January 2023 – Fourteen Lines

Let Me Lament Alone

It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.
Earnest Hemingway

A Dialogue Between Old England and New (An Excerpt)

by Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672)

Old England.

Art ignorant indeed of these my woes,

Or must my forced tongue these griefs disclose,

And must my self dissect my tatter’d state,

Which Amazed Christendom stands wondering at?

And thou a child, a Limb, and dost not feel

My weak’ned fainting body now to reel?

This physic-purging-potion I have taken

Will bring Consumption or an Ague quaking,

Unless some Cordial thou fetch from high,

Which present help may ease my malady.

If I decease, dost think thou shalt survive?

Or by my wasting state dost think to thrive?

Then weigh our case, if ‘t be not justly sad.

Let me lament alone, while thou art glad.

The publication of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in 1953 in the Partisan Review is a demarcation in Berryman’s life and career. Berryman had been appointed a prestigious position for the spring of 1952 at the University of Cincinnati. Eileen, herself an accomplished writer and successful therapist, joined him and began working at the University hospital, while waiting to open her own practice. Eileen published a remarkable memoir in 1982, The Lives of Young Poets, a generous account of their lives together and their friendships with the myriad of poets of their generation.

Eileen suffered from back issues throughout their marriage, with a combination of degeneration of disks and benign tumors that required several surgeries. She suffered from chronic pain and for periods during the final seven years of their marriage was proscribed opioids for pain management, at times nearly bed-ridden because of the condition. Eileen’s prolonged illness created a justification in Berryman’s mind for his repeated affairs, trysts, one night stands and womanizing. Berryman’s adultery was not a mystery to either Eileen or his friends. More often than not, he was eventually found out by someone in his inner circle. Several times he had close calls where he feared he had of fathered a child with one of his lovers, and may have in fact done so, but none of his lovers ever held him accountable. In reading the multiple biographies its clear that Berryman had a high sex drive that did not align with Eileen’s. It’s also hinted at that she in part blamed herself for his extra-marital activities. Berryman was the kind of man who both loathed and worshiped women, a chaos fueled in part by his complicated relationship with his mother. His loathing extended to a part of himself for the force that sex held over his thoughts and actions. His eventual regrets never seemed to stop him from taking advantage of the sexual relationships that his looks and intelligence afforded him.

Eileen made several attempts to help her husband reform his ways. She demanded he get help for his drinking and to start psychotherapy to see if he could put to rest some of his demons from his past. He took to the psychotherapy, but not abstinence. This period of critical success with his writing did help out their finances, but it was also marked by a cycle of shortage of funds. By the time they moved to Cincinnati in spring of 1952, Berryman owed thousands of dollars to friends, landlords, his psychiatrist and banks. Berryman and his wife never could afford to buy a house during their 10 year marriage, despite both having successful careers. There were always medical bills and other expenses that got in their way of achieving a level of financial comfort that both desired. Berryman suffered for his art, intellectually, financially and at times socially. Berryman’s boat floated but rarely glided down stream with ease.

The two would spend one final summer together in 1953 in Europe. Berryman toured and lectured following the critical success of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Berryman’s timing of publication was fortunate. There was still an acceptance of long form poetry among critics and publishers. The 57 stanza 544 line poem likely would not have received as much literary acclaim if published just a few years later. Eileen had grown tired of living with his literary “mistress” that the writing of his long poem required as well as his repeated affairs in real life. They would separate when they returned that fall and divorce two years later in 1956.

Berryman had already begun his magnum opus, the long process of writing the first volume of Dream Songs. During this time he would teach one semester at the University of Iowa in 1954, only to be dismissed for intoxication, profanity and an arrest for disturbing the peace. It didn’t phase him. He would be recruited by the University of Minnesota to become a lecturer in the Humanities Department in 1955, where he would remain until his death in 1972.

Although reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is a bit of a slog today, its clear that Berryman had already honed his writing and poetic style that is carried forward into the creation of Dream Songs. His intellectual capacity to connect history and literature in his writing was well established. So too was his lifelong self destructive habits that were as immovable as his drive to be a successful poet. I have not read Eileen’s memoir, but have ordered a copy for February as a way to mentally cleanse myself as I venture further into Berryman’s demise. I’ll share anything I find particularly compelling later in the year. Berryman’s final lines in stanza 37 are chilling in the honesty and complexity of his struggle to find peace in his relationships with women and the destructive tendencies of his behavior on their lives.

Homage To Mistress Bradstreet (An Excerpt)

by John Berryman

[36]

–Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame
is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw
hostile glances toward God.
Crumpling plunge of pestle, bray:
sin cross & opposite, wherein I survive
nightmares of Eden. Reaches foul & live
he for me, this soul
to crunch, a minute tangle of eternal flame.

[37]

I fear Hell’s hammer-wind. But fear does wane.
Death’s blossoms grain my hair; I cannot live.
A black joy clashes
joy, in twilight. The Devil said
‘I will deal toward her softly, and her enchanting cries
will fool the horns of Adam.’ Father of lies,
a male great pestle smashes
small women swarming towards the mortar’s rim in vain.

I Will Love That Touch

In the gloom the gold, Gather’s the light about (against) it.
Ezra Pound, R. P. Blackmur

Dream Song 173

In Mem: R. P. Blackmur

by John Berryman

Somebody once pronounced upon one Path.
What rhythm shall we use for Richard’s death,
the dearer of the dear,
my older friend of three blackt out on me
I am heartbroken-open-heart surgery-see!
but I am not full of fear.

Richard is quiet who talked on so well:
I fill with fear: I agree: all this is hell
Where will he lie?
In a tantrum of horror & blocking where will he be?
With Helen, whom he softened-see! see! see!
But not nearby.

Which search for Richard will not soon be done.
I blow on the live coal. I would be one,
another one.
Surely the galaxy will scratch my itch
Augustinian, like the night-wind witch
and I will love that touch.

R. P. Blackmur would begin teaching English literature in 1940 at Princeton and would remain a faculty member of the department for the next 25 years. Blackmur was an eloquent voice for the new age in criticism. His own small body of published work well behind him, he parlayed his keen intellect, intimidating good looks, sharp tongue into a successful teaching career and eventually literary criticism. It was he that put in a good word for Berryman and helped him obtain a position in the fall of 1943. The period from 1943 to 1953 saw Berryman hold various positions at Princeton and saw him rise in stature as a poet among his peers.

During this period he befriended Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Caroline Gordon, Jean Stafford, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellows, R. P. Blackmur, in addition to his long standing relationships with Schwartz, Tate and others. He won numerous awards during this period for essays, short stories, a biography of Stephen Crane and in 1953, for his long poem Homage to Miss Bradstreet. The list of awards is note worthy, including a Rockefeller Foundation Research fellowship (1944), Kenyon-Doubleday first place award for writing, (1945), Gurantors Prize for Poetry (1949), Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1949), Levinson Prize for Poetry (1950) and a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing (1952).

These ten years mark both the rise of Berryman as an established poet and writer as well as the fall of Berryman as a man and a husband. It is a period marked by repeated affairs, excessive womanizing and multiple betrayals of Eileen. It is a wonder their marriage lasted ten years. That it did, is a testament to Eileen’s kindness and forgiveness. Her inability to have a child was a source of both relief and agony for both during their marriage. Berryman’s drinking and ill health as well as Eileen’s own health issues, peppered their ten year marriage with constant drama, but also mutual dependence.

It was during this period that he had his affair with Lise in 1947, the much younger wife of a graduate student. It was an all consuming, destructive affair. It was also mind games, as Berryman used Lise to not only fuel his ego sexually, but also to construct a muse for his writing of sonnets, that would chronicle the affair. He wrote them in secret, used them to seduce her and would only publish them as a volume called Berryman’s Sonnets twenty years later. The 130 plus sonnets were published in 1967, after publication of 77 Dream Songs in 1964.

I mention the affair and the book for two reasons. One, Berryman’s Sonnets was a critical and publishing flop. The context of their writing and the inappropriateness of the relationship gives everyone the willies and they aren’t very good. The very fact that it was published on the heals of winning the Pulitzer Prize is an hangover of the establishment of white men of letters of the time, who were allowed to get away with behavior that would be condemned today. Second, it is evidence that Berryman, who wrote an extensive biography on Shakespeare, was wrestling with the traditional sonnet form within the context of “romantic”, if you can call it that, literature. It is from this base of extensive sonnet writing that he would move on to the more stylized form that would become the basis of the Dream Songs.

Berryman is richly praised for his “original” creation of the Dream Song sonnet form. So it was a bit of a surprise when I stumbled across Blackmur’s poem below, published in 1933, years before Berryman wrote any of his Dream Songs. The eighteen line poem, consisting of three six line stanzas is identical in its construction and use of rhyme for which Berryman would become renowned. I have always felt that everything is derivative, nothing is completely original. Every writer, either consciously or unconsciously, is influenced by writing that came before their own. But it is striking to see an example of a close colleague, with whom he taught alongside for years, use the form that would become associated with Berryman 30 years later.

Steriles Ritournelles

by R. P. Blackmur

I saw a face rise up
made honest by the dark
shadow of its hat.
What animal out of the ark
but would continue chaste
had its opposite a face like that?

How have I seen this promise waste—
treasure of company,
complement in thought,
the cord of Unity
binding the public deed—
spent, bewildered, broken, gone to seed.

How have I seen a smile unsought
startle the mystery,
make plain how all this action ends.
From this his gestured generosity
I think him such an actor as, maybe,
might lay down a hated wife for friends.

I Am Not Able To Forget

All poets’ wives have rotten lives, their husbands look at them like knives.

Delmore Schwartz

Dream Song 181

The Translator——-II

by John Berryman

Because I am not able to forget,
Henry is dreaming of society,
one where the gifted & hard-working
young poet is cherished, kissed as a king
to come, a prized comer. Ah but see
them baleful ignorant

justicer & witnesses, corrupt by purity,
lacking all sense of others, lacking sense,
but liars too, pal.
I snuff the proper vomit of a State
where every tree is adjudged equal tall,
in faith without debate.

I beg to place in evidence, vicious mother:
That in the west of my land tower Douglas firs,
taller than others.
If then a judge grides to one of them ‘You are sick,
lazy: Siberia’ what gross metaphors
shall we invent for this judge?

(The sentence: forced labour for five years in a ‘distant locality.’)

Berryman should have had every reason to improve his disposition in the fall of 1940. Harvard offered much of the advantages he was left wanting after his experience at Wayne State; higher pay, more gifted and dedicated students, incredibly talented counterparts and an opportunity to connect with his younger brother. Unfortunately, Berryman always had a glass half empty mindset and quickly settled into his same bad habits of nervous exhaustion, self pity and grumbling aloofness and ill health. The English department at Harvard in 1940 had what would prove to be some heavy weights of American poetry including, Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Stegner, Harry Levin, Mark Schrorer and of course Berryman. Other than a strong friendship with Schwartz, Berryman carried around his every heavier life long chip on his shoulder and managed to alienate most of his colleagues. However, Berryman was honing his skills as a professor, and by and large his students loved him and with the positive feedback of his pupils came a muted respect of his colleagues.

Berryman was weary of the grind of teaching, the prep, the grading, the reading of students papers and providing feedback. He worked hard it. He felt it robbed him of his creative energy and kept him treading water as a writer. However, during his Harvard years, he was able to muster sufficient time and energy to produce some poems that were not only published but were gaining some attention by important critics and publishers.

Berryman and his younger brother, Robert Jefferson, had taken up residence together when he moved to Boston to teach at Harvard. It was a rattle trap apartment, with holes in the walls, but it was an opportunity for the two of them to reconnect. Unfortunately, Berryman interacted with his brother the same way he interacted with everyone else, which pretty much was what seemed like indifference as he went about in his own self induced haze of annoyance. Despite it not being the reunion that Robert Jefferson had hoped, it worked well enough. The two of them lived peaceably under one roof for better part of two years. His brother would marry his first wife in the fall of 1941 and the three of them lived together, despite modest tensions, for the next year.

Berryman’s own romantic pursuits were more complicated. He was still undertaking an on again/off again letter writing romance with Beatrice, his fiance, living in England, while dating Eileen Mulligan, a friend of Jean Bennett’s, his girl friend from his college days. Eileen was an orphan and a devout Catholic. I mention both because the first was likely an entry into emotional bonding between the two and the latter a cause of exasperation for Berryman, who by this time was a loud and opinionated atheist. Eileen was kind, emotional, grateful and insecure as to where her future lay when they met. Berryman created an emotional obstacle few women would have dared to cross, still professing his love of his fiance, even though it was shear fantasy and farce by this point, neither he nor Beatrice had the will to call it off.

Berryman’s mother took a liking to Eileen and was genuinely kind and generous towards her emotionally, encouraging the relationship. It wasn’t until July of 1941, England in the grips of war, that Beatrice wrote him a letter and renounced her acceptance of his marriage proposal. Within a week he proposed to Eileen and she accepted. It wasn’t until October that Berryman got around to giving her a ring, inscribed ‘J.B. to E.M – NOW AND THEN ONE – 24, October, 1942.’ And in doing so set the date of their marriage one year hence.

Berryman’s and Delmore’s academic and personal friendship flourished during this time, but it was almost like Berryman’s melancholy was contagious, because by winter of the next year, Schwartz had slid into a serious depression, which contributed to the break down of his marriage. Eileen was a gentle source of encouragement and support to both. She competently set out to plan a proper Catholic wedding and had to plan the entirety of the event because of Berryman’s feckless ways.

During the lead up to the wedding, Berryman was desperate to both publish and find a more lucrative position. He was in debt from back rent and owed friends money. He was angry and despondent that he could never seem to get ahead financially. He applied to more than fifty schools and did not land a position to his suiting. He had to take a job selling Encyclopedia Britannica that summer, tramping the streets of New York’s East Side just to make a few bucks. Feeling hopeless and despondent he declared to Eileen that he hated life, to which she replied, “if you feel that way we shouldn’t get married.” But get married they did. He landed a position at the Iona School in New Rochelle for the salary of 2,400 for that fall, but lasted only three weeks as he felt over worked and stressed at the expectations. Fate would intervene, as in October, the month he would be married, he received a letter from Richard Blackmur that he had been advocating on his behalf at Princeton and had convinced the head of the English department to offer Berryman a job. Blackmur had been introduced to Berryman’s work through Alan Tate and had become interested in the young writer. The position at Princeton would pay $225 a month with the opportunity for additional summer income at a stipend of $500, sufficient funds that Berryman could dig himself out of debt and start married life on firmer financial ground.

The Foggy, Foggy Blue

By Delmore Schwartz

When I was a young man, I loved to write poems

And I called a spade a spade

And the only only thing that made me sing

Was to lift the masks at the masquerade.

I took them off my own face,

I took them off others too

And the only only wrong in all my song

Was the view that I knew what was true.

Now I am older and tireder too

And the tasks with the masks are quite trying.

I’d gladly gladly stop if I only only knew

A better way to keep from lying,

And not get nervous and blue

When I said something quite untrue:

I looked all around and all over

To find something else to do:

I tried to be less romantic

I tried to be less starry-eyed too:

But I only got mixed up and frantic

Forgetting what was false and what was true.

But tonight I am going to the masked ball,

Because it has occurred to me

That the masks are more true than the faces:

—Perhaps this too is poetry?

I no longer yearn to be naïve and stern

And masked balls fascinate me:

Now that I know that most falsehoods are true

Perhaps I can join the charade?

This is, at any rate, my new and true view:

Let live and believe, I say.

The only only thing is to believe in everything:

It’s more fun and safer that way!

God Has Many Other Surprises

Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

To Bhain Campbell (1911 – 1940)

by John Berryman

I told a lie once in a verse. I said
I said, I said, I said, “The heart will mend
Body will break and mend, the foam replace
For even the unconsolable, his taken friend.”
This is a lie. I had not been there then.

Dream Song 156

by John Berryman

I give in. I must not leave the scene of this same death
as most of me strains to.
There all the problems to be sorted out,
the fate of the soul, what it was all about
during it’s being, and whether he was drunk
at 4 a.m. on the wrong floor too

fighting for air, tearing his sorry clothes
with his visions dying O and O I mourn
again this complex death
Almost my oldest friend should never have been born
to this terrible end, out which what grows
but an unshaven, dissheveled corpse?

The spirit & the joy, in memory
live of him on, the young will read his young verse
for as long as such things go:
why then do I despair, miserable Henry
who knew him all so long, for better & worse
and nearly would follow him below.

Berryman debarked from Cambridge in fall of 1938 in debt, largely in part to having acquired a considerable library of rare books during his stay. These had become collateral for credit for living expenses and travel, but as his finances dwindled he was ultimately forced to leave them behind. It would be years before he was able to pay off the debt and retrieve them. He headed by ship for New York City and moved in with his mother and step father. Although the apartment was generous, with ample space for him to work, he felt restless and pinned in by the emotional tension of being under his mother’s roof once again. Ultimately, his living there, did not sit well with either of them and was one more cause of his constant mental fatigue.

He immediately reconnected with Delmore Schwartz, Alan Tate, Mark Van Doren and other friends while in New York. He was frustrated by his both limited successes at publishing and limited employment options. He was able to line up a modest teaching position with the help of Mark Van Doren at Colombia for that fall, but it was not a sufficient stipend to pay off his debts and prepare to assist his fiance to join him from England. This lack of ability to become self sufficient to his wants and needs was taxing. He began a phase that would continue throughout his life, where a combination of poor eating habits, insomnia, excessive work habits and heavy drinking would result in cycles of ever worsening states of mind and physical exhaustion to the point of nervous breakdown. His demeanor would vacillate from self incrimination to indignation at everyone and everything around him. He was anti-social and at the same time desperately lonely. He was a living contradiction. He was focused on writing, trying to craft material worthy of publishing and yet indifferent to the real opportunities that existed. He was oblivious to the fact that his writing was not going to generate sufficient income to live or marry. He believed in his talent but also was mired in mediocrity. In general he was a mess. Beatrice (his fiance) came for a five month long visit and lived with him and his mother in New York. Though they expressed their love for each other, she could see that he was in no way capable of being a life long partner. She returned to England and though the charade of their future marriage endured for a while, Berryman’s physical and mental health went only downward as did their relationship.

During the summer, his friend Bhain Campbell wrote to him that he had obtained a far better paying position at Wayne State University in Detroit for that fall. He encouraged Berryman to reconsider his teaching position at Colombia and to come join him in Michigan. Berryman got the job, in part because of a glowing recommendation from Mark Van Doren, and promptly departed for Detroit. His rejection of Columbia’s offer however, did not sit well with the administration. As would be often in his life, Berryman burned his bridges behind him.

Things started out wonderfully at Wayne State. Bhain and Berryman’s friendship flourished for a bit. They balanced and supported each other in work habits, demeanor and interests. Bhain, his wife Florence and Berryman would all move in together into a 1 bedroom apartment to save money. Berryman contrived to hide his attraction to Florence behind feigned contempt or indifference. But this threesome living arrangement did not age well as the fall semester continued.

Berryman was a good if not great teacher, but he had a tendency to overwork himself throughout his lifetime. He would follow maniac periods of working excessively with periods where he was nearly catatonic and unable to do anything. Things progressed to the point where both his physical and mental state so alarmed the Campbell’s that Bhain forced Berryman to see a doctor for a consultation. He would be diagnosed with epilepsy, a way to explain his fainting spells and sometimes catatonic state. In reading his biography there are a myriad of references to him falling down a flight of stairs or other physical accidents, some of which would result in minor fractures. But whether he truly had epilepsy or whether this was a polite way of covering up excessive drinking is impossible to determine.

By the end of the first semester, Berryman’s relationship with Bhain and Florence had worsened to the point that they had no choice but to move out. Berryman was forced to take a forced leave of absence from his teaching position as physically he couldn’t continue. He was “proscribed” by his doctor reading before bed, a meal plan for better nutrition and mental therapy. Within a month he had improved to the point he could resume teaching. He mended his friendship with Bhain, in part because Bhain’s cancer was moving quickly. Despite multiple surgeries, Bhain’s health deteriorated rapidly. Bhain and Florence moved to a cottage for the summer and following the end of the spring semester, Berryman provided a week of care-giving to his friend so that Florence could take a much needed break for herself. He would leave shortly after for New York to figure out the next step in his life. Berryman would see Bhain one more time in November, when he returned to visit his friend briefly, but by December, Bhain would fall into a coma and die.

The importance of this year and his friendship with Bhain would have far reaching consequences in the success that Berryman would have later in his career. Bhain was a committed communist who encouraged Berryman to identify the purpose behind his writing. He pushed Berryman to wrestle with not just structure but meaning. Up until this point, Berryman’s writing was overly metrical and rhymed in ways that veneered the fact there was not much depth to his poetry, beyond a pleasant postcard imagery. Although Berryman had learned the academic rigor and dedication to be a writer, he was not yet a “poet” and that vast difference pained him. But it was this very awareness of that gap that Bhain helped instill, combined with the confidence he bestowed on his friend’s abilities, that kept Berryman moving forward into the next chapter of his life.

Dream Song 168

The Old Poor

by John Berryman

and God has many other surprises, like
when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother
and chilling other.
men from far tribes armed in the dark, the dike-
hole, the sudden gash of an old friend’s betrayal,
words out that leave one pale,

milk & honey in the old house, mouth gone bad,
the caress that felt for all the world like a blow,
screams of fear eyeless, wide-eyed loss,
hellish vaudeville turns, promises had
& promises forgotten here below,
the final wound of the Cross.

I have a story to tell you which is the worst
story to tell that ever once I heard.
What thickens my tongue?
and has me by the throat? I gasp accursed
even for the though of uttering that word.
I pass to the next Song:

The World Is Lunatic

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
John Berryman

Dream Song 147

by John Berryman

Henry’s mind grew blacker the more he thought.
He looked onto the world like the act of a aged whore.
Delmore, Delmore.
He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.
Nothing was true but what Marcus Aurelius taught,
‘All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.’

He lookt on the world like the leavings of a hag.
Almost his love died from him, any more.
His mother & William
were vivid in the same mail Delmore died.
The world is lunatic. This is the last ride.
Delmore, Delmore.

High in the summer branches the poet sang.
His throat ached, and he could sing no more.
All ears closed
across the heights were Delmore & Gertrude sprang
so long ago, in the goodness of which it was composed.
Delmore, Delmore!

Berryman beginnings at Cambridge were weighed down by loneliness and lack of direction. He did not at first enjoy the academics of Cambridge and he was struggling to make friends. He wrote to his mentor Van Doren for advice. Van Doren wrote back that many of the previous Cambridge scholars had taken a little time to settle in and to not be alarmed. Van Doren’s advice was spot on. Within several months Berryman would meet or hear them speak at Cambridge a list of poets that looking back is remarkable. Berryman would come across either by chance or through lectures at Cambridge the following: Auden, T. S. Eliott, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. In the case of Yeats after several months at Cambridge he wrote to him, included a poem and to his surprise Yeats wrote back. Berryman eventually worked up his courage to buy a night ferry passage to Dublin and went and visited Yeats spur of the moment. The two spent an afternoon together at Yeat’s home where Berryman was inspired in the presence of one of the great living poets of his time.

Berryman also maintained friendships from his Columbia days with Alan Tate and Bhain Campbell. Campbell would die at age 29 of cancer shortly after Berryman returned from Cambridge, a blow that would unbalance Berryman. He would help to edit and publish a small volume of Campbell’s completed work early in his career. Berryman would befriend Schwartz in New York when he returned from Cambridge. It is a remarkable circle of literary friendships that Berryman developed, many of whose own work far overshadowed his own, then and now. However, those connections would inspire him to work harder towards his goal of eventual success as a poet. Berryman had a vision and a literary passion that rubbed off on others who were equally passionate about poetry.

Berryman of course fell in love while he was in Cambridge. I am not going to go into detail because if I chronicled every time he fell in love that is all I would write about. Most of his sexual conquests were short lived and its complicated enough covering all eventual nuptials, but in reading multiple biographies I got the impression that Beatrice/Beryl was the first of his real true loves. Even though it did not translate into a long term relationship, it set the stage for a more nuanced and tortured experience of love for the rest of his life.

Auden wrote the following poem in 1936, the same year that Berryman met him in Cambridge. It was written as a song in a play and set to music, eventually performed in Cabaret. The stage was set for war in Europe and Berryman was experiencing all of the build up to the conflict between Germany and England while at Cambridge. It also was winding the tension strings of the poets he met living in Europe, heightening the sense of purpose of bringing a poetic resonance to counter the horrors that were to come.

Stop All The Clocks

By W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The Whole World Dreamed Of This

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark Van Doren

After Long Drought

by Mark Van Doren

After long drought, commotion in the sky;
After dead silence, thunder. Then it comes,
The rain. It slashes leaves, and doubly drums
On tin and shingle; beats and bends awry
The flower heads; puddles dust, and with a sigh
Like love sinks into grasses, where it hums
As bees did once, among chrysanthemums
And asters when the summer thought to die.

The whole world dreamed of this, and has it now.
Nor was the waking easy. The dull root
Is jealous of its death; the sleepy brow
Smiles in its slumber; and a heart can fear
The very flood it longed for, roaring near.
The spirit best remembers being mute.

Dream Song 123

by John Berryman

Dapples my floor the eastern sun, my house faces north,
I have nothing to say except that it dapples my floor
and it would dapple me
if I lay on that floor, as-well-forthwith
I have done, trying well to mount a thought
not carelessly

in times forgotten, except by the New York Times
which can’t forget. There is always the morgue.
There are men in the morgue.
These men have access. Sleepless, in position,
they dream the past forever
Colossal in the dawn comes the second light

we do all die, in the floor, in the morgue
and we must die forever, c’est la mort
a heady brilliance
the ultimate gloire
post-mach, probably in underwear
as we met each other once.

Stood the Ancestors, Relaxed & Hard

John Berryman with his classmates in the fall of his senior year at South Kent School in 1931. Berryman is seated in first row far left.

Offering Dragons quarter is no good. They regrow all their parts and come on again. They have to be killed.
John Berryman

Dream Song 78

by John Berryman

Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared,
inapprehensible his studies grew,
nourished he less & less
his subject body with good food & rest,
something bizarre about Henry, slowly sheared
off, unlike you and & you,

smaller & smaller, till in question stood
his eyeteeth and one block of memories
These were enough for him
implying commands from upstairs & from down,
Walt’s ‘orbic flex,’ triads of Hegel would
incorporate, if you please,

into the know-how of the American bard
embarrassed Henry heard himself-a-being,
and the younger Stephen Crane
of a powerful memory, of pain,
these stood the ancestors, relaxed & hard,
whilst Henry’s parts were fleeing.

Within weeks of Berryman’s biological father’s death his mother and John Angus Berryman would be married. The family of four moved to Jackson Heights, New York. John Jr. would take Angus’ last name Berryman for the rest of his life as the first line of defense of creating separation from himself and his father. John Angus had managed to time his exit from the Florida real estate business at the high and although he gave a significant portion to his first wife in exchange for a divorce in order to marry Martha, there was a solid stake to get the family started in their new life.

In the summer of 1929, John Berryman applied to the South Kent School, an Episcopalian foundation whose reputation was a focus on academics and moral rigor. It was a boarding school that kept costs low by allowing students to earn part of their tuition through work, like washing dishes, snow shoveling and other chores on the school grounds. Despite the spartan quarters and reduced costs, the tuition proved almost too much to bear as time went along and John Angus worked less and less.

Berryman was small for his age, eccentric, quiet and a world class clutz, the perfect target in an all boys school for bullying. Despite no interest nor talent in sports, Berryman felt obligated by both his mother and the school culture to engage in sports. He did so with the kind of forced and faked sincerity that I remember in my school days of boys with similar attributes that can only be explained by a kind of ruthless zeal that is intended to do only one thing, gain a modicum of respect among his peers for his tolerance of pain, pain dished out both during practice and during games. He played right guard on the football team in the fall of 1929, lacking the athleticism for the skilled positions requiring speed or coordination. He suffered enough injuries and humiliation to gain some respect and a respite when the injuries generated sufficient blood as to send him to the bench. He preferred tennis in the spring and worked hard at it, as a means to satisfy the politics of the sport culture at the school and expectations of his mother. But in the end, neither protected him from the being at the bottom of the pecking order among his classmates. His small stature and odd looks meant he endured the worst that young men can dish out.

By his third year, the constant bullying weighed on him to the point that he became estranged from his classmates, depressed and truly suicidal. There was a dramatic attempts at suicide, where in front of classmates, following a fight near the rail road tracks, he threw himself in front of an on-coming train, forcing the very tormentors who had been beating him moments earlier to drag him to safety. This reckless disregard for his life scared his classmates enough to realize Berryman was serious about his own self destruction. They understood the consequences if Berryman killed himself as a result of their bullying was beyond their intentions and it gave him a little breathing room but also a reputation for being seriously unhinged.

Berryman thrived academically to a point at South Kent. He excelled in some areas and rebelled in others. He never completely fit in, but he was pushed by his own intelligence and his mother’s expectations to set himself apart in preparation for the next step in his academics.

He spent 5 years at South Kent and was confident his application to Columbia College in spring of 1932 would be accepted. By this time the economic fallout of the depression had eaten away at the families financial resources. His step-father had been laid off at his stock exchange position and his mother was now supporting the family on 1/4 of what his father had been making just two years prior. Berryman earned a scholarship to Columbia to cover most of his tuition and lived at home his freshman year to save money. Berryman did not thrive his first year at Columbia and through laziness or his reoccurring challenges with mental illness, he briefly lost his scholarship and dropped out. However he identified a talent in his freshman year that would that would provide an entry into a new world of women and self respect. It turns out, despite his otherwise lack of physicality, he was an excellent dancer. From that point on he embraced the social opportunities that college life provided, attending several dances a week and with them the opportunity to carouse and flirt with girls and drink with his friends afterwards.

Berryman was forced to reapply for his scholarship in the summer between his first and second year at Colombia. It caused him to reassess his goals. He approached Mark Van Doren for support and improved his study habits. He got involved in journalism at the college, expanded his network with other literature students and writers and generally began to thrive academically. He would build over the next three years an impressive body of work, with success at publishing poems, critical analysis and literary criticism. His intelligence and drive stood out. However his constant late nights, smoking and tendency for self abuse, took its tool and by mid way through his senior year it resulted in exhaustion nearly to the point of collapse. Although he had become the star pupil in the literature department at Columbia and was under consideration for a fellowship to Cambridge, the effort took a toll on his mental and physical well being. But. in what would become a reoccurring theme for the rest of his life, he endured, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in the spring of 1936, primed to study abroad that fall on a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge that he had been awarded.

Dream Song 93

by John Berryman

General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,
Captain Fatigue, and at the base of all
pale Corporal Fatigue,
and curious microbes came, came viruses:
and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry
the rare Order of the Weak.

-How come dims one these wholesome elsers oh?
Old polymaths, old trackers, far from home,
say how thro’ auburn hair titbits of youth’s grey climb.
I have heard of rose-cheekt but the rose is here!
I bell: when pops her phiz in a good crow,
My beauty is off duty!-

Henry relives a lady, how down vain,
spruce in her succinct parts, spruce everywhere.
They fed like muscles and lunched
after, between, before. He tracks her, hunched
(propped on red table elbows) at her telephone,
white rear bare in the air.

Tasting All The Secret Bits of Life

John Berryman

I am the little man who smokes and smokes….
John Berryman

Dream Song 74

by John Berryman

Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry
did will not bear thought.
Feeling no pain,
Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter
explaining how bad it had been
in this world.

Old yellow, in a gown
might have made a difference, ‘these lower beauties’,
and chartreuse could have mattered

“Kyoto, Toledo,
Benares- the holy cities-
and Cambridge shimmering do not make up
for, well, the horror of unlove,
nor south from Paris driving in the Spring
to Siena and on . . . “

Pulling together Henry, somber Henry
woofed at things.
Spry disappointments of men
and vicing adorable children
miserable women, Henry mastered, Henry
tasting all the secret bits of life.

There is an inherent problem with Berryman’s Dream Songs that hangs like a bad odor over his work, the use of language and phrasing that we would now call “blackface”. Berryman was awarded some of Poetry’s top awards, something that is a bit troubling then and is even more troubling now. I say this as someone who enjoys reading The Dream Songs, but it creates some odd tension between my ears. Given Berryman is directly descended from a family of white supremacists, its more than a little awkward to just brush it aside as eccentric or claim it as a metaphor. The question is why did Berryman do it? Why did Berryman appropriate African American dialect, idioms and language and incorporate it into the structure and theme of his poems? And does it inform, tarnish or condemn his legacy?

Berryman was always evasive as to whether The Dream Songs were confessional poetry. I don’t think he was fooling anyone then or now. Its a form of confessional poetry and if it is then why appropriate language that clouds the purpose? He hid behind his difficult persona when confronted by critics of his day that it detracted from his broader meaning. Berryman rarely addressed this criticism head on, but alluded to the idea that his poetic vision was apolitical. I think that flies in the face of the overtly paranoid language of his protagonists throughout his poems and the constant references to politics, wars and social conflicts. In my opinion, every writer is political because eventually their writing will be interpreted and reinterpreted through the politics of the times.

I highly doubt any publisher would touch Berryman’s Dream Songs today. It is too big of a mess, too dark, and regardless of his intentions, would be viewed as tone deaf, if not racist. The reader must decide if every poem a poet writes has to align with their beliefs to find anything of value or if we learn from both the best and worst of the role models around us? Which informs our decisions more as adults, the best of our parents and siblings or their worst? I do not give Berryman a pass on this issue, I think this component of his poetry erodes some of the validity of his legacy. The language makes some of The Dream Songs unprintable on Fourteenlines because I find it so distracting. But as I have said before, a poem sometimes has an impact on me because of the connection that I feel with just one line. And many of Berryman’s Dream Songs grab my attention because of specific lines.

I hold all artists to a standard that at their core, to create art, they cannot have evil intent. I believe that Berryman felt he was sharing an inner dialogue that used language in ways to explore ideas that transcended race. But even with that generous assessment, Berryman puts the reader in a very problematic position, because nothing Berryman did was haphazard. Berryman demands a lot of his readers, demands they interpret his writing, try and unlock what his writing speaks to them. In today’s renewed focus on equity, and its challenge of doing better, being better, its impossible to avoid the discomfort his blackface tropes create in the pit of my stomach.

The only reasonable explanation that helps redeem the entirety of The Dream Songs is that Berryman intended it is an indictment of himself. If you view The Dream Songs as Berryman’s confession, based in part by his Catholic faith, it raises the question whether it was also a condemnation of the nation’s impoverished civil rights record at the time of their publication. Berryman was a tortured soul. Berryman put to paper the unvarnished truth of his failures as a man, a husband and father. But if Berryman was trying to wrestle with the legacy of his family as a metaphor for civil rights, I think he would have been more outspoken about that intent during his lifetime. Berryman chose to be mysterious. He chose to let the reader decide. And by doing so, its absolutely fair to decide for or against him.

Dream Song 76

Henry’s Confession

by John Berryman

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? -I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as a man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to a Mr Bones?
-If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern seas
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
-You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful seas,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
-I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.

Lashed and Languished, Anguished

Martha Little Berryman with her maternal grandfather, Colonel Robert Glenn Shaver of the Confederate Army.

“Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources”
John Berryman, Dream Song 14, quoting his Mother Martha.

Dream Song 58

by John Berryman

Industrious, affable, having brain on fire,
Henry perplexed himself; others gave up;
good girls gave in;
geography was hard on friendship, Sire;
marriages lashed and languished, anguished; dearth of group
and what else had been;

the splendour & the lose grew all the same,
Sire. His heart stiffened, and he failed to smile,catching (enfint) on.
The law: we must, owing to chiefly shame
lacing our pride, down what we did. A mile,
a mile to Avalon.

Stuffy & lazy, shaky, making roar
overseas presses, he quit wondering:
the mystery is full.
Sire, damp me down. Me feudal O, me yore
(male Muse) serf, if anyfing;
which rank I pull.

Martha Little was born on July 8, 1894. Born a “Yankee”, in Du Quoin, Illinois, because of poor timing by her mother in planning a trip from St. Louis to visit friends, Martha would spend the rest of her life overcompensating to insure there was no mistaking her southern upbringing. Martha was a single child of a moderately well to do couple, until her father abandoned her and her mother when she was five. Her mother never recovered, socially, emotionally or financially. She raised Martha as a single mother, overly cautious, dower, not allowing her a normal childhood. Martha was taught by a tutor, not allowed to attend primary grades or have friends her age. Mrs. Little did what she was required in raising her daughter, but did not imbue her role as mother with a loving nature, literally poisoned by the circumstances that her ex-husband had left her.

Both women of course focused on her side of the family in creating their identity. Martha and her mother basked in the attention of Mrs. Little’s father, Robert Glenn Shaver of the Confederate army. It was through his financial assistance that they were able to maintain a middle class lifestyle. But before you look too kindly upon the bearded gentleman, it should be noted, that Martha’s fondness for her grandfather does not take into account he was a notorious founder of the KKK in Arkansas and accused of murder. He was a racist, violent man, educated and wealthy enough to get away with it. He knew his way around the law as a lawyer and after losing the civil war, as a Sheriff in Arkansas.

Mrs. Little, Martha’s mother, always felt she was being judged for being a single mother, as much by her family as in her community. Martha absorbed that bitterness into a feeling she was being looked down upon for being a “bastard child”, her words, of a broken marriage. Martha grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. It wasn’t until she was 12 that they moved to McAlester, Oklahoma, where for the first time Martha was allowed to attend school, and in some ways literally allowed into the light.

Martha was intelligent, hard working and because of her prior tutoring, years ahead of other students her age. At fifteen she entered a Christian Junior College for Young Women in Columbia, Missouri. She graduated as valedictorian two years later in 1911. She began her teaching career at age 17, teaching grades 4 through 6, but lasted only until Thanksgiving. A bit overwhelmed and rudderless, she returned to the boarding house her Mother now owned and ran in Sasakwa, Oklahoma.

The relationship between Martha and her mother was not close. Martha wrote repeatedly in her letters to her son her mother did not love her, did not have confidence in her and was endlessly disappointed that her only child was not a son. This combination of being abandoned by her father and emotionally frozen out by her mother, made Martha all the more zealous when she became a mother, to focus emotionally almost exclusively on her relationships with her children. It is not surprising, that Martha did not have a good impression of men, nor that she struggled in her three marriages.

When John Allyn Smith began showing interest in Martha, she claims she was an innocent in all things related to sex and in relationships with men in general. Given the strained relationship with her mother she likely was looking for a way out from underneath her mother’s roof and possibly thought a young banker might be a way to start her life. Or if her accounts later in life are true, that he forced himself upon her and she felt she had no choice but to marry him. Either way, the odds of success were stacked against them. Combine that with Martha always wanting to be one step above her current financial and social situation, it would have been impossible for John Sr. to meet the standards of social climbing that Martha (and her mother) expected based on their somewhat snooty self image based on being the heirs of a noted Confederate Colonel. Martha always claimed her Grandfather was only kind and loving. But as it relates to shaping her personality and the subsequent impact on her poet son, it only added another layer of grandiose expectations and dysfunction that would both torment and inspire him for the entirety of his life.

Martha “Jill” Little Berryman was a powerful personality. She would become a successful business woman in New York, become the primary financial supporter of her two sons and husband as JB attended high school and then college, but most importantly, she would weave an unwavering belief in John that he was destined to be a great writer. From the age of 16 on, she kept every letter he wrote, even retyping many of them out to preserve them from his at times near illegible scrawl, so that they would be available for posterity one day, anticipating, foretelling, his eventual rise to recognition as a Pulitzer worthy poet.

I have a bit of insight into what happens to a family when a father abandons his wife and children. My Mother’s grandfather did exactly the same thing at about the exact same point in time. He walked away from his life, following a fire in the warehouse district of Minneapolis around 1905, leaving his wife and three small children to believe he perished in the flames of his workplace as a printer. He left them to fend for themselves, and to wonder what had become of him once it was determined he wasn’t dead but mysteriously vanished. His mother was so horrified by what he had done, she moved into their home and worked herself to an early grave by doing what ever she could to support her daughter in law and grandchildren. The impact of that abandonment reverberated emotionally into the next generation and the next, and if I am honest, to the next. It is still ringing at a decibel not able to be heard by anyone but his descendants today.

Dream Song 64

by John Berryman

Supreme my holdings, greater yet my need,
thoughtless I go out. Dawn. Have I my cig’s,
my flaskie O,
O crystal cock, -my kneel has gone to seed, –
any anybody’s blessing? (Blast the MIGs
for making fumble so

my tardy readying.) Yes, utter’ that.
Anybody’s blessing? -Mr Bones,
you makes too much
demand. I might be ‘fording you a hat:
it gonna rain. -I knew a one of groans
& greed & spite, of a crutch,

who thought he had, a vile night, been-well-blest.
He see someone run off. Why not Henry,
with his grasp of desire?
-Hear matters hard to manage at de best,
Mr Bones. Tween what we see, what be,
is blinds. Them blinds on fire.

I Am She. I Am He

The only people that are happy are those that don’t write long poems.
John Berryman

Dream Song 29

by John Berryman

sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

I do not believe in fate, but the concept of fate is popular among poets. Particularly poets who believe that to discover one’s poetic voice you must experience suffering so that you can express it and balance it with joy in a genuine way. I do believe in genetics. I believe that depression, mania and a tendency towards mental illness are in part hard wired as a gift in our DNA. Whether you want to interpret that as fate is up to you.

John Berryman was borne John Allyn Smith, Jr. Having Junior hung around your neck is difficult for many men. I can’t imagine what it would be like given how in one instant, your entire childhood and identity were erased or at least shrouded in a permanent fog from violence. Berryman would spend the rest of his life pursuing therapy, dream analysis, drugs, what we would call today sex addiction, work addiction, alcohol and sobriety, yet nothing balanced his serotonin levels to the point that he didn’t crave the next high or his next low. Berryman was an incredible intellect, who also worked as hard as any poet in the 20th century to become a poet. The published work of Berryman is a small percentage of his output over his lifetime. The Dream Songs may read like they are rickety in their construction, slap dash if you pick at them one at a time. But if you sit down and read the entirety of them, including the one’s published after his death, there is a stealthy, mindful consistency that does not come by chance, it comes from incredibly hard work as a writer.

Addiction is a disease, not a failing of morale character, nor an inclination towards laziness. Addiction in of itself, is hard work. It carries none of the idolatry or support that defines our societies focus on cancer. John Berryman carried his addictions successfully in forging a career as a professor and poet. Success and addiction are not mutually exclusive realities for many. It all depends on how one defines success.

Before I explore the primary relationship in Berryman’s life, the relationship with his mother, I think a bit more context around his father’s life is warranted. John Allyn Smith was borne into a middle class family in Stillwater, Minnesota. Born on March 21, 1887, the last of 10 children, born in 2 year intervals to Jefferson and Mary Smith. There is no record of John Smith’s childhood. The first written record of his life is in 1905 when he attended business courses at Globe College of Business in St. Paul, an institution that still survives today. John Smith would as a young man work in the lumber industry in Stillwater, Minnesota. Ready to make a stake for himself after working blue collar jobs, he decided to follow an older brother to Oklahoma during the oil boom. His much older brother had been financially successful and owned a small bank, but died shortly before Smith arrived. However, Smith was able to follow in his brother’s footsteps and became branch manager of a small bank in Sasakwa, Oklahoma. Sasakwa is about 100 miles southeast of Oklahoma city, a small town that has only gotten smaller in the past 100 years ,with 150 residents as of the last census. There was not much to do in Sasakwa. He took a room in a boarding house owned by Martha Little’s mother and with it an interest in Martha. However it came to pass, the two were married in July of 1912, John Allyn Smith was 25 and Martha was 18.

After a short honeymoon, the newlyweds settled in McAlester, a city about 60 miles due east, where John Smith continued his banking career. John Allyn Smith Junior was born in October of 1914. Sufficient time had elapsed from the wedding that Martha feared she might not have children.

Martha shaped the narrative of her first husband after his death, and little of it was positive. However, records suggest something else. Accounts of friends and colleagues suggest he was honest, trustworthy, amicable. He could play a good hand of bridge, like to fish and hunt, play baseball and was a regular Joe and contributing citizen in the towns he lived and worked. He handled difficult issues like foreclosures and bankruptcies with professionalism and care for the people involved while weighing the interests of the banks that he was employed. From 1912 until 1920, John Smith provided a stable middle class life for his family and had a solid if unremarkable banking career. Smith worked for several banks during this period and left all of them on good terms and parlayed his experience into better positions. The couple had a second son, Robert Jefferson Smith in September of 1919.

Berryman had few memories of this time in his life, but he did not have unhappy memories of this time in his life either. In 1920 the family, moved to Andarko, a much smaller city than McAlester, where Smith became Vice President and loan officer for the First State Bank. The move proved prosperous, finances and the Smith family moved into a bigger house and retained the services of a maid. Smith was in complete control of the bank and under his leadership the bank floated along for the next several years. However, John Smith Sr was restless, he was bored. He stepped down from his position at the bank in March of 1924 in search of a new beginning. Martha would later shape the accounting that he was fired, but a written endorsement by one of the trustees suggests he left on good terms, praising him for his 15 years of service in the banking industry. It looks more like John Sr simply wanted to try something new. Within days of resigning from the bank he was appointed to a position of assistant game and fish warden for the State of Oklahoma, a position that aligned with his personal interests of hunting and fishing. The speed with which it occurred suggests he had lined up the position before he left the bank. Smith would join the Oklahoma National Guard that summer. The change in positions provided temporary relief from his mid-life crisis and a diversion from his stale marriage, but the career change was not as financially lucrative. As savings began to dwindle, and Martha began to complain that her grasp on the brass ring that she desperately wanted to climb in society was at risk, fractures began to be more evident in their marriage. Smith began to rapidly try and figure out the next stage in his career. His mother-in-law had purchased some land in Florida from years before. The model T had suddenly made the beaches of Florida accessible and the Florida land boom was on. Smith schemed with Martha’s mother to throw their lot in together in business and see if he could turn his knowledge of banking into a successful real estate and insurance business in Florida, using her land as collateral to get started. John, his mother-in-law and Martha set out in the fall of 1925 for Florida to scout out the possibilities. John Jr (age 11) and his brother (age 6) were placed in a boarding school, where both were severely bullied and both were miserable. Word made its way to their mother and she promptly returned to Oklahoma, removed them from the school and drove them back to Florida to enroll them in public school.

Although the family unit was restored, the change of scenery did not improve the families circumstances. The Smith’s arrived too late in the Florida real estate boom and despite all of John Sr’s best attempts his businesses floundered. The three had purchased a restaurant in the Tampa area. All three worked in some fashion at the venture, while John Smith also tried his hand at real estate. Neither worked out and as it became apparent that the restaurant business was not for them, selling it just months later for less than half what they purchased it, the already strained relationship between he and his wife and his mother-in-law became combative emotionally and by her accounts after his death, physically as well. By early 1926, their financial resources declining fast, the family were forced to move into a boarding house, owned by John Angus Berryman. By late June 26 of that year John Allyn Smith would lay dead, on the back stairs of the boarding house, a single gun shot to the heart. In less than 6 months the entire course of John Berryman’s life would be forever altered and with it, any vestige of happiness in John Jr’s childhood was obliterated.

Diving Into The Wreck (An Excerpt)

by Adrienne Rich

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.