The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems

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  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  INTRODUCTION

  From The Dispossessed (1948)

  Winter Landscape

  The Disciple

  A Point of Age, Part I

  The Traveller

  The Ball Poem

  The Spinning Heart

  The Possessed

  Parting as Descent

  World-Telegram

  The Animal Trainer (2)

  Desire Is a World by Night

  The Moon and the Night and the Men

  A Poem for Bhain

  Canto Amor

  The Nervous Songs

  Young Woman’s Song

  The Song of the Demented Priest

  A Professor’s Song

  The Captain’s Song

  The Song of the Tortured Girl

  The Lightning

  The Long Home

  A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away

  New Year’s Eve

  The Dispossessed

  The Cage (1950)

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953)

  From His Thought Made Pockets & The Plane Buckt (1958)

  They Have

  The Poet’s Final Instructions

  from The Black Book (iii)

  A Sympathy, A Welcome

  American Lights, Seen From Off Abroad

  Mr. Pou & the Alphabet (1961)

  Formal Elegy (1964)

  From Love & Fame (1970)

  Cadenza on Garnette

  Freshman Blues

  Images of Elspeth

  Two Organs

  Olympus

  The Heroes

  Recovery

  Transit

  Message

  The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers

  Damned

  Despair

  The Hell Poem

  Eleven Addresses to the Lord

  1. “Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake”

  2. “Holy, as I suppose I dare to call you”

  3. “Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me”

  4. “If I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so”

  5. “Holy, & holy. The damned are said to say”

  6. “Under new management, Your Majesty”

  7. “After a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean”

  8. A Prayer for the Self

  9. “Surprise me on some ordinary day”

  10. “Fearful I peer upon the mountain path”

  11. “Germanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna”

  From Delusions, Etc. (1972)

  Opus Dei

  Lauds

  Matins

  Prime

  Interstitial Office

  Terce

  Sext

  Nones

  Vespers

  Compline

  In Memoriam (1914–1953)

  Tampa Stomp

  The Handshake, The Entrance

  Henry by Night

  Henry’s Understanding

  Damn You, Jim D., You Woke Me Up

  A Usual Prayer

  ‘How Do You Do, Dr Berryman, Sir?’

  King David Dances

  From Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972 (1977)

  “Canal smell. City that lies on the sea like a cork”

  “Gulls chains voices bells: honey we’re home”

  “Henry under construction was Henry indeed”

  “Long (my dear) ago, when rosaries”

  “With arms outflung the clock announced: Ten-twenty”

  “Good words & irreplaceable: serenade, schadenfreude”

  “I’m reading my book backward. It sounds odd”

  Phase Four

  Epilogue (1942)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  INDEX OF TITLES

  ALSO BY JOHN BERRYMAN

  COPYRIGHT

  Introduction

  John Berryman saw birthdays as imaginative opportunities. Lecturing at Princeton in March 1951, he pictured Shakespeare on his thirtieth birthday. “Suppose with me a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, congratulated, on a day in latter April long ago,” he began: “about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday.” A birthday is a chance to greet across time: to hail a predecessor. In a late poem Berryman addressed Emily Dickinson. It is December 10, 1970, and in “Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140” he raises his glass to her. “Well. Thursday afternoon, I’m in W——,” he writes: “drinking your ditties, and (dear) they are alive.” A birthday is a moment of invention. The climax of his long poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a violent, beautiful childbirth. “No. No. Yes! everything down / hardens I press with horrible joy down,” shouts Anne: “I did it with my body!” Close to the end of The Dream Songs, the cycle for which Berryman is best known, he writes: “Tomorrow is his birthday, makes you think.” John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914, and this edition of his poems is published to mark his centenary.

  Bringing a man to life: this was his imaginative project. On March 12, 1969, collecting a prize at the National Book Awards, Berryman explained that his aim in The Dream Songs was “the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined.” These poems describe a sad man called Henry. “So may be Henry was a human being,” he writes in Dream Song 13:

  Let’s investigate that.

  … We did; okay.

  He is a human American man.

  In producing him, they explore the conditions of his invention. “Let us suppose,” he begins, in Dream Song 15:

  one pal unwinding from his labours in

  one bar of Chicago,

  and this did actual happen. This was so.

  Just because we must imagine him does not mean that he is not real; nor is he exactly the same as Berryman. “The poem,” he asserts in a note, “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry,” but the distance between the two remains a little blurred.

  Berryman has not been canonized, quite; he has not continued to receive the respect, even awe, accorded to his great contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This may be because he appears a little less serious than they do. He is certainly funnier than they are, constantly mirthful about the process of critical celebration and literary canonization. “[L]iterature bores me, especially great literature,” complains Dream Song 14. “Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes / as bad as achilles,” it continues, and the joke is only half that Henry is no Achilles. It is also in the mismatch of classical literature and teenage ennui, balanced by the voice.

  Berryman has, however, found a curious afterlife in the early decades of the twenty-first century. He appears unexpectedly and often in songs by indie rock bands. In “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?” by the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the singer intones joylessly, “I came softly, slowly / Banging me metal drum / Like Berryman.” The Australian singer Nick Cave named one of his albums Henry’s Dream (1992), and in the song “We Call Upon the Author” from 2008 he returns to Berryman. “Berryman was best!” he yelps: “He wrote like wet papier-mâché, went the Heming-way.”

  These bands take Berryman as an emblem of the hard-living, misunderstood poet: it is a Romantic vision of the man and hinges
upon his alcoholism, suffering, and early death. Berryman committed suicide by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis in January 1972, and this is the moment these songs return to. “There was that night we thought that John Berryman could fly,” sing the band the Hold Steady in “Stuck Between Stations,” and the song invents the scene. “The devil and John Berryman / they took a walk together,” the song imagines, and it starts to speak for him: “He said I’ve surrounded myself with doctors / And deep thinkers. / But big heads and soft bodies / Make for lousy lovers.”

  “John Allyn Smith Sails” by the band Okkervil River borrows Berryman’s original name and mixes his story with a classic pop song from the 1960s, the fortuitously named “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys. This new version ends with Berryman’s voice:

  I’m full in my heart and my head

  And I want to go home

  With a book in each hand

  In the way I had planned

  Well, I feel so broke up, I want to go home.

  “With a book in each hand”: this is the final image of the first volume of Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, as a worn-down Henry determines to keep living:

  with in each hand

  one of his own mad books and all,

  ancient fires for eyes, his head full

  & his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.

  Outside the confines of his own published works, Berryman’s words and image have moved into popular American myth, blended with the Faustian backstory of the blues—a singer who trades with the devil—and the old notion of the artist as troubled outsider. Like the Dream Songs, these indie rock bands are supposing a man, someone halfway between the invented and the real.

  These are all, however, versions of Berryman’s life, and when we turn to the works they may at first look tied to a particular historical period. Berryman’s poems are filled with the bric-a-brac of 1950s and 1960s America: Ben Hur, Ike, the Viet Cong, and Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire. We hear of medicines and magazines of the time: LSD, Sparine, Haldol, and Serax; National Geographic and Time. His characters eat chicken paprika and drink frozen daiquiris, and speak lines from old vaudeville shows. Berryman loved blues music and alludes to it throughout: Bessie Smith, Pinetop Perkins, “Empty Bed Blues” (“empty grows every bed,” ends the first Dream Song). In “New Year’s Eve” from Berryman’s first full collection, The Dispossessed (1948), the speaker is at a party where “Somebody slapped / Somebody’s second wife somewhere,” and the line conjures an age perhaps best known to us now from TV shows. It is easy to read these poems as historical documents.

  This is, however, too narrow an understanding of Berryman’s sense of history: for his listing of all these temporary possessions and fashions is also in the service of an ambition outside time. He wishes to capture what it is to be a human, alive and present in the culture. Reading Berryman therefore involves a little time travel, and this is the magic trick of deeply sympathetic literature: to exist in one instant both in the past and present, in two places at once. Berryman’s Sonnets trace the story of a love affair, and one of them describes an evening when Berryman and his lover are far from each other. They have agreed to each separately at six o’clock go to a bar. “I lift—lift you five States away your glass,” he explains, and although she has never been to this bar—“Wide of this bar you never graced”—and although there are other, ugly sounds and interruptions—“wet strange cars pass” and “The spruce barkeep sports a toupee alas”—they are for this moment with each other. “Grey eyes light! and we have our drink together,” it ends. Written before an age of cell phones, this event seems oddly archaic, sweet and old-fashioned. It is also magical, in its faith in will over circumstance, and it is what we do—in miniature—when we read. Berryman invites us to drink with him. In reading his poems, we clink glasses across the decades.

  To toast Berryman on his one hundredth birthday, Farrar, Straus and Giroux are reissuing his three major collections of poetry: Berryman’s Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete cycle of 385 Dream Songs. Each has a new introduction by a poet: April Bernard, Henri Cole, and Michael Hofmann. But these three collections are not all of Berryman’s published poetry. This New Selected volume includes generous coverage of Berryman’s other poetry: from his first collection, The Dispossessed (1948); the complete “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1953), which is his masterpiece, in the old-fashioned sense of the word—the early work that proves an apprentice is now a master of his chosen form; and from the moving two late collections, Love & Fame (1970) and Delusions, Etc. (1972). This volume also includes poems from the smaller collections published in Berryman’s lifetime, and for these I gratefully follow the texts established by Charles Thornbury in his John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937–1971 (1989), with the exceptions explained below. Thornbury includes only verse selected and arranged for publication by Berryman personally: he leaves out, for example, the poems written very late in Berryman’s life and collected after his death by John Haffenden in Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967–1972 (1977). I have included poems from this volume among the selection in order to give as broad a sample as possible.

  In addition to Berryman’s poetry published as collections, this New Selected volume includes also two poems by Berryman that have not previously appeared among his published poetry. The first, called “The Cage,” appeared in Poetry magazine in January 1950; the second, “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet,” was published for the first time in Richard J. Kelley’s edition of Berryman’s letters to his mother, We Dream of Honour (1988). These show us two different sides of Berryman.

  Berryman went twice to visit Ezra Pound while he was being held at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a mental hospital just outside Washington, DC. The first time, Berryman went with Robert Lowell, who was then Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, on February 14, 1948. The second time, Berryman went alone: it was November 3, 1948, and Berryman records in his notes that he wished Pound a happy birthday, which had been three days before. Berryman was in 1948 at work on a selected edition of Pound’s poems for New Directions publishers, and he wrote “The Cage” in response to the story Pound told him at the hospital. Pound recounted how he was captured at the end of the war in Italy, and then kept by the Americans, and Berryman composes the poem directly from the phrases Pound uses. Here we see Berryman as a young poet, working by re-creating the words of an older poet: following his predecessors but also setting himself apart.

  Berryman’s son, Paul, was born in March 1957, and the following year his wife, Ann, left him, taking their son with her. Berryman remarried in the fall of 1961, and that Christmas he wrote a poem for his separated son. It was called “Mr. Pou & the Alphabet,” and it is an alphabet poem. It is tender and playful, but also a little somber. “A is for awful, which things are,” it begins, and “B is for bear them, well as we can.” This is an older Berryman, one worn down by the world but still enduring, and one who loved his children, who are an important presence in his poetry. The final phrase of the last of the Dream Songs is simply “my heavy daughter,” and among his papers at his death was the opening for a new long poem he hoped to write, on his three children and their futures.

  The New Selected volume includes also a poem called “The Minnesota 8 and the Letter-Writers,” which was published in the first edition of Love & Fame (1970) but removed by Berryman from the second (and subsequent) editions, and which does not appear in the Collected Poems. As Charles Thornbury explains, Love & Fame received negative reviews upon publication, and Berryman immediately asked his editor to delete six poems. Three of these described Berryman’s youthful love affairs, in sexually explicit detail; and three treat contemporary political controversies. The “Minnesota 8” were a group of anti–Vietnam War protesters who were arrested in July 1970 when they attempted to break into government offices with the intention of destroying draft records. Berryman’s poem was first published in the local newspapers later that month, and it shows—unusually
and revealingly—the poet as a direct commentator on his political moment.

  Any selection implies an interpretation. Berryman has long been seen—and often dismissed—as a merely “confessional” poet, and while the urge to narrate his own collapses was certainly a motor for him, he is also a poet of many more voices than this. Confession, of course, has a religious origin, and Berryman was a powerful devotional poet. This New Selected includes his two cycles of liturgical verse, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” and “Opus Dei,” in full. While he wrote these late in his career, the devotional impulse runs throughout his works. “What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be,” he writes in the first Dream Song, and the struggle to make sense of an apparently cruel world is one strand among these astonishingly rich works. I have hoped, in my selection, to show Berryman’s development as a poet, which was a movement through styles and forms. This introduction traces some key concerns and motifs throughout his career.

  * * *

  On January 10, 1938, Berryman wrote to his mother. “The problem of the name has arisen again,” he explained, for he had just submitted poems to two little magazines under two different names, John McAlpin Berryman and J.A.M. Berryman. He had already decided to divide his writing life by name—John Berryman for poetry and plays, and J.A.M. Berryman for the rest—so his confusion was understandable. Now he feared it might deter readers. He was twenty-three years old and planning for wide recognition.

  The problem of the name arises only in part from Berryman’s great ambition; it is also a wholly sensible response to the deep uncertainty of his family structure. His childhood was a chaos of shifting names and uncertain relations. His mother called him Billy before he was born and until he was three, but he was christened John Allyn Smith, after his father. When his father died in June 1926—a suicide, it seems, although there is haze around even this—his mother soon remarried, this time to the family’s landlord, a man called John Angus McAlpin Berryman. It is customary for a woman to change her last name upon marriage, but Berryman’s mother changed her first name too. Martha Smith became Jill Angel Berryman and she renamed her son after his new father. The name John Berryman, then, is doubly borrowed, thirdhand. At school his friends nicknamed him Burrman, for he slurred his own name. Later, his first wife recalled him saying, “What I cannot forgive myself for not having done, was to take the name John Smith,” and in penance he repeated his actual name like a mantra or a curse.