He was the author of The Dream Songs and he did not make a habit, in his poetry, of being clear. This infernal monster of American letters to whom fam

“The Wound Talks to You” | The Point Magazine

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2021-07-02 01:00:05

He was the author of The Dream Songs and he did not make a habit, in his poetry, of being clear. This infernal monster of American letters to whom fame arrived late, winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Award, John Berryman was considered in his final decade to be one of the single most important American poets then writing. At almost half a century after his death, these days he is frequently confused with the exploits and iniquities of his invention, a figure named Henry, greatly resembling the poet himself, whom Berryman described in one interview as “a white American, sometimes in blackface, in early middle age.”

It must be said that this description has done little to clarify matters. At the height of the civil rights movement he told one interviewer, “I hate the South because they put down Negroes there: it’s as simple as that.” Taken on its own, the statement hardly resolves the conundrum of monstrous Henry, who can often be found in The Dream Songs speaking thus: “We hafta die. / That is our ’pointed task. Love & die. / —Yes; that makes sense. / But what makes sense between, then?”

For Berryman that between, that vast interregnum between love and death, was the problem. He attempted to solve it through an immense consumption of alcohol, a voracious sexual appetite and above all an incredible devotion to poetry, through all that time shaking his fist at the God—as he described Him in a letter to his second wife Ann Levine in 1955—whose “beneficent attempts to get me obliterated at the age of 10 or 11 failed.” In his last days, flailing to maintain a tenuous sobriety, he attempted a kind of razor-wire reverence, and finally, in the winter of 1972, in his fifty-eighth year of life, he leapt from a bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and died.

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