Can poetry kill?

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you need to listen to an album several times to realize how good it is? The same is true of poetry. I’ve been reading John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and although my first reaction was “What the heck…” I’ve found his poems curiously more-ish, like popcorn. 

Taken together, The Dream Songs is a sequence of numbered cantos, each comprising three six line stanzas, sometimes rhymed, sometimes not. The poems read a little like a diary, each riffing on a particular emotion or situation from the poet’s life. The narrator, however, is not Berryman but ‘Henry’, a character that stands as a kind of alter ego for the poet, providing a little ironic distance between the poet and his work. Often, the cantos remind one of free-form jazz. A representative canto (no 141) runs as follows,

            One was down on the Mass. One on the masses.

            Both grew Henry. What cause shall he cry

            Down the dead of Minnesota winter

            Without a singular follower nearby

            Among who seem to live entirely on passes

            Espouse for him or his printer?

 

            Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol

            Himself & for his spouse & brood, barely.

            Nude he danced in his snow

            Waking perspiring. He’d’ve run off to sea

            (but for his studies careful of the Fall)

            twenty-odd years ago.

 

            Duly he does his needful little then

            With a chest of ice, a head tipping with pain.

            That perhaps is his programme,

            Cause: Henry for Henry in his main:

            He’ll push it: down with anything Bostonian:

            Even god howled ‘I am’.

 

Berryman, an American, published The Dream Songs in two books, in 1964 and 1968. In 1972 he committed suicide, by jumping off a bridge. A number of his contemporaries also killed themselves. This raises a serious question: can poetry kill?

In The Information, Martin Amis depicts a novelist who writes pseudo-Joycean novels so incomprehensibly complicated, prospective publishers suffer nose-bleeds trying to read them. There’s an idea, here. Perhaps the American military could read Pound’s The Cantos to detainees s as an alternative to waterboarding. My advice, to return to the point, is that if you suffered any form of haemorrhage reading the poem by Berryman above, you’re trying too hard to understand it. Basically, you should just go for the gist of the thing, Berryman’s attitude to writing (at once hard labour, and a compulsion), and permit all details to sail over your head. Presumably a scholar of Berryman would know why he is down on Boston, but I don’t.

I remember, by the way, when I found out that David Foster Wallace had offed himself. I sat in a café, with the article in Time open in front of me, and thought “Now he’s never going to produce his masterpiece.” Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest was supposed to be just that, but I’ve often thought the title of the novel was a jab at its reviewers, few of whom would have had time to read the whole thing before getting their reviews to print. I have read the whole thing, and found it (dare I use this word?) self-indulgent. The short stories in Oblivion, however, are true works of genius. Perhaps one day I’ll re-read Infinite Jest and change my appraisal, but life is probably too short for that.