DREAM SONG 133
John Berryman
As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:
he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights
of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.
DREAM SONG 105
As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.
As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'
Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.
- John Berryman was born 98 years ago today. I was 21 when Pary Gittenger, an English teacher at Montgomery College, Rockville, loaned me his copy of Dream Songs. Thank you, Pary.
- Paths of resistance. The most important thing you'll read today.
- Neoliberalism kills, part one.
- Neoliberalism kills, part two.
- Beyond the welfare state:
- Welcome to the age of hell.
- Is the progressive blogosphere dead?
- Can it have come to this?
- Infinite jestice.
- Just another day.
- Hobsbawm.
- The fountain of truth.
- Berryman interview: As for the graduate students, some of the work they do is damned interesting. A woman somewhere in the South did an eighty-page thesis investigating the three little epigraphs to the 77 Dream Songs and their bearing on the first three books of the poem. I must say that her study was exhaustive—very little left to be found out on that subject! But it's good, careful work. I take a pleased interest in these things, though there is ineptness and naïveté, and they get all kinds of things wrong and impute to me amazing motives. Another woman thought I was influenced by Hebrew elegiac meter. Now my Hebrew is primitive, and I don't even know what Hebrew elegiac meter is—and, moreover, neither does she. It's a harmless industry. It gets people degrees. I don't feel against it, and I don't feel for it. I sympathize with the students. I can vouch a heh.
- Mr Jones.
- Copa America 2016 will be in US!
- Three hours of Hall & Oates? Beats Fitz and the Tantrums.
- You loved me.
- BARTOK!
- HEY! THERE'S A NEW JULIE DOIRON ALBUM!
- Adventures close to home.
DREAM SONG 4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken paprika, she glanced at me twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. - - Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion Latin, jeweled eyes
downcast... The slob besides here feasts... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: There is.
