Ask most Italians who their country’s greatest writer is and they will tell you Alessandro Monzoni, the eighteenth century author of The Beloved. What is particularly unique about Monzoni is that the author decided that the Italian of his day would not work for what he wanted to write and so he ‘reinvented’ the language to suit his literary vision. The end result was an enduring masterpiece. One could say the same about e e cummings, the American contemporary poet, who turned both conventional grammar and punctuation upside down. A third, less-known figure would be John Berryman, the author of The Dream Song poems.

I first discovered Berryman when in college back in the 1970’s, Reading through his Dreamsongs, I came away understanding next to nothing. A brilliant poet, much of his writing was at times impossible to digest. How difficult is it to wade through and make coherent sense of Berryman’s Dreamsongs? Many academic scholars found the poems tough going. On the other hand, back in the psychedelic sixties there were established poets boasting international acclaim, who travelled around the country selling snake oil (i.e. much of their poetry was quite awful, vapid and uninspired). They taught at prestigious Ivy League colleges and lectured at Breadloaf earning a small fortune. Not one of them could measure up to John Berryman. 

The difference?  In a word, honesty. Berryman did what the Italian Monzoni and the iconic e e cummings did as second nature; he spoke from the heart. The Persian mystic, Rumi, once wrote: “Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth." Berryman did just that.

Dream Song 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.

Berry uses a deeply personal, confessional voice to share his innermost fears, neurotic obsessions and shattered dreams. Henry is a fictional representation of the author, who suffered from chronic alcoholism, depression and an extremely traumatic childhood. It is interesting to note that Berryman, a scholar who taught at Harvard, chose to use a slang-riddled vernacular for most of his poetry. Again, this highlights his incredible skill reinventing the language, making it come to life in ways that we never might have imagined.

Dream Song 4

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken páprika, she glanced at me twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & 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.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry. 

—Mr. Bones: there is.

John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma, where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha, a schoolteacher, moved to Florida. In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself. Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry. (Wikipedia)

Dream Song 29

r

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry's ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;

thinking.

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.

John Berryman's major poetic breakthrough came after the first volume of The Dream Songs in 1964. The dream song form consists of short, 18-line lyric poems in three stanzas. They are in free verse, with some stanzas containing irregular rhyme. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequel, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named Henry who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman, but Berryman was careful to make sure his readers realized that Henry was a fictional version of himself (or a literary alter ego). In an interview, Berryman said, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax… "Malcolm Brinnin, reviewing 77 Dream Songs in The New York Times, wrote that its "excellence calls for celebration".[20] Robert Lowell wrote in The New York Review of Books, "At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.” 

In response to the perceived difficulty of the dream songs, in his 366th "Dream Song", Berryman facetiously wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort". John Berryman Won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. 

Berryman was married three times. According to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. Many times he was hospitalized for alcohol abuse. Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he died by suicide, jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis onto the west bank of the Mississippi River. (Wikipedia)