‘By the second verse, dear friends…’ – Singing John Berryman
by and published in Edition One of Pomegranate
Reading John Berryman for the first time is like going to the dentist’s, being told to say ‘ah’, then being hit in the mouth by a shovel. You know he’s weird; you’ve heard he’s important; so you go along, read a Sonnet or two, think ‘hey, once you get past all these verb inversions the man’s not all that bad’ – and then all of a sudden, WHAM, ‘less yes than an ice-cream cone’, and where the good Christ did that come from? Berryman is a confrontational poet in that he brings you face to face with the fact that sometimes, you don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He is enjoyable, but not without a little time and effort. You have to dig for the gold.
My introduction to Berryman is the slim volume selected by Michael Hofmann and published by Faber and Faber. It contains choices from the often brilliant Sonnets and the often maddening Dream Songs, the latter commonly held on high as one of the greatest achievements of 20th century American poetry. The Songs do not immediately endear themselves to a reader who is not Berryman; some references are so private and bizarre as to be lost entirely, unless you fancy going back to the Minneapolis of 1972 and having a swim.
They are startling in their foreignness; at times they can be completely lucid, and at times they descent into lexical chaos within the space of a line-break. As Robert Lowell wrote in a contemporary review, ‘at first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness.’ But they are Dream Songs for a reason: if they make you feel lost, scared, confused, and you can’t lay out in plain terms what’s going on, then after a fashion they’re fulfilling their function. This isn’t an apology for obscurity – sometimes Berryman’s private world of phrasing and voices is so left-field as to have left the field altogether. Their idiosyncracy can verge on idiocy. But it is their fractured, associative, crowded nature that make them such an individual, important work – Berryman the poet is looking at himself from within, without, and through a number of surreal looking glasses.
Why are the poems written in backslidden quasi-racist minstrel jive? Who is the friend talking to ‘Henry’ throughout? Why did Berryman insist on his distance from Henry when in some cases their resemblance is beyond all reasonable doubt? (see Song 145, in which the narrator discusses the death by shotgun suicide of a father on a front-porch, closing with the lines ‘in the summer dawn/left Henry to live on.’) We don’t know, and Berryman himself seemed somewhat determined that we never would. By the time he reached Song number 366, he deigned to look back over the nettle-field of language he had sprouted just to tell us:
‘These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.’
To which the reader can only reply: well, gee, thanks John – but the sentiment is key to understanding why we should not understand.
Even if Berryman is sometimes off the radar, to paraphrase some great poet or other, it is necessary for someone to push the boundaries so that those who come afterwards will see for themselves how close they can go before falling off the edge. Some modern verse is probably as gnarly in its syntax and its worldview as the Dream Songs, but evidently Berryman’s acclaim has not been conferred by association. His greatest gifts to today’s poetry were the restless spirit of his lines, and the clash of higher and lower registers that permeates his verse; the weird blackface frame narratives and sentences like ‘down some many did descend from the abominable and semi-mortal Cat’ have been curiously absent from the work of later admirers…
of which there are many, and not just in the expected circles. I myself discovered Berryman as a direct result of the recommendation given to me in an interview by John Darnielle, chief Mountain Goat and general genius. Darnielle is one of the most poetic songwriters at work today, and it’s no coincidence that he appreciates the shifting dynamics and stop-what-you’re-doing-and-listen images that run throughout Berryman’s poetry.
‘I’ve given up literature and taken down pills
and that rabbit doesn’t trust me,’
the curious climax of song 107, is a line that would slot easily in with any one of Darnielle’s paranoid meanderings around West Coast America, many of which already featured rabbits anyway.
If you’re reading this, under thirty and interested in poetry, it’s also a fair bet you’ve heard ‘Stuck Between Stations’, by America’s best literary beer-louts, The Hold Steady; if not, I’ve severely misjudged my target audience. This is one of two songs released within months in 2007 which take Berryman’s death as a subject, and use it create wonderful poetry of their own. I’m not going to go into the are-lyrics-poetry debate right now, but the lyricists in question (Craig Finn, and Will Sheff of countryfied screamers Okkervil River) certainly evince a greater knowledge of the tricks of meter, rhyme, rhythm, imagery and sound than a number of on-page poets I could name.
‘John Allyn Smith Sails’, the Okkervil track, is a creaking, tumbling, gloriously raw autobiography in Berryman’s persona – lines like
‘breaking in a case of suds at the Brass Rail
a fall-down drunk’
would almost certainly make their muse proud. The pay-off is a raucous segue into ‘Sloop John B’, cut-up with lines culled and re-arranged from the clear and keenly-phrased Song 77, which I quote for your comparison to the song I insist you seek out:
‘love/raved away so many of Henry’s years
it is a wonder that, with in each hand
one of his own mad books and all,
ancient fires for eyes, his head full
& his heart full, he’s making read to move on.’
The point of all this indie poet pimping is to show how Berryman appears to be the romanticised suicide du jour; his life makes for a great story, and an even greater song. Literature and music have always had their own febrile intersection – Clare and Blake drew from popular ballads, and I hope I’m right in thinking Byron played guitar. The Dream Songs are songs, albeit in the words of Lowell ‘much too difficult, packed, and wrenched to be sung.’ These cases in particular serve to illustrate that one can have an interesting effect on the production of the other.
But songs about your favourite poet seem to me a lot easier to write than poems about your favourite band. One of my first forays in poetry outside of primary school was an elegy for tragic Manic Richey Edwards, and the day that work sees sunlight will be when Richey appears playing lead guitar at the head of a choir of angels. Though the bands above have proved that music about writing doesn’t equate to architecture about dancing, it seems in my case that the commonly-quoted reverse is still the case. However, you’re not me, and we’d be interested to see if the current will flow both ways. For the next issue of Pomegranate, I hereby invite you to send us any poems inspired by, written to, or written about the music that you love or loathe.
But before you go, one last chance to see why you ought to love Berryman:
‘The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.’
Hoist up the John B sail.
Richard O'Brien
Richard O’Brien is one of Pomegranate’s two submissions editors. He likes to think of himself as Charlotte Geater’s glamourless assistant.
He was born in Peterborough in 1990 and has returned only for weddings and funerals since starting at Brasenose College Oxford in 2008. He has also returned for holidays.
His first pamphlet, ‘your own devices’, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2009, and his first play ‘Instead of Beauty’ was the winner of the 2010 OUDS New Writing Festival. He enjoys the humiliation of directing autobiographical musicals. Other interests include travel, museums, travelling to museums, and walks on a long beach.