We Are the Stuff Dreams Are Made on Notes on John Berryman’s Broken Humor

I have to make jokes do duty for both jest and earnest.

—Josef K., from Kafka’s The Trial

Centenaries, under whatever auspices, seem to necessitate reappraisal—something about the triple-digit amount of elapsed-time occasions republishings and reassessments alike. October 25th, 2014, was the 100th birthday of John Berryman. To celebrate, fsg released a new volume of selected poems—edited by Daniel Swift, entitled The Heart is Strange—as well as reissued Berryman’s Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs. Such circumstances invite us to consider Berryman’s eclipsed place in the American canon. I hope to attest, in particular, to the extent of John Berryman’s own critical engagement with some of the questions posed by confessional poetry, to which, if I am right, no close parallel in said context, in which he is cordoned, can be found.

Confessional poetry takes subjectivity—the egocentric predicament and all the issues it is freighted with and the questions they entail—as its subject, theme, and frame of reference. The bugbear with which it wrestles is not to sound like the divorced Karenin, introducing himself with the empathy-prompting question: “Are you acquainted with my grief?” More than a cathartic airing of dirty laundry or tabloid exhibitionism, confessional poetry is an enactment of the self-exegetical impulse, more analogous to psychoanalysis than confession per se. So the ambition of soi-disant confessional poetry appears to be to write naked verse. As many of this “school” remind us, to do this one must be either devoid of vanity or filled to the gills with the ichor. In his most inspired moments, John Berryman attains to the former state in a sort of kenotic welter. More often, however, he lapses into the latter mode of being, indulging in a rebarbative nobility-in-suffering that frequently stifles much of the empathy previously occasioned. This happens especially in The Dream Songs, on which Berryman’s critical reputation rests. (All his work prior to the Songs—notably, his Sonnets and the long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet—tends to be read as charting a well-omened progression thereto. So be it.) Doubtless this is, in part, why his reputation has suffered. I submit, however, this vacillation can be chalked up to patent intent. At its best The Dream Songs is a jagged Kafkaesque comedy of errors, complete with all the contingent motions of a relentless, if bootless, and allusive mind—a splintered, somnambulistic epic of spiritual frustration, celebrating the vim in those mutilated but unmastered by life. At its worst The Dream Songs becomes a maudlin gallimaufry of mad-songs croaked off-key, a dipsomaniacal almsman throwing a pity party supported by a chorus of kazoos. And yet such high-handed and ham-fisted moments do contribute a certain drunk-uncle charm and are part and parcel of The Dream Songs’s project, as I have come to understand it.

The Dream Songs occasionally collapse into a synopsis of mewling trivialities, but could this help cultivate the dream-diary candor and loose-construing the Songs seem to strive for? Individual sections in the work—too frequently treated as individual poems—thrash and come a cropper (in particular, many sections in the middle of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest), and their flailing threatens to topple the whole edifice—and indeed, for some, the book does crumple into entropic ruin. Obviously these are not the anthology pieces, but couldn’t the foundering moments feasibly serve the long poem as a whole, give it greater verisimilitude by the simple virtue that not all our thoughts or dreams are interesting? That life’s fundamental absurdity is made most apparent when exhilaration exists in tandem with tedium? The inclusion of certain later Dream Songs, which are more nearly like pratfalls than poems, can only be accounted for under the heading slapstick editing. Berryman certainly possessed critical acumen and was a good judge of his work; why then include subpar poems? I, admittedly, tend to give this anomaly a generous reading, assuming (though perhaps construing...