John Berryman

John Berryman's best-known work is his collection The Dream Songs, in which personas such as "Henry" and "Mr. Bones" address issues like his father's suicide. Here's the first:

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.

e. e. cummings

I think that people read Cummings for a good reasons: he experiments with punctuation and line breaks in original ways, for example. I think he's not read nearly enough for the way he plays with meter and rhythm. This poem also has a tone that sounds almost playfully wistful; it's as though he's consciously evoking feelings of sentimentality and nostalgia.

what if a much of a which of a wind

gives the truth to summer's lie,

bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun

and yanks immortal stars awry?

Blow king to beggar and queen to seem

(blow friend to fiend:blow space to time)

—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,

the single secret will still be man.

what if a keen of a lean wind flays

screaming hills with sleet and snow:

strangles valleys by ropes of thing

and stifles forests in white ago?

Blow hope to terror;blow seeing to blind

(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)

—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,

it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream

bites this universe in two,

peels forever out of it's grave

and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

Blow soon to never and never to twice

(blow life to isn't:blow death to was)

—all nothing's only our hugest home;

the most who die,the more we live

I particularly love the description of just what this wind (or, in the final stanza, this "dawn of a doom of a dream") would be doing: the "blow x to y" expressions. The latter's set up early on to be a diminished form of the first: a king becomes a beggar; a queen becomes hollow, merely appearances, just a "seem." It's quite easy to see how "death" is a more momentous thing than "was." The diminishings in between, I think, are where the real crux of the poem lies. In what respects is time "lesser" than space? Or, since that seems wonky, why does the persona feel that way?

Also, it seems (to me, at least) that the first two stanzas are explicitly about the seasons (particularly the final two lines of each stanza). Why isn't the third? Where does it depart, besides the invocation of something besides a "wind?"

Enjoy some Larkin!

I am terrible at finding the painting I was intending to post about tonight (currently it's at "green dress prominent, other drab people near walls, dancing, may include the name of a dance in the title"; help me, people!), so here is some Philip Larkin.

Fiction and the Reading Public

Give me a thrill, says the reader,

Give me a kick;

I don't care how you succeed, or

What subject you pick.

Choose something you know all about

That'll sound like real life:

Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,

How you sleep with your wife.

But that's not sufficient, unless

You make me feel good -

Whatever you're 'trying to express'

Let it be understood

That 'somehow' God plaits up the threads,

Makes 'all for the best',

That we may lie quiet in our beds

And not be 'depressed'.

For I call the tune in this racket:

I pay your screw,

Write reviews and the bull on the jacket -

So stop looking blue

And start serving up your sensations

Before it's too late;

Just please me for two generations -

You'll be 'truly great'.

I think this poem is lovely. One of the things that makes Larkin a great poet is his willingness always to use the word that has the right meaning, the one that sounds right (and when the two don't converge, the poem changes): the reader pays "your screw" and writes the "bull on the jacket."

The members of the "reading public" are satisfied by pleasantries, yes, and also by the second-order pleasure of seeing coherence and logical consistency: tales that wrap themselves up neatly without loose ends, compositions that neatly return to the key they started in. It's actually the latter that is most necessary for the "reading public" (or else they'd reject Shakespeare's tragedies and Friday the Thirteenth alike).

Larkin doesn't take liberties with his precisely chosen language to provide either of those. Sometimes the realities of the human experience are jagged, rough, disconnected; sometimes they stray off, never to return to center: Larkin's poetry captures that harshness when it's appropriate. Read some.

Theodore Roethke

Read this poem by Theodore Roethke.

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

So what's your impression? Are you convinced that this is an allegory of child abuse? Maybe you are. If so, you have at least one thing in common with most people in my English class ("Foundations I") freshman year of high school.

Here's my question for you: why, exactly, is Roethke's poem so often interpreted this way? Obviously, any talk of a frustrated mother, a drunk father, ears scraping buckles, heads being beaten, hard palms is going to trigger certain reflexes, and plenty of overzealous high schoolers will rush to tsk-tsk at the father, whose "waltz" isn't what we'd like it to be.

But is the surface interpretation, that father and son are engaging in a traditional, dancelike romp around the house, a little too rowdy for the mother, that life is hard for this working-class family and thus alcohol commonplace, at all invalid? I don't think so. But I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.