photo: elusive kerero, Brooks sanctuary, Nelson
John Berryman is considered by some to be the greatest of American poets. However, I only discovered him recently, on the occasion of the posthumous publication of « Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs », regarded as the continuation of « Dream Songs », which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1964. He was born in 1914 and died in 1978 by suicide. He was deeply affected by the death of his own father, who committed suicide when the boy was eleven. He suffered from depression and alcoholism for much of his life. He belongs to the Confessional poetry school (Sylvia Plath is also part of it). I greatly admire his syntax, his original use of punctuation, his honesty, his lack of embellishment, his sarcastic, often cynical and ironic side, which some critics have described as « lowdown buffonery ». He is sometimes difficult to follow (I have to read him in English as there is no systematic French translation of his work). Despite the very dark side of his life and sometimes of his writing, I find that his poetry, even when he is gloomy, full of life and the simplicity I love in writing. To give you an idea of his talent, an excerpt from one « Dream Song 14 »
Life,friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me, as a boy, (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess that you are bored means you have no inner resources’. I conclude now I have no inner resources because I am heavily bored.