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Looking Back Editors Selections From 50 Years of Studies in Art Education Kerry Freedman

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Title: John Berryman

John Berryman

Centenary Essays

Monographs XVI, 314 Pages

Series: Modern Poesy, Volume 11

Summary

Drawing on the proceedings of two conferences organized to celebrate the centenary of John Berryman'southward birth in 2014, John Berryman: Centenary Essays provides new perspectives on a major U.s.a. American poet'south work by critics from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In addition to new readings of important aspects of Berryman's development – including his creative and scholarly encounters with Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and West. B. Yeats – the book gives fresh accounts of his engagements with contemporaries such equally Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. It as well includes essays that explore Berryman's poetic responses to Mozart and his influence on the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Making extensive employ of unpublished archival sources, personal reflections by friends and old students of the poet are accompanied by meditations on Berryman'due south importance for writers today past award-winning poets Paula Meehan and Henri Cole. Encompassing a wide range of scholarly perspectives and introducing several emerging voices in the field of Berryman studies, this volume affirms a major poet'southward significance and points to new directions for critical report and creative engagement with his piece of work.

Excerpt

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook tin exist cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Foreword: 'Berrymancy' (Paula Meehan)
  • Introduction (Philip Coleman and Peter Campion)
  • 1. Berryman as Instructor and Friend: Personal Reminiscences (Judith Koll Healey, Richard J. Kelly and Bob Lundegaard)
  • 2. Henry and His Problems (Michael Berryhill)
  • 3. John Berryman'due south 'Poundian Inheritance' and the Epic of 'Synchrisis' (Claudio Sansone)
  • four. Berryman's Mischief (Edward Clarke)
  • 5. 'A fresh, active relation': Milton'south Lycidas and the Poetry of John Berryman (Karl O'Hanlon)
  • vi. Multiple Impersonalities: T. S. Eliot and John Berryman (Deanna Wendel)
  • vii. Of Letters and Lyric Way: John Berryman'south Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Heather Treseler)
  • 8. 'Satanic pride': Berryman, Schwartz, and the Genesis of Love & Fame (J. T. Welsch)
  • 9. 'the angel and the fauna in human': John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Shakespeare (Alex Runchman)
  • ten. Berryman-Jarrell: Nervous Affinities (Michael Hinds)
  • 11. 'The sonnet might "lead to dishonesty"': John Berryman and Paul Muldoon as Sonneteers (Katherine Ebury)
  • 12. Not Allowed to be Bored: John Berryman's Dictionary of Boredom (Stephen Matterson)
  • xiii. The Pornography of Grief: John Berryman and the Language of Suffering (Adam Beardsworth)
  • fourteen. 'He begot us an enigma': Berryman's Beethoven (Eve Cobain)
  • fifteen. John Berryman'southward Acoustics (Peter Campion)
  • 16. Henry in High School: John Berryman in the Classroom is an 'Aroused Zen Touch' (Michael P. Carriger and William C. Patterson)
  • Afterword: My John Berryman; or, Imagination, Love, Intellect, and Hurting (Henri Cole)
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Serial index

← viii | ix →

Acknowledgements

This volume has its ground in two events, one in Dublin and some other in Minneapolis, organized in 2014 to celebrate the centenary of the nascency of John Berryman. The editors wish to give thanks everyone who read poems, gave papers, chaired sessions, and participated in discussions at these conferences, and particularly the following people and organisations for their infrequent back-up and support:

Dublin: Joseph Chiliad. Bradley; Fiona Byrne; Susan Cahill; Ron Callan; Jonathan Creasy; Matthew Mean solar day; Martin Doyle; Kit Fryatt; Gillian Groszewski; Alan Hayes; Eleanor Jones-McAuley; Zosia Kuczyńska; Emma Loughney; Philip McGowan; Peter Maber; Niamh NicGhabhann; Joanne O'Leary; Kathrine Phillipa; Diane Sadler; the students and staff of the English language Department of the Mater Dei Found (Dublin Metropolis University); the students and staff of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin; the Fulbright Commission of Republic of ireland; the Irish Association for American Studies; KC Peaches (Nassau Street); Poetry Republic of ireland; The Irish Times; Reads Impress and Design; RTÉ Radio One (The History Show); Newstalk FM.

Minneapolis: Barb Bezat; Michael Dennis Browne; Tom Clayton; John Coleman; Raiana Grieme; Edward Griffin; Patricia Hampl; Kathryn Hujda; Lois Kelly; Richard J. Kelly; Alan K. Lathrop; Cecily Marcus; Tim Nolan; Ellen Messer-Davidow; Katherine McGill; Wendy Pradt Lougee; Elizabeth O'Brien; Kathryn Rensch; Daniel Swift; Jennifer Torkelson; Shannon Wolkerstorfer; the students and staff of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota; the students and staff of the Creative Writing Plan at the University of Minnesota; the University of Minnesota Libraries; the staff of Andersen Library, University of Minnesota; Minnesota Public Radio; Minnesota Daily.

For over four decades, scholars working on John Berryman's work have had the support and encouragement of the poet's widow, Kate Donahue Berryman, without whom none of this work would take been possible. The editors thank her and the members of the Berryman family who attended ← nine | x → the conference at the Academy of Minnesota in Oct 2014: Martha Mayou, David Mayou and their son John; Sarah Berryman and her family; and Paul Berryman.

Permission to quote from John Berryman'due south published and unpublished works in this book has been received from Kate Donahue Berryman, executrix of the John Berryman Estate. Permission to reproduce a photographic image of Siah Armajani'south Tomb for John Berryman on the cover has been received from the artist, with the assistance of Alejandro Jassan of Alexander Gray Assembly LLC, New York City.

Finally, thanks are due to the editors of Peter Lang's Mod Poetry series for supporting this project, and Jasmin Allousch, Emma Clarke, Liam Morris and Emily Vincent for diverse kinds of assistance. Last but non least, many thanks to Christabel Scaife, who kept everything on grade from initial proposal to publication.

Philip Coleman, Trinity Higher Dublin
Peter Campion, Academy of Minnesota

← x | xi →

PAULA MEEHAN

Foreword: 'Berrymancy'

Editors' Annotation: The post-obit text was delivered at the opening of the John Berryman Centenary Symposium at the Irish Middle for Verse Studies, the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University, Dublin, ten Oct 2014.

When Philip Coleman approached me with news of this conference and an invitation to contribute here now at the opening of this conference, and also generously invited me to contribute to his anthology of responses in verse to Berryman, Berryman's Fate, a beautiful wee book, I had a long poem of my own, a poem of many parts in process, yet in process if stalled in progress, so I felt the fickle finger of fate pointed back to Berryman. Exercise not look the souvenir horse in the oral fissure whatsoever they say in Ilium. I exercise not accept the disquisitional distance of a trained academic. My formation has been as a craftswoman and dreamer. Poems move through my body and I experience them on the pulses. Usually I'd sooner dance a poem than talk over it.

When I first played with Berryman I was in my teens. We used the The Dream Songs as a book for scrying – every bit we did the I Ching, Finnegans Wake, The Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno. And Dinneen'due south Irish–English Dictionary was a bit like the Kerry Mafia – it fabricated you an offer yous couldn't empathize. Books of heft and substance and mysterious utterance, books that mirrored the myriad-faceted nature of our lives internal and external, our diamond faceted young minds.

A random indication from the forces of the cosmos equally to what was to exist done. What will I do today? What volition I dwelling house in on? Does he love me? Do I care? How volition I resolve the row, another one, with my mother? Should I go to London and have the consequence? Will I pass Latin? Should I go to Cornwall and have the consequences? Volition I drib out altogether and go to Afghanistan to see the mirror-embroidered robes of the natives flashing along the trails? ← xi | xii →

Part of the zeitgeist of the heavenly and grave dance of the constellations that gave Paris in 1968, the foreshadowing of the Aquarian age in the astrology of 1969, the star divination the astrologers tell us we are living through now. As kids on street corners in Finglas with our heads flying off our shoulders, Berryman fabricated as much sense as anything else in our universe where nosotros more often than not, to quote Alan Watts, a self-styled harbinger of that zeitgeist, 'were climbing up the signposts instead of post-obit the road'.

The Dream Songs were (was!) all ludic divination and fun. Then I scry – on Wednesday dark opening at random property in mind the question. Using The Dream Songs as if I were a Querant at present in the dark art of 'Berrymancy', the question being: What say y'all, John Berryman, almost the conference and festivities for your 100th altogether? This is what I become from the great Randomer Himself – Dream Vocal 275, entitled 'July xi':

And nonetheless I find myself able, at this deep point,
to comport out my duties: I lecture, I write.
I am even lecturing well,
I threw two chairs the janitors had piled
on the podium to the floor of the lecture hall:
the students were amazed

it was expert for them, action in the midst of thought,
an angry Zen bear on, something non written downwardly
except in the diaries
of the unknown devoted ones of the 115:
'Chief Henry is budgeted his limit.'
A little more whiskey please.

A little more whiskey please. Something's gotta give
either in edgy Henry or the environs:
the conflict cannot final,
I soothe myself with, though for 50 years
the war'due south fabricated headlines. Waiting for fall
and the cold fogs thereof

in delicious Ireland.i ← xii | xiii →

Ah! Hairs stand on cervix. Which Vocal speaks most clearly to me now. It has read me.

We call up we read the poem. The verse form reads us. Finnegans Wake, dream song of this urban center: information technology reads the listen of whoever holds information technology in their hands. It reads the borders and the traditions of the beholder. The limits of their patience and their perseverance too. The limits of their trust.

In my early twenties I encountered The Dream Songs again in the northwest of the United States. A grade chosen The American Eiron from Marking Twain to Woody Allen. Taught by Jim Busskohl, who in an before incarnation had been a stand-up comedian downwardly in San Francisco before he defected to academia. He riveted us with his renditions of passages from the prepare and other texts. In a classroom that could only be described as soul-less, non besides far from Hanford, the nuclear town, upwardly the road from Fairchild Airforce Base where the B52 bombers lined up on alert ensured it was a ground zero in the consequence of a nuclear attack by what the newspapers screamed were the Russkies, Jim Busskohl, almost in passing, embodied, doing the voices, Berryman's characters, compelling and repelling at in one case. Theatrical. A proficient show.

Synchronicitously I found The Dream Songs for a dollar in the Goodwill Store. I began to intuit The Dream Songs' own performance of themselves. I understood the 'I' of the poem as a transpersonal 'I', another element in the construction of the poem to be manipulated and narrated at volition or past inclination, and with that came the realization that the phrase 'confessional poet' is an oxymoron. All poems were becoming dream songs so, songs of the inner dreamer, or so information technology seemed at that moment, 1981, Ronald Reagan'southward America.

Was I able for it? Hardly. Often hungover myself and feeling shame or dehydration'due south devastation of my electrolytes, i style or some other in pain, Henry was out of favour. Henry was a assuming boy. Henry was getting upwards the noses.

Is someone else's monkey mind any more interesting than ane'south own? Practice The Dream Songs help cope with monkey mind, the ceaseless chatter I, for one, and no doubt like many others, seek to quieten? Is the shaping, the force of will on the chaos of the wounded self a salvific deed for the reader even though it didn't salvage Berryman's own poor demented hibernate? ← thirteen | xiv →

The rage for club, the intense patterning, the keeping religion with the pact of his fate, the difficult grafter, the master craftsman hammering the lines of his dreamtime, the songs.

The tertiary engagement with Berryman came afterward an approach concluding twelvemonth from Philip Coleman, who has to take responsibility for this wave of obsessional behaviour, a veritable cult.

I lugged The Dream Songs downwardly to the island of Ikaria in the eastern Aegean where in the village of Therma (clue – hot springs) I opened the book once again and allow it read me. An asclepeion, a place of healing since aboriginal times, considering of the radionic springs, Therma seemed similar the right place for it. In ancient times the person seeking to exist cured would get-go slumber in the precincts of the sanctuary of Asclepius until that person had a dream that could be used by the priests to effect a diagnosis and a form of treatment. I was taken with the thought of healing the wounded soul of The Dream Songs dream by dream, song by song.

I felt the humanity of Berryman equally a strength for compassion for all the wounded and fond souls that I had known. Pity for the cocky too every bit addict and reader. I thought of how all traditions, or many traditions, hold an idea of retrospective redemption, whether information technology is the freeing of the souls from purgatory through our intervention in the Catholic tradition I was reared in, or the liberation through hearing for the beings in the bardos, the in-between place between incarnations in the Buddhist tradition. The Tibetan Book of the Dead refers straight to 'liberation through hearing', equally the Catholics hold with an act of contrition: both practices recommended even when the person has died.

I imagine your distinguished deliberations over these few days as powerfully redemptive energies for the soul of John Berryman. I know this book will mark a change in the way Berryman is read. Information technology restores a dignity to the life of Berryman by refusing the indulgence of the stereotype, and it refuses to ascertain, to confine or reduce Berryman's life by the manner of his expiry.

I imagine every person in this room has been touched by suicide. I rarely run across anyone who has been spared that most traumatic bereavement past the time they achieve, say, the age where they can vote. I call up Berryman has much to offer u.s.a. in our apprehension of the forces that would bulldoze a being to such a desperate terminate. ← xiv | xv →

Information technology feels like pure geomancy that this conference and celebration should start in Dublin where, I am reliably informed, Ronnie Drew, vocalizer of songs broad and narrow, inspired a smooth-shaven John Berryman to start his famous beard when they met. (A little more whiskery delight, a fiddling more whiskery …) Said beard must surely accept its ain website by now.

You lot don't have to be bearded, an alcoholic, or write obsessively in patterns to connect with Berryman. Believe me, I don't think whatsoever of those attributes will help. ← xv | xvi →

1 John Berryman, The Dream Songs (1969; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 294.

← xvi | 1 →

PHILIP COLEMAN AND PETER CAMPION

Introduction

Kickoff published past Graywolf Press in John Berryman's adopted city of Minneapolis in 2014, Claudia Rankine'south Citizen: An American Lyric was widely praised as i of the nigh powerful works of poetry to appear in contempo years.ane The book contains an unexpected reference to Berryman:

Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn't win.ii

Strictly speaking, the '[s]omeone' mentioned here is not Berryman at all, only Gottfried Benn, who is referenced in Berryman'south Dream Song 53:

and Gottfried Benn
said: – Nosotros are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.3

Rankine includes The Dream Songs among the works referenced in Denizen – she does not cite Benn – but her re-writing of Berryman's line suggests a radical form of estimation.4 The shift from Berryman's commonage plural ('our own skins') to the atypical ('our skin') in Rankine's poem reflects a growing global demand for a new kind of racial understanding that problematizes a homogeneous idea of American selfhood: Black Lives Affair. ← 1 | ii → There is a need to run across the (black) 'person' beyond the (white) 'symbol'. Every bit Rankine puts information technology but before this direct reference to Berryman in Denizen,

Biographical notes

Philip Coleman (Volume editor) Peter Campion (Volume editor)

Philip Coleman is an Acquaintance Professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a Beau. His most recent publications include John Berryman's Public Vision: Relocating «The Scene of Disorder» and Berryman's Fate: A Centenary Commemoration in Verse (2014). He also co-edited «After thirty Falls»: New Essays on John Berryman (2007). With Calista McRae, he is currently co-editing a choice of John Berryman'southward literary correspondence. Peter Campion is the author of three collections of poems, Other People, The Lions and El Dorado, besides as numerous catalogue essays and art monographs on contemporary painters. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize (Prix de Rome) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he directs the MFA programme in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

wisemanparminquale.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1109862