Reading John Berryman's Collected Poems (FSG, 1989 - edited & wonderfully introduced by Chas. Thornbury, of Northfield MN). Clearly I haven't read Berryman carefully enough...

- the truth is I have held him & his whole generation at arm's length for a long time... Berryman's (& Lowell's, & etc.) personal confessional psychological edginess just too close to my own reality show... part of the reason I fled (in a literary way) to Russia, traditional home of sanity & good sense (ha ha)...

Berryman leapt from the bridge down the road a few blocks from my grandfather's house, on my grandfather's (John Ravlin's) birthday (1/7), the way his granddaughter, my cousin Juliet, leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge, on her father's (Jim Ravlin's) birthday (12/7), later that same year... (I was 19 at the time, in college, trying to be a poet - reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, Marlowe's Faust)...

2 of my younger brothers jumped off 2 other (adjacent) bridges of the Mississippi, within the same 10 blocks or so (imagine extreme cold, dark, snow... winter...) & somehow, thankfully, survived...

I'm more interested in my grandfather's generation (Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot)...

Everybody (including Berryman) ends up in Minneapolis somehow, for Recovery... (Berryman himself rescued from jail by Allen Tate, & brought to Minneapolis, ca. 1953)... & then they write their obligatory satires on the Twin Cities... Berryman, James Wright... it's a minor genre of the East Cost literati...

I remember back in the 60's, one of my closest high school friends telling me about the bardic long-beard eccentric skinny Berryman's visits to his girlfriend's family home, on Thanksgiving (in the suburb next door)... reciting poetry...

I remember seeing his book (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) on my friend's bedroom reading desk, & him telling me this... I was in high school - Berryman too complex for me then - but not for my friend... who (long after) became a prominent physician, in Los Angeles...

I know exactly where Berryman jumped. I've been there. It's usually very cold in January, in Minneapolis. But I'd like to visit his grave, in Resurrection Cemetery (Mendota Heights, St. Paul) - across the river, by the Indian mounds.

Mendota... sounds like Beethoven (probably Sioux).