It’s tempting to remember John Berryman not by his astounding contributions to the increasingly dead, gesticulating art of poetry, but through the lyrical epitaph of fellow Minneapolitan Craig Finn:
The devil and John Berryman, they took a little walk together
And they ended up on Washington talking to the river
He said, “I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers
But big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers”
There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly
But he didn’t, so he died
She said, “You’re pretty good with words, but words won’t save your life”
And they didn’t, so he died
Yeah, he was drunk and exhausted, he was critically acclaimed and respected
He loved the Golden Gophers, but he hated all the drawn-out winters
He likes the warm feeling, but he’s tired of all the dehydration
Most nights were kind of fuzzy, but that last night he had total retention
I’ve never really understood what “confessional poetry” is supposed to mean. The Dream Songs don’t feel like divulgences so much as magical thinking. Three stanzas of six lines across seven installments some 385 times over. These are mystical numbers, and a willful prophesizing burrows into each one, returning again and again to loss and epiphany, despondency and hope, fatigue, hesitation, floating, falling.
A song may be an incantation of feeling. The kind of rhythm set to discourse, which looses language’s hard edges. But a dream is more elusive. And even more tempting to see as translation—unspooling decryptions of emotion, anxieties, and chaotic recollection. It takes another leap to embrace dreams’ occult imbrications. The predictive, wish-fulfilling qualities as told in ancient, oracular interpretations.
I prefer to understand the dream in this manner, not quite like Joseph and Pharaoh, but as a possible future, one you can resolve to pursue, or take as a warning. I’ve seen my fantasies played out through life years beyond their envisioning. What else can one do with such ruminations as, “Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes / almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize / to rouse us toward our fate”? It’s not necessary to justify divination. The total retention of Berryman’s plummet is there, manifest.
-David Fishkind