Henry & Berryman, Berryman & Henry H.

Silence reigns at HG Poetics. Wuz happening?

Still working on long poem, Lanthanum. Rather than posting to the web, I'm sending it out in pieces to magazines.

Finally actually finished excellent Paul Mariani bio of John Berryman (Dream Song). (Must have started reading this about 20 yrs ago.) & have been delving into Berryman's work more closely.

He seems so different from me (his personality) in almost every way. Where he is tortured, I am calm. Terrible childhood, happy childhood. When he is fiery & mercurial, I'm subdued & detached. (He is "bored Henry" - I'm just... boring.) Different brands of negative capability, maybe. Where he struggles & works hard, I am complacent, lazy (everything comes easily, & always has). Well.... & he's famous, & I'm.... - might be a relation there.*

I note a few odd parallels & connections, however. Minneapolis. He lived at 33 Arthur Ave. in his last years, just a few blocks from where my parents have lived, early & late (I grew up on Arthur Street, myself). He jumped off the Washington Bridge on my grandfather's birthday, a few blocks from his house. Toward the end of his career (& life), he experienced charismatic religious experiences. This happened to me at the outset of my poetry "career." He taught at Brown briefly, a couple years before I arrived. & Edwin Honig assigned me the task of organizing the memorial reading there in his honor (1972).

& then there's the Huffy Henry factor...

*though some people might disagree with this self-assessment. My wife, for instance, would probably call me a nervous melancholic obsessive scribbler.

If you go to the preview of Lanthanum, & look at the 1st poem, I'm happy to see how the beginning (including the snow in line 1) predicted my daughter's cover photo. But I'm thinking especially of line 19. (The shade there, in the picture, is the shade of the bridge.) Forms a sort of "decussation" (cf. Sir Thos. Browne)...

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).

I guess I could put that state seal on the cover of The Grassblade Light. The middle volume of Forth of July (& actually the poem as a whole) is suffused with many images, stories & gestures of the poet-plowman persona turning to listen to the Native American "ghost-dancer".

& the formal, numerical center of Grassblade Light (as I've noted before) is the following line :

Love is our North Star high up above

from an old poem called "Grain Elevator" (self-published in Way Stations):

 III


  
 Your two clay whistle-birds
 Are on the windowsill,
 Ready for children's lips to share
 Their flute-sounds with the real birds
 At the feeder, on the other side of the glass;

  
 You've always been the better maker,
 Turning the years and years around
 With muscular feet and fingers,
 Clay speech rising from the wheel
 To last this generation, and to serve
 The next Thanksgiving – plates, bowls,
 Pitchers waiting to ornament
 Some simpler, lasting celebration,
 Open house for the upright heirs
 Of tender hills and anxious clay.

  
 And where's that modest watercolor,
 Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light,
 Of Granddad's granary downtown?  Standing
 Behind the rusted parallel of the tracks
 And a row of poplars, crowded out
 By warehouses and condominiums,
 Its curving columns burgeoning now
 Only with air and memory – and hidden
 Wafers of petrified wheat, noon
 Sunlight answering a lifetime's work
 Just over the treeline and the crooked streets.

  
 On a sultry day in late July
 In 1961 – when I was nine – we stopped
 In a little pasture beside the road,
 Under the shade of clustered oaks,
 With a herd of cows nearby,
 For a picnic and a rest on our way
 To visit Grandma's farm, and cousins
 In Iowa City.  And after the sandwiches
 And sleepy talk, while the grown-ups
 Snoozed among rocks and baskets,
 I wandered off a little way
 And found a squared-off family graveyard,
 The gray slate leaning in the uncut grass,
 Deep summer whispering from unfamiliar soil.

  
 Maybe it was your voice I heard,
 So long ago there in the aching depths;
 Your voice, challenging me to find
 That earthy crossroads – whistling word –
 And lay Grandfather's brooding ghost to rest.

I've decided to bring HG Poetics to a close today. 4/7 is a good number for me.

Thanks to one & all, for visiting, reading, writing.

Adios & bon voyage.

9

 
The quartzite ridge you are now standing on
is about 23 miles long, 800 feet wide, and rises
some 100 to 300 feet above the nearby
agricultural fields.
             The hard, red-to-pink Sioux
quartzite exposed here is one of the oldest
bedrock formations in Minnesota and was deposited
originally as red sand
   all the glyphs at the Jeffers
site were produced by pecking with a pointed rock
held in the fist and used as a punch
struck with a hammerstone
    carvings that resemble
bird tracks can be found
     turtles, geometric designs,
bison figures, stylized thunderbirds,
and birds in flight
             a long-legged animal glyph
which could represent a horse
   Dragonfly and linked circles.
The dragonfly is a common Dakota motif,
and the linked circles were often
used... to depict the passage of time.