Customer Reviews

The Dream Songs

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Curse you John Berryman! You have ruined my ear for other poets. THE DREAM SONGS is one of those award-winning modern epics you wonder why you are reading until near the end, when you realize that you have slipped completely into the author's syntaxes, thoughts and, yes, dreams.

Don't let Berryman in his forward tell you different: this book is baldly autobiographical. Berryman dubbed himself Henry, gave a voice to his traumatized psyche (Mr. Bones) and set them talking, unraveling a lifetime of scholarship mixed with pain.

If you have read about Berryman, you will see him instantly in THE DREAM SONGS. Yet, unlike Robert Lowell, Berryman doesn't assume a familiarity with his biography that verges on solipsism. It is enough to know his father killed himself, Berryman killed himself, Berryman had affairs, was an alcoholic, was married several times and that he dearly loved literature, especially Shakespeare, some of whose Sonnets he parodies.

There is no narrative to the 385 Songs, per se. They come in thematic groups, which are grouped into seven 'books' and, like diary entries, chronicle whatever is on Henry's mind, which is often the untimely deaths other poets, such as Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. Like most "modern" poetry, THE DREAM SONGS is a tough slog through sentences that may or may not make sense. Except if you read them enough and carefully, they start making sense. It's a magical effect, but not gained without some serious struggle.

The poems themselves are incomparable to anything I've read before. Berryman borrows aspects of African-American English and WCWesque directness. He composes dehydrated, idiosyncratically-punctuated sentences that straddle stanzas of six lines, often rhymed and never predictable in length. Individual lines sometimes break into startling caesuras or hover outside the regular three-of-six form. However inconsisent individually, the poems achieve a perverse (foolish?) consistency overall which, grasped, is that magical concussion I spoke of before. THE DREAM SONGS are nothing if not unique; I highly-recommend them as part of a balanced poetic diet.

He was out of his own mind for years." The first lines of Dream Song #155 were written about another author but remind me of Berryman himself, whose struggle with depression and alcoholism was lifelong and whose innovative, compressed cadences continue to haunt me-- especially those of these 385 Dream Songs. You can recognize a D.S. straightaway if it revolves around a bumbling character named Henry (sort of a more bitter, more desperate, more adorable Homer Simpson) and/or his part-time interlocutor, Mr. Bones. The D.S.s are also characterized by this odd, oblique syntax (which at different times mimics Black dialect, pedantic jargon, and the flat speech of the mentally unstable). More or less all of them are written in a form I believe J.B. created: three six-line stanzas with an occasional orphan punch line and some irregular, slanted end-rhyme.

With 385 x 18 = almost 7000 lines, this is the book they should have called "100 Years of Solitude"; I've only lived through the first half-century myself. But what keeps me reading is the fact that this drowning man's poems can clutch and so tightly *hold* the greased pig of life, in all its sloppy, despairing, goofy, grandiose, horrified, exultation. Between the bleakness of his free-floating, unremitting guilt ("But never did Henry, as he thought he did, / end anyone and hacks her body up"), and his pathetic and bawdy speculations ("What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?"), our lovable and unloved Henry, "pried / open for all the world to see, survived." Though Berryman himself ultimately lost his own decades-long fight against suicide, stalwart Henry lives on and, as the first Dream Song tells us,

"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."

...this book, a masterpiece of syntax and characterization. I first read Berryman's Dream Song 69 over 12 years ago. That poem drew me to this book, which has never left me since then. I have moved to other continents, and this is the one volume I would not think of leaving behind. Even when I have been in the hospital, I am sure to pack "The Dream Songs." I cannot explain why this strange and marvelous book affects me so deeply, but I could not possibly give it any higher praise. Yes, there are lulls. Certainly, there are poems which pale in comparison to others, but the work as a whole is a dazzling accomplishment. No one sounds quite like Berryman: he heaves a word like an axe and in the next stroke caresses the reader with infinite tenderness. Berryman is unique, his conversations unmistakable, and his genius lies in his wit and honesty. No other book-length poem compares to this. Throughout the elegies, the arias, the schizoid self-confidence and despair, Henry emerges a character not easily surpassed in poetry, or in literature at all.

"Man, I been thirsty" -- Berryman's explanation in *The Dream Songs* of why he drank so much for so long. And he was: thirstier, hungrier, lustier, more curious and more ambitious than anyone around him -- and ultimately, too, sadder, lonelier, more tragic. Yes, the later sections are too long and sometimes not inspired enough -- Berryman is, indeed, sometimes boring, though we must not say so. But when he's sharp, it's as a whip, and when he's hot, it's as an iron: nobody flashes and yearns like this "brain from hell." The first and last Dream Songs (1 and 385) are among the sweetest, saddest poems I know; # 14 is perhaps the most true; and # 4 is, quite possibly, the greatest poem about lust in the English language. Feast, and enjoy!

"The Dream Songs" are Berryman's attempt through Henry (his seemingly ubiquitous, sometimes-accessible, sometimes-frightening & alone character) to resolve & look beyond, under, in between the chaotic litany that was his life. Although Henry & Berryman are of course not interchangeable ("Not the poet, not me," warns J.B.), Henry is usually Berryman in masquerade slipping in & out of situations, often at the fringes---except when lustful or pursued or mourning, which is often. Henry is a grotesque, & a sad one. Later in "The Dream Songs," Henry is even less relied upon. The poems are spoken as dank, mordant confessionals w/ Henry's voice & presence somewhat obscured by Berryman's own star. Much of the ornamentation (blackface gibes, vaudeville talk, extended conversations w/ a pal who addresses Henry as Mr Bones) falls away & a naked, confounded Berryman treads, claws for his own existence. The characters of the Songs are multifarious: from the sinister self-exploration of 67 to the frank lust of 361, to sad, simple Song 1, &c. Couple this plumbing of theme w/ a most unusual cadence & the aggressive, open triple-sextet form which Berryman pioneered, & one has a pleasing synthesis of the regimented & the unruly. These poems can not be housebroken nor mastered. Berryman is a most consistently flawless individualist. His discipline w/ form melded w/ sometimes roughshod language yields an incredibly pleasing, somewhat effervescent effect. These are poems of necessity & importance, for Berryman (whom they could not save) & Henry who "is a long wonder the world can bear & be."

Berryman's dream song sequence demonstrates how to create a series of related poems, without rigid constraints beyond trying to maintain a certain length. Some are self-standing like #28 "Snow Line" while others require some knowledge of the series characters Henry and Mr. Bones. Everything seems topical: relationships, politics, writers, and even the everyday. Berryman frequently inverts syntax for striking effects. Most of the dream songs make a strange statement and build off of it such as "Life, Friends, is boring. We must not say so." (#14) or "Bats have no bankers and they do not drink." (#63) I admire the scope of topics such as work, love, and writing that are still relevant today and the seemingly matter-of-fact way Berryman writes, which often produces hilarious results, such as the case of the two previously mentioned poems. In one of the later songs he even takes on himself "The only happy people in the world/ are those who do not have to write long poems." (#354) The Dream Songs are crucial for anyone interested in 20th and even Contemporary Literature.

the main point of criticism of this poem is its hyper-personal self-referential content. i have to say, however, that i have never felt so comforted, so saddened nor so delighted by any work of art or literature or film as i have by these songs no matter how little i know about what he really means or is talking about. i don't even want to know the specifics or the origins behind every line.
this is the most jarring and successful work of experimental anything i've ever encountered in my life. berryman had such a command of language; vernacular, colloqialisms, meter, form, internal rhyme, schizo pronoun shifts, multiplicity, this masterpiece has it all. 'the dream songs' take language and poetry to its limits and does so succinctly, with meter and rigid sonnet form berryman devised for the work.
the fact that the beats overshadow people like berryman and john barth and william carlos williams is simply a crime. i honestly feel that this work surpasses 'leaves of grass' and is probably the most amazing achievement in american poetry.
this is not to say that i think berryman is america's finest poet (more than likely our most erudite, but not our finest). on the contrary, i think he was a marginal writer who caught fire like no one ever has. this is what art is; one person's fractured assemblege of all the shattered pieces of everything in an epic confession where he is in fact three people and is killed and raises from the dead and cheats and lies and is mistreated and is wrong, all in heroic fashion. to want to know where it all came from is wrong and selfish and diminishes the work. to be consoled or bored or outraged is what must be done.
i re-read this beast about once a year, last time through 191 was probably my favorite. like all masterpieces, you appreciate something different every time.
buy this book, steal it, whatever you have to do.

This assemblage of six line stanzas, in precarious sonnet form, that is, Henry's de facto form, finds the text crammed and twisted, the poetic content bewilderingly mashed into many of these lines of text. What starkly emerges is the power of an intense amount of self-generated pain.

The despair and self-loathing contrasts sharply with the wicked wit and occasional flash of meanness; the confessionally inclined Henry emerges as a not-too-honest, lustful and quite sad storyteller. The DREAM SONGS are anything but flawless; and yet, the flaws are so unique that they augment the collage of experience that Berryman at times compellingly depicts. Some of the SONGS are flat out brilliant, while others are just oozing with sticky pathos and self-indulgent whining. These are the loosely linked themes that bear the load of Henry's loves, losses, work-in-progress, current events, and even some domestic details.

Berryman's denial notwithstanding, his Henry and Bones personas, standing unsteadily through the too-many alcoholic dawns ... well, he somehow manages to pull himself together enough to shakily get to class and lecture in order to earn some more whiskey money. And to his credit, his erudition lurks on through these self-styled sonnet songs - experimental collages, maudlin at times, fueled by the hard liquored nights.

Jung would say Berryman is "too high up in his mind", a personality riddled with self-importance. Under the currents of self-loathing and pity lurks an obvious hankering for fame - and the DREAM SONGS provide the catharsis and exit for his regrets, which seem many.

No, Henry is not one prone to humility - and his creator can be a real horse's ass, with many racist undercurrents weaving through the sniveling and morbid death obsessions. Yet, throughout all the textual dross, lies the glint of poetic nuggets waiting to be claimed by the metaphorically intrepid.

Don't start this book with the expectation that you will read it from first page to last as you would a novel or many other long poems because if you do you will only end up frustrated. Better to do as other reviewers here have recommended: sample a sonnet here, a page or two there; let the words and images wash over you; and don't worry if many of the pieces seem to lack meaning at first. The title of this work should be taken quite literally: Berryman's sonnets are indeed frangented pieces of a dream, each of which offers a glimpse of a tortured but brilliant intellect, and like all dreams they need to be understood on their own terms and not through the expectations that we bring to them.

I tried several times to get into Dream Songs and failed, put off each time by its refusal to surrender its meaning easily. Finally, on a whim, I picked it up and just started reading, flipping through the sonnets at random--and that's when I got it. It isn't meaning that Berryman is seeking to relate to the reader, or even wisdom--it's simply his -- Henry's? -- life, unadorned, with warts and all.

If you're reading these reviews then no doubt you're the kind of person who is open to the experience that this book has to offer. Five-plus stars.

Don't be put off. It daunts one at first. Flip through till you find the right one, then skip around. There are gems in here, and the more you keep looking, the more you find. Trite as that may be to say, there are rich rewards here