John Berryman is somebody whose poetry I have loved since first reading his masterpece, The Dream Songs, over 20 years ago. Like any great artist, his work deepens in profundity and complexity as you grow older. There are lines from his poems that I know I will never forget, lines charged with vulnerability and despair and the blackest humour which sustain and nourish me as I bring them to mind and reflect upon them. There can be a raggedness to the syntax of these poems that can make them hard to digest but there is something indefinable in his lifelong attempt to essay the unknowable strangeness of the human heart that comes closer to "emotional truth" than a great many canonical writers. He responded to criticism of The Dream Songs simply with the words, "These songs are not meant to be understood. They are meant to terrify and comfort."
Berryman was one of the great minds in 20th century American literature and a deeply rewarding writer on 17th century English poetry. His career was deeply hamstrung by his alcoholism which fed his crippling self doubt and depression. A tormented Catholic, he would urge his students to get down on their knees each day and pray for the words to come. Berryman was 11 when his father committed suicide. He fled to literature as a salve for his mental wounds but the mental anguish of this early trauma was a permanent one and he would be drawn back to this subject time and again.
The Dream Songs is what I return to most regularly but this Selected Poems is an excellent selection of his entire output, which includes some of his most valuable poems from late in his life when he grappled directly with his faith and his sanity. These are deeply distressing and eerily disquieting poems.
Perhaps the greatest of these is Henry's Understanding, written shortly before his suicide in 1972.
"He was reading late, at Richard's, down in Maine,
aged 32? Richard & Helen long in bed,
my good wife long in bed.
All I had to do was strip & get into my bed,
putting the marker in the book, & sleep
& wake to a hot breakfast.
Off the coast was an island, P'tit Manaan,
the bluff from Richard's lawn was almost sheer.
A chill at four o'clock.
It only takes a few minutes to make a man.
A concentration upon now & here.
Suddenly, unlike Bach,
& horribly, unlike Bach, it occured to me
that one night, instead of warm pajamas,
I'd take off all my clothes
& cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff
into the terrible water & walk forever
under it toward the island."
Gryphon Diablo 300, dCS Rossini (with matching clock), Kharma Exquisite Mini, Ansuz C2, Finite Elemente Master Reference.
