The Dream Songs: Poems

Curse you John Berryman! You have ruined my ear for other poets. THE DREAM SONGS is one of those award-winning modern epics you wonder why you are reading until near the end, when you realize that you have slipped completely into the author's syntaxes, thoughts and, yes, dreams.Don't let Berryman in his forward tell you different: this book is baldly autobiographical. Berryman dubbed himself Henry, gave a voice to his traumatized psyche (Mr. Bones) and set them talking, unraveling a lifetime of scholarship mixed with pain.If you have read about Berryman, you will see him instantly in THE DREAM SONGS. Yet, unlike Robert Lowell, Berryman doesn't assume a familiarity with his biography that verges on solipsism. It is enough to know his father killed himself, Berryman killed himself, Berryman had affairs, was an alcoholic, was married several times and that he dearly loved literature, especially Shakespeare, some of whose Sonnets he parodies.There is no narrative to the 385 Songs, per se. They come in thematic groups, which are grouped into seven 'books' and, like diary entries, chronicle whatever is on Henry's mind, which is often the untimely deaths other poets, such as Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. Like most "modern" poetry, THE DREAM SONGS is a tough slog through sentences that may or may not make sense. Except if you read them enough and carefully, they start making sense. It's a magical effect, but not gained without some serious struggle.The poems themselves are incomparable to anything I've read before. Berryman borrows aspects of African-American English and WCWesque directness. He composes dehydrated, idiosyncratically-punctuated sentences that straddle stanzas of six lines, often rhymed and never predictable in length. Individual lines sometimes break into startling caesuras or hover outside the regular three-of-six form. However inconsisent individually, the poems achieve a perverse (foolish?) consistency overall which, grasped, is that magical concussion I spoke of before. THE DREAM SONGS are nothing if not unique; I highly-recommend them as part of a balanced poetic diet.

...this book, a masterpiece of syntax and characterization. I first read Berryman's Dream Song 69 over 12 years ago. That poem drew me to this book, which has never left me since then. I have moved to other continents, and this is the one volume I would not think of leaving behind. Even when I have been in the hospital, I am sure to pack "The Dream Songs." I cannot explain why this strange and marvelous book affects me so deeply, but I could not possibly give it any higher praise. Yes, there are lulls. Certainly, there are poems which pale in comparison to others, but the work as a whole is a dazzling accomplishment. No one sounds quite like Berryman: he heaves a word like an axe and in the next stroke caresses the reader with infinite tenderness. Berryman is unique, his conversations unmistakable, and his genius lies in his wit and honesty. No other book-length poem compares to this. Throughout the elegies, the arias, the schizoid self-confidence and despair, Henry emerges a character not easily surpassed in poetry, or in literature at all.

"The Dream Songs" are Berryman's attempt through Henry (his seemingly ubiquitous, sometimes-accessible, sometimes-frightening & alone character) to resolve & look beyond, under, in between the chaotic litany that was his life. Although Henry & Berryman are of course not interchangeable ("Not the poet, not me," warns J.B.), Henry is usually Berryman in masquerade slipping in & out of situations, often at the fringes---except when lustful or pursued or mourning, which is often. Henry is a grotesque, & a sad one. Later in "The Dream Songs," Henry is even less relied upon. The poems are spoken as dank, mordant confessionals w/ Henry's voice & presence somewhat obscured by Berryman's own star. Much of the ornamentation (blackface gibes, vaudeville talk, extended conversations w/ a pal who addresses Henry as Mr Bones) falls away & a naked, confounded Berryman treads, claws for his own existence. The characters of the Songs are multifarious: from the sinister self-exploration of 67 to the frank lust of 361, to sad, simple Song 1, & c. Couple this plumbing of theme w/ a most unusual cadence & the aggressive, open triple-sextet form which Berryman pioneered, & one has a pleasing synthesis of the regimented & the unruly. These poems can not be housebroken nor mastered. Berryman is a most consistently flawless individualist. His discipline w/ form melded w/ sometimes roughshod language yields an incredibly pleasing, somewhat effervescent effect. These are poems of necessity & importance, for Berryman (whom they could not save) & Henry who "is a long wonder the world can bear & be."

"Man, I been thirsty" -- Berryman's explanation in *The Dream Songs* of why he drank so much for so long. And he was: thirstier, hungrier, lustier, more curious and more ambitious than anyone around him -- and ultimately, too, sadder, lonelier, more tragic. Yes, the later sections are too long and sometimes not inspired enough -- Berryman is, indeed, sometimes boring, though we must not say so. But when he's sharp, it's as a whip, and when he's hot, it's as an iron: nobody flashes and yearns like this "brain from hell." The first and last Dream Songs (1 and 385) are among the sweetest, saddest poems I know; # 14 is perhaps the most true; and # 4 is, quite possibly, the greatest poem about lust in the English language. Feast, and enjoy!

He was out of his own mind for years." The first lines of Dream Song #155 were written about another author but remind me of Berryman himself, whose struggle with depression and alcoholism was lifelong and whose innovative, compressed cadences continue to haunt me-- especially those of these 385 Dream Songs. You can recognize a D.S. straightaway if it revolves around a bumbling character named Henry (sort of a more bitter, more desperate, more adorable Homer Simpson) and/or his part-time interlocutor, Mr. Bones. The D.S.s are also characterized by this odd, oblique syntax (which at different times mimics Black dialect, pedantic jargon, and the flat speech of the mentally unstable). More or less all of them are written in a form I believe J.B. created: three six-line stanzas with an occasional orphan punch line and some irregular, slanted end-rhyme. With 385 x 18 = almost 7000 lines, this is the book they should have called "100 Years of Solitude"; I've only lived through the first half-century myself. But what keeps me reading is the fact that this drowning man's poems can clutch and so tightly *hold* the greased pig of life, in all its sloppy, despairing, goofy, grandiose, horrified, exultation. Between the bleakness of his free-floating, unremitting guilt ("But never did Henry, as he thought he did, / end anyone and hacks her body up"), and his pathetic and bawdy speculations ("What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?"), our lovable and unloved Henry, "pried / open for all the world to see, survived." Though Berryman himself ultimately lost his own decades-long fight against suicide, stalwart Henry lives on and, as the first Dream Song tells us,"What he has now to say is a longwonder the world can bear & be.Once in a sycamore I was gladall at the top, and I sang.Hard on the land wears the strong seaand empty grows every bed."