect of the whole book, not any one virtuosic poem, that you'll remember.
Sometimes the poems are horrifying (especially to a reader encountering them in this day and age, when the ubiquity of sexual violence is much more well understood than in Berryman's era):
...But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing. (from "Dream Song #29")
Sometimes they are hilarious:
I don't operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don't do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail---
because of my wife & son---to keep from earning.
---Mr. Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. ---Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
---Mr. Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they don't pay you. Will you die?
---My
friend, I succeeded. Later. ("Dream Song #67")
Through it all, Berryman's showman-like versatility is the most salient feature. The Dream Songs contain forays into a variety of topics tangentially connected to Henry's (the protagonist's) life: literature, music, travel, sports, politics, spirituality. And then there's the marvelous use of language, both naughty and knotty at once. I do believe it's a shame that "Dream Song #14" ("Life, friends, is boring...") is the most widely anthologized of the bunch, since it doesn't do justice at all to Berryman's genius for verbal experimentation and syntactical acrobatics. (Moreover, as "Dream Song #67" proves, Berryman had the capacity to be much, much funnier than the corny "wag" pun at the end of "Dream Song #14" has misled many casual readers to believe.) No one "Dream Song" could do justice to Berryman's genius, though; it's the cumulative effect of the whole book, not any one virtuosic poem, that you'll remember.
October 30, 2014
Slanted and obtuse, both in syntax and the effluvial subject matter. Made up of depression and the comical misdirections and occasionally dire implications of that black dog. Watch out for ole' Mr. Bones, though he could have been trickier IMO. How is this confessional? IDK maybe ppl take the speaker to be John Berryman and his life has some similarities to the tone of these poems, but I didn't take them as confessional. It's OK, Berryman like most who get stuck with a "school of" label didn't believe that he was confessional. Challenging, even for a reader of poems, but once you start hearing Berryman's voice in all this, man, it gets pretty interesting.
August 19, 2022
I was not a fan of Berryman. I couldn't make heads or tails of his poems. I'd rather tease curls out of my poodle hair on a humid day than try to tease meaning out of one of these "dream songs." And I really hated the cheesy, poorly rendered southern black dialect he often assumed through the use of improper grammer and mangled diction. I don't care when he was writing, that's bad form and reading it gave me a headache and indigestion.
To be balanced about this review, there were things I did like about the collection. I enjoyed the repeated figure, "Henry," who is like an everyman, someone to whom the reader is supposed to be able to remain connected throughout their reading of the collection. I felt this tool was effective making it easier for me to empathize with the human element of each piece.
Also, outside of racist dialect, Berryman's made up words could be quite clever and hilarious. Such as on p9, in "The Prisoner of Shark Island," he writes, "Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One. / Fúnnee; he don't feel so." Readers know what that first word in the second line means, and why a doppelganger has been called into it's place, even if those who have heard it spoken do not; this little bit of being in on the writer's joke heightens the humor.
Even my appreciation of this obvious skill could not get me past that terrible dialect, however. There are other ways to suggest manners of speaking than this, and they work much better; I wish Berryman had used them.
*edit Planning a reread of this collection in winter of 2022/2023
To be balanced about this review, there were things I did like about the collection. I enjoyed the repeated figure, "Henry," who is like an everyman, someone to whom the reader is supposed to be able to remain connected throughout their reading of the collection. I felt this tool was effective making it easier for me to empathize with the human element of each piece.
Also, outside of racist dialect, Berryman's made up words could be quite clever and hilarious. Such as on p9, in "The Prisoner of Shark Island," he writes, "Now Henry is unmistakably a Big One. / Fúnnee; he don't feel so." Readers know what that first word in the second line means, and why a doppelganger has been called into it's place, even if those who have heard it spoken do not; this little bit of being in on the writer's joke heightens the humor.
Even my appreciation of this obvious skill could not get me past that terrible dialect, however. There are other ways to suggest manners of speaking than this, and they work much better; I wish Berryman had used them.
*edit Planning a reread of this collection in winter of 2022/2023
July 20, 2025
Like a drunk guy telling you about all his ghosts. Very weird but intimate. Tied together by the simplicity of the recurring form. Feel inspired to be weirder, let it happen, and scramble words and sentences for fun
Read
December 31, 2022Dream songs 14
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn.
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
I remember reading John Berryman's "Dream Song #14" in my twenties, with its famous opening words, "Life, friends, is boring." I remember being struck by its wit, irony, playfulness, delight: it is the kind of poem students read aloud to each other in a pool of laughter and admiration, and there is nothing wrong with that, for it reinforces their sense of cynicism and superiority, and it is crucial at that age we find a like-minded group to whom we can belong. I remember rereading the poem, not for the second time, some
thirty years later, and being struck by its excruciating pain, which is entirely without irony. Many persons who knew Berryman have remarked that he spoke, always, without irony, which means, simply, that he always meant what he said. If you are going through a particularly stable period of your life, and you encounter his bleakest statements, you will react with chagrin and disbelief, as if listening to the ablest jester. If you are going through a particularly unstable period of your life, the straightforward articulation of suffering that has already twisted and dislocated its bearer renders a tension that will very nearly kill you. But I did not know this then.
Mary Ruefle
Started the dream songs because John Berryman was the only author in the trip to echo spring by Olivia Laing that I had not read. I don’t read poetry and therefore feel unable to judge the artistic merits of these pieces. Nonetheless Laing’s review of Berryman’s life and his alcoholism produced such sympathy in me that I had to try to read some his work.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn.
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
I remember reading John Berryman's "Dream Song #14" in my twenties, with its famous opening words, "Life, friends, is boring." I remember being struck by its wit, irony, playfulness, delight: it is the kind of poem students read aloud to each other in a pool of laughter and admiration, and there is nothing wrong with that, for it reinforces their sense of cynicism and superiority, and it is crucial at that age we find a like-minded group to whom we can belong. I remember rereading the poem, not for the second time, some
thirty years later, and being struck by its excruciating pain, which is entirely without irony. Many persons who knew Berryman have remarked that he spoke, always, without irony, which means, simply, that he always meant what he said. If you are going through a particularly stable period of your life, and you encounter his bleakest statements, you will react with chagrin and disbelief, as if listening to the ablest jester. If you are going through a particularly unstable period of your life, the straightforward articulation of suffering that has already twisted and dislocated its bearer renders a tension that will very nearly kill you. But I did not know this then.
Mary Ruefle
Started the dream songs because John Berryman was the only author in the trip to echo spring by Olivia Laing that I had not read. I don’t read poetry and therefore feel unable to judge the artistic merits of these pieces. Nonetheless Laing’s review of Berryman’s life and his alcoholism produced such sympathy in me that I had to try to read some his work.
June 1, 2016
1.5 few good lines sprinkled throughout the collection otherwise i thought it was bad
October 6, 2020
You might enjoy them for their brevity, their wit, their acidity, their music, their word play, their colloquialism, their formalness, their interconnectedness, their dreaminess. You might not enjoy them for their obscurity or for Berryman's personality. I recommend reading and rereading. In clusters, in groups. Consume the whole collection at least once. Repeat. Slowly.
When i first read these poems i aspired to be a poet and professor. Rereading, now, middle-aged, nostalgia-prone, i re-experienced my eager self fearlessly toying with Truth and Beauty (how could that courageous kid become this insulated man?). I discovered that Berryman was probably the biggest influence on my juvenile verses (every one="juvenile"; not one="Verse"). That secondary elation combined with primary self-loathing make the Dream Songs personally enjoyable. I don't feel the need to read another 308 of them, though, in His Toy His Dream His Rest or the all-in-one Dream Songs.
Is it self-indulgent to quote favorite lines? When lack of context diminishes their beauty? I doed it anyways.
2020 Personal Pandemic Project: making poems from poets' repetitions.
77 Dream Songs yielded the following...
When i first read these poems i aspired to be a poet and professor. Rereading, now, middle-aged, nostalgia-prone, i re-experienced my eager self fearlessly toying with Truth and Beauty (how could that courageous kid become this insulated man?). I discovered that Berryman was probably the biggest influence on my juvenile verses (every one="juvenile"; not one="Verse"). That secondary elation combined with primary self-loathing make the Dream Songs personally enjoyable. I don't feel the need to read another 308 of them, though, in His Toy His Dream His Rest or the all-in-one Dream Songs.
Is it self-indulgent to quote favorite lines? When lack of context diminishes their beauty? I doed it anyways.
...—drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres.
No more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:
thirstless: without a think in his head
("A Strut for Roethke"; 18:10-13)
I had a most marvellous piece of luck, I died.
(25:16)
My friends,—he has been known to mourn,—I'll die;
live you, in the most wild, kindly, green
partly forgiving wood,
sort of forever and all those human sings
close not your better ears to, while good Spring
returns with a dance and a sigh.
(26:13-18)
Now—tell me, my love, if you recall
the dove light after dawn at the island and all—
(34:7-8)
Why should I tell a truth? when in the crack
of the dooming & emptying news I did hold back—
(34:13-14)
Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and, in general, bats have it made.
(63:1-3)
the sun in the willow
shivers itself & shakes itself green-yellow
(66:9-10)
and the fifteen changeless stones in their five worlds
with a shelving of moving moss stand me the thought of the ancient maker priest.
("Karesansui, Ryoan-ji"; 73:16-18)
But the snows and summers grieve and dream
(77:13)
2020 Personal Pandemic Project: making poems from poets' repetitions.
77 Dream Songs yielded the following...
Die Status
Old Henry came back in vain
(All: O! come on down)
A mile rowed to see ruin
(Pal: Easy, come down)
Mournful communes, no right use
(Pal: Er, ha, come down)
And sleeps consist of the death
(Pal: My god! Please! one
March 2, 2021
Enjoyed this a lot. Blends humour and genuine tragedy effortlessly, and it's irresistibly quotable. Sometimes it's near-incomprehensible; some words have accents added for no discernable reason; there's a character called Mr Bones that we learn almost nothing about. It's a strange, arresting read.
Read
December 10, 2016¯\_(ツ)_/¯
September 2, 2018
I have only begun to get my teeth into a few of these. They feel like almost Koans at times, demanding both attention and openness. Will be returning to this many more times.
August 14, 2022
Berryman presents a “brain from hell”. His character, Henry, is tormented, fragmentary, isolated. Top tips: 35, 46.
March 25, 2017
I have been meaning to read John Berryman for years, even before his 2014 centennial with its rush of reissued and new collections, going back to the period in my life, from 2008 to 2010, when hardly a day passed that I did not have to walk across the bridge from which Berryman leapt to his death in 1972. Someday I will perhaps read all of the Dream Songs, though most critics I have consulted gently suggest that the common reader can probably stop after this, Berryman's Pulitzer-winning landmark book of 1964, 77 Dream Songs.
As the overall title for the sequence suggests, the poems are intended as a dream diary for a protagonist—sometimes speaker, sometimes third-person subject or second-person object of other speakers' addresses—named Henry, loosely an authorial stand-in: a middle-aged poet in the middle of the American century, ravaged by drink, desire, and despair. The poems have a regular pattern: each contains three stanzas of six lines each. Meter and rhyme are largely free, however; this means, as it means in Whitman and Eliot, that the occasional fall into regular measure ("There is an eye, there was a slit") or rhyme scheme (see #40) is all the more thrilling. Berryman was a lover and scholar of Shakespeare; like Melville before him (and like his friend and contemporary, Saul Bellow), he adopts the bard's great magic trick of playing the English language in every register,[1] as well as twisting syntax out of shape. Here, from #44, is a representative sample:
I go in fear of philistinism, but even so, I have to wonder if the bafflement is necessary except as a foil to make the more conventionally beautiful verses shine more brightly. The Dream Songs that people quote—Cole helpfully lists the good ones in his intro: #1, #4, #5, #14, #21, #26, #29, #37, #45, #46, #53, #76, #77—are the clearest ones, the poems that use a mingled syntax to create a mingled affect of sorrowing gallows humor. Self-pity is fine in a lyric poem; in fact, it's practically what the form was invented for. But Berryman is on a perhaps literally therapeutic mission to cut his self-importance with self-parody:
____________________________
[1] A controversial aspect of Berryman's language is his frequent recourse to what appears to be African-American vernacular. Such rhetoric, as in #40's miming blues lyric—
[2] This is Emerson, from Nature (1936). He is in this passage reproving the not-un-Berryman-like Coleridge for having written in his "Dejection: An Ode" that he gazed at the sky "with how blank an eye!"
As the overall title for the sequence suggests, the poems are intended as a dream diary for a protagonist—sometimes speaker, sometimes third-person subject or second-person object of other speakers' addresses—named Henry, loosely an authorial stand-in: a middle-aged poet in the middle of the American century, ravaged by drink, desire, and despair. The poems have a regular pattern: each contains three stanzas of six lines each. Meter and rhyme are largely free, however; this means, as it means in Whitman and Eliot, that the occasional fall into regular measure ("There is an eye, there was a slit") or rhyme scheme (see #40) is all the more thrilling. Berryman was a lover and scholar of Shakespeare; like Melville before him (and like his friend and contemporary, Saul Bellow), he adopts the bard's great magic trick of playing the English language in every register,[1] as well as twisting syntax out of shape. Here, from #44, is a representative sample:
Tell it to the forest fire, tell it to the moon,The meaning of this could perhaps be unraveled, maybe some critic has even done it, with reference to Berryman's personal life or items in the news of the day, but more important than whatever this might mean is the poet's willingness to present the ostensibly meaningless, and not only at the level of content but of language itself, as with the dueling verbs in line five or the ambiguity of what "writhing" modifies in line six. Also representative is the contrast between lines of crystalline clarity or vividness, like "Tell it to the forest fire, tell it to the moon," with a confusing chaos of sometimes rebarbative verbal noise. While I referenced Melville and Bellow above, the Dream Songs often sound more like the end of "Oxen of the Sun" than like Moby-Dick, more like Naked Lunch than like Herzog:
mention it in general to the moon
on the way down,
he's about to have his lady, permanent;
and this is the worst of all came ever sent
writhing Henry's way.
The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no barIn the introduction to this 2014 reprint of 77 Dream Songs, Henri Cole quotes Elizabeth Bishop: "Some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important–perhaps sometimes too personally." If such a judgment is good enough for Elizabeth Bishop, it's good enough for me. Cole also quotes Robert Lowell comparing Berryman's difficulty to that of Hart Crane, another Elizabethan ranter adrift in the chaos of the twentieth century, speaking a seemingly private idiom in tortured syntax.
there, no sweet freeway, and no premises
for business purposes…
I go in fear of philistinism, but even so, I have to wonder if the bafflement is necessary except as a foil to make the more conventionally beautiful verses shine more brightly. The Dream Songs that people quote—Cole helpfully lists the good ones in his intro: #1, #4, #5, #14, #21, #26, #29, #37, #45, #46, #53, #76, #77—are the clearest ones, the poems that use a mingled syntax to create a mingled affect of sorrowing gallows humor. Self-pity is fine in a lyric poem; in fact, it's practically what the form was invented for. But Berryman is on a perhaps literally therapeutic mission to cut his self-importance with self-parody:
…literature bores me, especially great literature,The overall mode of the Dream Songs is mock-heroic. But the heroism is real—a heroism of enduring the roiling self in a roiling world, all shot through with misleading desires and bad news. From #53:
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
—I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,This voice from 1964, then, is a very contemporary voice: it holds the tone of every "this is fine" quip on social media posted over some catastrophic link. Such a tone is probably inescapable for anyone in Berryman's position, anyone crossing Berryman's bridge, but I have never been comfortable with hearing it come out of my own mouth, and I am trying to think of a better name for it than "learned helplessness." Another famous line, from #45: "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back." Berryman was fond of electing himself Whitman's poetic legatee; I remember what Whitman's own intellectual tutor had to say on the subject of gazing on ruins:
said the Honourable Possum.
—It takes me so long to read the 'paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,
because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
including the corpses, pal.'
Kierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read 'papers,
and that was not, friends, his worst idea.
Tiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,
a programme adopted early on by long Housman,
and Gottfried Benn
said:—We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.
The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.[2]Too severe? I doubt I could live up to it myself, and Berryman anticipates the critique in any case by semi-seriously declaring himself bored with great literature. But a literary period of which 77 Dream Songs is a major masterwork, a period still our own, should maybe think again about so lavishly indulging in nervous laughter and soppy-drunk tears amid the ruins. Whoever rebuilds in our place will assuredly be bored of us. I think I already am.
____________________________
[1] A controversial aspect of Berryman's language is his frequent recourse to what appears to be African-American vernacular. Such rhetoric, as in #40's miming blues lyric—
Wishin was dyin but I gotta make—can make for uncomfortable reading, yet it is important to contextualize this choice. For one thing, the sociolect Berryman here mimics is, as Helen Vendler and August Kleinzahler via Kevin Young point out, that of the minstrel show—in other words, Berryman parodies and travesties not black speech but white mens' prior parody and travesty of black speech. Another important point is the function of the minstrel voice in the Dream Songs; like all the voices in the poem, it represents a part of Henry's own consciousness, bantering with or taunting or arraigning him. Berryman thus makes the twofold claim that white American consciousness is constituted in some way by black American culture (cf. another of Berryman's friends and contemporaries, Ralph Ellison) and that the white man's idea of black culture may be only a distorted and self-serving mirror, a projection. All of this is in service to the marking of Henry not as universal subject, master of all he surveys, but with sociological precision as the white educated American middle-class male. Because such marking, such refusal of an elite class's spurious catholicity, is precisely the ideological work that critical theory calls for, I fail to see how Berryman's work (never mind the man) can be judged reactionary unless one is absolutely committed to the type of criticism Howard Hampton once so memorably labeled "holier-than-Mao."
it all this way to that bed on these feet
where peoples said to meet.
Maybe but even if I see my son
forever never, get back on the take,
free, black & forty-one.
[2] This is Emerson, from Nature (1936). He is in this passage reproving the not-un-Berryman-like Coleridge for having written in his "Dejection: An Ode" that he gazed at the sky "with how blank an eye!"
December 13, 2021
There's a lot to grapple with in these verses, a strange and problematic self-stylized blackface that would get a boy CANCELLED in 2021 is, well, strange and problematic and difficult to read in 2021, but so much of these words are focused on the strange problems that life throws our way, how we make music or mockery or magic or madness from them, is well, our problem. The problem of hell brain in hell world. The problem of being messy fuckers who are learning how to steal and sing, the songs we have no right to and the rites we have no songs for. The problem of being the person you are and all the problems that causes and when you try to be someone else, well well well.
Maybe something about how suicide-haunted these poems are resonates with me. What a year.
Maybe something about how suicide-haunted these poems are resonates with me. What a year.
July 21, 2017
Surreal poetry about an angsty dude named Henry. Not awful, but the voice changes and random foreign words reminded me of Infinite Jest, and that's always a shame.
April 7, 2019
14 and 29 I might print out and frame and hang in my bathroom.
November 1, 2020
lovely mostly, weird
April 21, 2021
Deceptively intricate and challenging
Read
October 30, 2025when the depression reduces you to a pre-linguistic form of speech otherwise known as AAVE
February 17, 2017
I had been having a lot of trouble sleeping when I went to the used bookstore to get a poetry collection. They didn't have any poetry collections by authors I enjoy, which they usually do. So I looked at the titles for a topic that may interest me. I have been reading/researching about dreams a lot, and that, coupled with the word "spooky" on the back, made me pick up this book.
This collection is a collection of dreams in that the writing is not grounded in traditional reality. The narrator often moves from first person (between numerous characters, primarily "Henry" and "Mr. Bones") and third person. The situations/timeline are not always grounded in traditional reality. The words don't always make logical sense but come on in a dreamlike state. This is the type of poetry you "feel" at points, because sitting and trying to decode it is too difficult and probably not the point.
"Henry" is Berryman's puppet, essentially. Unlike Pessoa, he does not take on Berryman has not adopted a new personality persay. In the introduction it is made clear that Henry is NOT Berryman, but a tool for the author to use to explore various dream states. While I really enjoyed the concept of Henry, I found it/the thinking behind it extremely self-indulgent. While not all poetry is about the author/narrator, I bet you money that Henry is closer to Berryman than he isn't.
One of the things I really enjoyed in this book was the subjectivity. In the early days of conceptualizing psychosis, certain thinkers posited that psychosis stems from subjectivity - when someone struggles with their own personhood, and the personhood of those around them. Boundaries get confused. While the introduction mentions cyclothymia and others mention depression, this book spoke to me more than that. I read this book as if I were experiencing psychosis. I work with people who are psychotic frequently, so I found this really interesting. I am not psychotic, but I would love to have someone who is read it and reflect on that. In that sense I really enjoyed this book - the changes in language, the easy, confusing shifts in identity, topic, place -- it all seemed to fit.
This book is extremely racist. I rarely say that writing is racist/problematic, because realistic books are biased. This gives readers a safe/stable place to explore these issues outside of the real world (as long as reading about oppression is safe for them.) Well, this book goes beyond that. The introduction actually describes it as "minstrel-y" - this introduction was written in 2014. Had I known this, I wouldn't have purchased the book despite the great writing therein. The language used at times mimics black slang. At times Henry becomes the uneducated black person, who Mr. Bones lectures knowingly. The author actually dares to lecture black people through these characters about racism and how to deal with it! I think Berryman fetishized black people's suffering as an analogy for his own, and to feel liberal, and like a good guy. This was disgusting, I have never read anything like it, or I haven't in long time. I would characterize this as "minstrel-y."
This book's racism was disgusting, it was not always easy to access the language (although I think that was the point,) and it was self-indulgent. But Berryman clearly had talent and was on to something here. What would it have been like if he wasn't such a racist asshole? I would say what would have happened if the wrote this today, but racism is alive and well. If only he could subtract that element from this, it would have been quite the collection.
This collection is a collection of dreams in that the writing is not grounded in traditional reality. The narrator often moves from first person (between numerous characters, primarily "Henry" and "Mr. Bones") and third person. The situations/timeline are not always grounded in traditional reality. The words don't always make logical sense but come on in a dreamlike state. This is the type of poetry you "feel" at points, because sitting and trying to decode it is too difficult and probably not the point.
"Henry" is Berryman's puppet, essentially. Unlike Pessoa, he does not take on Berryman has not adopted a new personality persay. In the introduction it is made clear that Henry is NOT Berryman, but a tool for the author to use to explore various dream states. While I really enjoyed the concept of Henry, I found it/the thinking behind it extremely self-indulgent. While not all poetry is about the author/narrator, I bet you money that Henry is closer to Berryman than he isn't.
One of the things I really enjoyed in this book was the subjectivity. In the early days of conceptualizing psychosis, certain thinkers posited that psychosis stems from subjectivity - when someone struggles with their own personhood, and the personhood of those around them. Boundaries get confused. While the introduction mentions cyclothymia and others mention depression, this book spoke to me more than that. I read this book as if I were experiencing psychosis. I work with people who are psychotic frequently, so I found this really interesting. I am not psychotic, but I would love to have someone who is read it and reflect on that. In that sense I really enjoyed this book - the changes in language, the easy, confusing shifts in identity, topic, place -- it all seemed to fit.
This book is extremely racist. I rarely say that writing is racist/problematic, because realistic books are biased. This gives readers a safe/stable place to explore these issues outside of the real world (as long as reading about oppression is safe for them.) Well, this book goes beyond that. The introduction actually describes it as "minstrel-y" - this introduction was written in 2014. Had I known this, I wouldn't have purchased the book despite the great writing therein. The language used at times mimics black slang. At times Henry becomes the uneducated black person, who Mr. Bones lectures knowingly. The author actually dares to lecture black people through these characters about racism and how to deal with it! I think Berryman fetishized black people's suffering as an analogy for his own, and to feel liberal, and like a good guy. This was disgusting, I have never read anything like it, or I haven't in long time. I would characterize this as "minstrel-y."
This book's racism was disgusting, it was not always easy to access the language (although I think that was the point,) and it was self-indulgent. But Berryman clearly had talent and was on to something here. What would it have been like if he wasn't such a racist asshole? I would say what would have happened if the wrote this today, but racism is alive and well. If only he could subtract that element from this, it would have been quite the collection.
January 22, 2022
There are those who've forgotten about Berryman—it's been 50 yrs since he jumped off that bridge—those who never read him in the first place, and those who don't care for his work—it's erudite, confusing, and eccentric. Goofy and depressing. Then there's the rest of us. It took a while for Berryman to find himself: the earlier poems, which channel Yeats, are a skillful ventriloquil exercise; but the Dream Songs are the real thing. And they don't care one whit whether you like them or not.
March 28, 2023
I tried. I really did.
May 31, 2025
Of 1826 —
“I am the little man who smokes & smokes.
I am the girl who does know better but.
I am the king of the pool.
I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
I am a government official & a goddamned fool.
I am a lady who takes jokes.
I am the enemy of the mind.
I am the auto salesman and love you.
I am a teenage cancer, with a plan.
I am the blackt-out man.
I am the woman powerful as a zoo.
I am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind—
It is the Fourth of July.
Collect: while the dying man,
forgone by you creator, who forgives,
is gasping 'Thomas Jefferson still lives'
in vain, in vain, in vain.
I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.”
“I am the little man who smokes & smokes.
I am the girl who does know better but.
I am the king of the pool.
I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
I am a government official & a goddamned fool.
I am a lady who takes jokes.
I am the enemy of the mind.
I am the auto salesman and love you.
I am a teenage cancer, with a plan.
I am the blackt-out man.
I am the woman powerful as a zoo.
I am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind—
It is the Fourth of July.
Collect: while the dying man,
forgone by you creator, who forgives,
is gasping 'Thomas Jefferson still lives'
in vain, in vain, in vain.
I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.”
October 14, 2024
Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
Thinking.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
Thinking.
April 11, 2023
“Dream Song 55"
Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.
The architecture is far from reassuring.
I feel uneasy.
A pity,—the interview began so well:
I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away
and sloshed out a martini
strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters—
God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,
John's energy,
anti-matter matter. I felt fine.
Then a change came backward. A chill fell.
Talk slackened,
died, and began to give me sideways looks.
'Chirst,' I thought 'what now?' and would have askt for another
but didn't dare.
I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,
some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:
'We betrayed me.”
-------------------------------------------------
Dream Songs No 67
I don’t operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don’t do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail —
because of my wife & son — to keep from earning.
— Mr Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. — Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
— Mr Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they didn’t pay you. Will you die?
— My
friend, I succeeded. Later.
------------------------------------------
Henry's Confession
Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
—You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.
The architecture is far from reassuring.
I feel uneasy.
A pity,—the interview began so well:
I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away
and sloshed out a martini
strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters—
God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,
John's energy,
anti-matter matter. I felt fine.
Then a change came backward. A chill fell.
Talk slackened,
died, and began to give me sideways looks.
'Chirst,' I thought 'what now?' and would have askt for another
but didn't dare.
I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,
some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:
'We betrayed me.”
-------------------------------------------------
Dream Songs No 67
I don’t operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don’t do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail —
because of my wife & son — to keep from earning.
— Mr Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. — Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
— Mr Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they didn’t pay you. Will you die?
— My
friend, I succeeded. Later.
------------------------------------------
Henry's Confession
Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
—You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
March 14, 2021
For April, National Poetry Month, I've been reading some collections of poetry. It must be said, I have not read or written much poetry in the past, so I may not be in the best place to interpret such intense, rich, difficult writing as John Berryman's Dream Songs.
I had been fascinated by the story of John Berryman, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and acclaimed professor who was also an alcoholic and who, while teaching at the University of Minnesota, jumped off of a Minneapolis bridge into the Mississippi in the winter of 1972 to his death. A haunted, tormented figure, Berryman's poetry, collected in this slim 1964 paperback, certainly reflects a conflicted but erudite personality.
Collecting the first 77 "Dream Songs," these poems are powerful and full of literary and historical references (not all of which I was familiar with), but often vague and nonsensical, and truly reflect the title, evoking a very dream-like cadence and logic. As a "key figure" in Confessional Poetry, the Dream Songs are deeply personal, sensual, and often starkly bleak. Following the travails of the middle-aged man Henry, Berryman's poetic alter-ego who is often referred to as "Mr. Bones" by another voice who uses a racist "minstrel-show" vernacular, the poems drift from theme to theme. It is the type of writing that is dense with inferred meaning and one could spend a lot of time analyzing just what Barryman meant or didn't mean in each line; there were some poignant pieces though, for example, 63;
"Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and in general, bats have it made.
Henry for joining the human race is bats,
known to be so, by few them who think,
out of the cave."
I had been fascinated by the story of John Berryman, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and acclaimed professor who was also an alcoholic and who, while teaching at the University of Minnesota, jumped off of a Minneapolis bridge into the Mississippi in the winter of 1972 to his death. A haunted, tormented figure, Berryman's poetry, collected in this slim 1964 paperback, certainly reflects a conflicted but erudite personality.
Collecting the first 77 "Dream Songs," these poems are powerful and full of literary and historical references (not all of which I was familiar with), but often vague and nonsensical, and truly reflect the title, evoking a very dream-like cadence and logic. As a "key figure" in Confessional Poetry, the Dream Songs are deeply personal, sensual, and often starkly bleak. Following the travails of the middle-aged man Henry, Berryman's poetic alter-ego who is often referred to as "Mr. Bones" by another voice who uses a racist "minstrel-show" vernacular, the poems drift from theme to theme. It is the type of writing that is dense with inferred meaning and one could spend a lot of time analyzing just what Barryman meant or didn't mean in each line; there were some poignant pieces though, for example, 63;
"Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and in general, bats have it made.
Henry for joining the human race is bats,
known to be so, by few them who think,
out of the cave."
March 29, 2013
A haunting collection of poetry. Each poem comprises of three stanzas with a free rhyming scheme leading to an overall effect of a series of shorts - some defying interpretation as Lowell himself admitted on reviewing the collection.
The central character of Henry has been taken to be Berryman himself (although Berryman rather half-heartedly denied this) but he is oddly indeterminate - his poetic voice located in varying dictions and dialects. Other characters will sometimes pop up - Mr Bones or the voices of his dead poetic friends and allies - Frost and Roethke (in eulogy) to name but two.
There are many beautiful passages - the kind you want to type up and pin about the house to be stumbled upon at a future unknown time when in need of surprising beauty. The subject of a line, or the denouement of an action are often left to the end of a line or form an enjambement over to the next. The effect is startling - often contributing to a feeling of reversal, delay or of rocking back on your heels. Sometimes the meaning can only be understood in retreat - a metaphor perhaps for the poor, unhappy subject Henry.
Perhaps a depressive's collection. I'm pinning this quote over my mirror:
"Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat
smiled into his mirror, a murderer's
(at Stillwater), at himself alone
and said across a plink to that desolate fellow
said a little hail and buck-you-up
upon his triumph"
The central character of Henry has been taken to be Berryman himself (although Berryman rather half-heartedly denied this) but he is oddly indeterminate - his poetic voice located in varying dictions and dialects. Other characters will sometimes pop up - Mr Bones or the voices of his dead poetic friends and allies - Frost and Roethke (in eulogy) to name but two.
There are many beautiful passages - the kind you want to type up and pin about the house to be stumbled upon at a future unknown time when in need of surprising beauty. The subject of a line, or the denouement of an action are often left to the end of a line or form an enjambement over to the next. The effect is startling - often contributing to a feeling of reversal, delay or of rocking back on your heels. Sometimes the meaning can only be understood in retreat - a metaphor perhaps for the poor, unhappy subject Henry.
Perhaps a depressive's collection. I'm pinning this quote over my mirror:
"Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat
smiled into his mirror, a murderer's
(at Stillwater), at himself alone
and said across a plink to that desolate fellow
said a little hail and buck-you-up
upon his triumph"
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