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Ø John Berryman 78 And that I do not know any of your sayings And that I cannot speak or read your language And that I do not sing your songs And that I do not teach our children to eat your food or know your poems or sing your songs But that we say you are filthing our food But that we know you not at all. Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time. You were lighter than the others in color, that was neither good nor bad. I was really looking for the first time. You seemed troubled and witty. Today I touched one of you for the first time. You were startled, you ran, you fled away Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. I reach, I touch, I begin to know you. 1978 JOHN BERRYMAN 1914–1973 John berryman’s poems are marked by their darkly funny, linguistically inventive , and often searingly emotional explorations of the problem of selfhood in the postmodern world. His magnum opus, The Dream Songs, is a sequence of 385 short poems composed in a uniquely Berrymanesque language that are loosely woven together into a dreamlike, self-exploratory narrative. The first volume of this epic sequence, 77 Dream Songs, burst on the poetic scene in 1964 with an effect of considerable surprise and shock. Early readings of The Dream Songs led critics to attach the label Confessional Poet to Berryman, a characterization to which he responded, in his own words, “with rage and contempt.” Recently, readers have come to appreciate more fully the richness, the complexity , and the sheer artfulness of poems that are perhaps better understood as skillfully constructed surrealistic fictions than as straightforward self-revelations. For 79 John Berryman Ø all that, both the pleasure and the pain one so often encounters in Berryman’s poetry seem very real indeed. Born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma, he moved as a child with his father and mother to Florida, where his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., lost his life savings in the Florida land boom of 1926. By June of that year, his father was distraught over his financial ruin and over the fact that his wife, Martha, the poet’s mother, had filed for divorce. On the night of June 25, John, Sr., was found dead with a bullet wound in his chest and a .32-caliber revolver resting beside him. At the coroner’s hearing, the poet’s father’s death was ruled a suicide, but neither of Berryman’s biographers was able to rule out the possibility that the poet’s mother had murdered his father. His mother promptly married her lover, the prosperous investor John Angus Berryman, and the poet, then eleven years old, took on his adoptive father’s surname and moved north to New York with his new family. Berryman’s mother proved deeply devoted to her son, supportive of his writing aspirations, yet consumingly possessive. As he grew up, Berryman himself began to suspect his mother of murder. The moral and emotional uncertainty and unsettling guilt that pervaded Berryman’s emotional ties to his dead father, his usurping stepfather, and his overpowering mother haunted his personal and artistic development. From 1932 to 1936, Berryman attended Columbia University, where he developed a close relationship with the elder poet and professor Mark Van Doren, who encouraged Berryman’s own poetic aspirations. He also developed friendships with such important elder poets and critics as R. P. Blackmur and Allen Tate. In his final year at Columbia, Berryman won the Kellett Fellowship, which enabled him to do postgraduate work at Cambridge University in England , where he studied for two years and met the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his idol, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. When Berryman returned to America, his relationship with his mother continued to be difficult. At the same time he befriended important poetic contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Delmore Schwartz (the first two included in this anthology). Berryman would spend long hours talking with Lowell and Schwartz about the art of poetry and their artistic aspirations. After struggling to find steady work as a writer or teacher—he even briefly sold encyclopedias—Berryman located temporary teaching posts at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Iowa before landing a long-term position, in 1954, at the University of Minnesota. Berryman’s earlier work was often laboriously conventional. His first breakthrough to...

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