I’m back home. A wonderful time with friends, family and taking care of my aging mother at the farm, central to my childhood. The cottage was perfect and put my head back in its right place. Nothing like swimming in sparkling fresh water while listening to the loons call from up the lonely side of the lake.
I spent a few moments when there, rummaging through my boxes and boxes of books (my children) and notebooks filled with poetry, essays, aphorisms, scribbles — written in many ports of call during my life. The farm is only one place where I have boxes like these stuffed. My dream is one day to have everything together but alas, probably will never happen.
I brought back some notebooks, found a box with many large ones and hoped they contained one I’d filled with an essay, writings about “modernity”. Alas, now home and flipping through them, it isn’t there. Maybe next time.
I brought just a few books home, reached in to a few boxes. One of them had some of my John Berryman collection. A poet I can’t say enough about. The above narrated poem, a favorite.
Berryman was a melancholic, much like me, in his writing and life. I think too much is made of his suffering nature and wanton self-destruction. What matters is the work, the oeuvre he left behind.
The Ball Poem hits home because it well describes the first cut, the moment one begins to discover that nothing lasts, everything has its time and day. As a boy or girl, we all longed for nothing to change. Children love the world to remain as it is, comfortable, fun, predictable. But then physics and the faery dust do their magic and entropy ensues. Entropy, a subject that oozes through much of my own work and certainly too, Berryman’s.
The lesson of the poem is that of Ecclessiastes 3 — “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:” But like every good poem, there are other lessons you can find stuffed in there.
If you can, check out the Dream Songs of Berryman. So many don’t see the true genius in them, how they sing and paint and spit out in intimate fashion - the inner life of a man. And do they have style, so little of that in today’s modern MFA blathering crowd of faux-poet-academic, diarrhetic wannabees.
In preparation for writing this, I narrated and produced this video version of probably his most noted Dream Song, #`14. Enjoy. This Paris Review interview with Berryman is good for those reading this who want to explore this gift to the English language.
John Berryman (1914–1972) was an American poet and scholar, and a central figure in the confessional poetry movement. His life was marked by the early trauma of his father's suicide when Berryman was a child, an event that deeply influenced his work and personal struggles. He is best known for The Dream Songs, an intensely personal and technically innovative sequence of poems that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Throughout his career, he taught at several prestigious universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Minnesota, while battling alcoholism and depression. He died by suicide in his late fifties.
[In these notebooks, I found this poem, probably written about 30 years ago, in the 90s, summer in Corsica. Kind of on a similar theme as The Ball Poem]
A Life Lesson
If memory serves me right (and sometimes it does)
it was 1969 and I was 6 going on 7 and trying to
survive the rough neighborhood we lived in.
North Toronto. Albion and Kipling, Jamestown Crescent —
my parents scrapping together a living in govt housing
and me trying to be a good little boy.
It was Saturday afternoon and that only meant one thing
Movies - the matinee at the Albion Mall, always a western
always the shoot ‘em up highlight of the week.
My mother was generous, usually I only got a quarter
but today she gave me a brand spanking
crisp and new $1 bill. I felt like a millionaire.
Frankie Quimet (at the barber shop) and I skipped off
to the mall, gleefully shooting at each other and feigning injury.
Dreaming of stagecoaches and riding with Jesse James.
As we entered the mall parking lot I reached in my pocket.
The bill wasn’t there! It was nowhere. Must have dropped out.
We circled back down the street, eyes scouring the sidewalk.
Suddenly Frankie yelled out. It’s here! Found it!
I ran over and he was pointing down the sewer drain
and there it was, all bright green and just laying there.
We tried everything possible; sticks, strings, blowing
but there was no way to get that damn dollar bill.
I never had felt so empty. Life was over. Finished.
I told Frankie to go ahead to the movie, I’d be ok.
He said, “No way. Let’s go to the river and hang out.”
We sang CCR all the way there and were soon swordfighting
and killing imaginary bad guys in imaginable ways.
Money comes. Money goes.
But a good friend - doesn’t.
