A Body of Poetic Experience

25 May, 2025

As can occasionally happen, a puff piece in one of my alumni magazines recently gave me a bit of pause. In providing advice to wary crowds on how to approach poetry, poet and English professor Major Jackson asserts that “the experience of poetry is fundamentally physical,” meaning in part that this experience involves “be[ing] sensitive to the moments where the poet breathes,” which in turn “help us to modulate our own breathing.”¹ All right; nothing you won’t have heard in a literature course or anthology. But it did bring me back to the root of my current low-boil obsession with twentieth-century American poet John Berryman.

Prior to my stumbling across a BBC documentary that devoted a few minutes to Berryman, I’d read his The Dream Songs after a workshop leader made it clear that it was not OK to appreciate the work.² A good chunk of it, after all, involves a character speaking in blackface, a sort of minstrel character-as-chorus. I read the collection mostly as a way of trying to figure out 1) what would make someone do that and 2) what about Berryman’s work was so groundbreaking and engaging that it’s kept the poet alive in at least a noticeable portion of the poetry community (if there is such a thing that broad). I don’t remember much, though, about that initial exposure other than feeling a curious mix of song and confusion and discomfort and occasionally insightful phrases, and it didn’t make me want to seek out anything further about or by its author. Although on a second reading, some damn fine stuff (especially "Dream Song 14") stands out, when I first encountered it, The Dream Songs was for me one of those books you’re not sure you really want to keep, and so set aside on a shelf to come back and review the next time you cull your library.

But there I was, watching footage of Philip Larkin and Anne Sexton et al, and lo and behold, we were into the confessional poets, a group in which Berryman gets included, even though he objected to such categorization. And so we saw still photos of a messy bear who looked just about like what you’d imagine an American poet of his time to be, tie-and-jacketed and all—but then there was the jolt of witnessing him holding forth in a Dublin pub, trashed and transcendentally articulate and spouting poems from memory with undeniable charisma, while also jerking about in a near-caricatural portrayal of a soused and blathering barfly probably on the verge of a seizure. It was startling not just because these (and, I would later discover, other) antics weren’t edited out—producers would’ve been left with nothing had they insisted upon using only sober moments—but also and especially because of the way the poetry created by and coming out of this man was inseparable from his particularly embodied spectacle. As Jackson said, it was a “fundamentally physical” experience.

The other footage I found was only more painful, a tragic train wreck of addiction and the strange ego battles and abuses and pissing contests that are still part of the academic humanities, young self-important hosts and interviewers trying to appear calm and in control, hiding behind their cigarettes as they silently beg each other and whoever’s outside the camera’s view to please, please do something and save this disaster.³

And finally, in a coincidence that’s not unusual for me, I’d just read, in a collection of Helen Vendler’s essays, that critic’s thoughts on the 2014 publication of Berryman poems, The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems—a collection that included everything but The Dream Songs, and we all, as Vendler pointed out while lamenting the exclusion, know why.⁴ Given everything that had just fallen into my lap, I had to know more, and started digging into another mostly-comprehensive (also sans Dream Songs) collection.⁵ On the back cover was a clean-shaven young Berryman, immaculately suited and looking like an extra in The Great Gatsby; on the front was the bearded cigarette-cradling figure who’d now become familiar to me. That young poet, I discovered when I began reading the collection, had started out as a pretty conventional producer of poetry: good, but still predictable stuff in standard verse forms. This was not the work I’d read in The Dream Songs. How in the world did the poet move into such drastically different styles, and how did the proper man become such a different beast?

The poetry itself wasn’t going to tell me anything, and after reading John Haffenden’s biography of the poet, what I found was a not-uncommon but still terrible story of striving so strong it destroyed the striver, a process not inseparable from contemporary class-, gender-, educational- and other-based roles and expectations that meant among other things drinks and smokes ever in hand, skirt-chasing, self-involvement, and a general obliviousness of realities outside those held up by a mid-century mainstream.⁶ Although Berryman could see through the sham of many expectations of normalcy, he apparently couldn’t see, in spite of seemingly sincere efforts to do so, through himself.

All that to say that none of this is really helping me understand—and probably won’t ever be able to—how a grown man was so fixated on an affair with a family acquaintance that he produced 117 infatuated sonnets over (in this edition) sixty pages, poems you can tell probably have nothing to do with the real person he’s been trysting with, but more with a muse that’s seized him and demands more and more output that can only be churned out by wearing yourself out and down in all ways.⁷ I’m currently stuck in about the middle of that particular period of Berryman’s writing, and although I can see his style and approach changing—something’s been set skittishly loose, and it’s not due to the revelation of some pure love—it’s maddening. Maddening among other reasons because there’s no place, in spite of these sonnets being highly constructed, that I can feel Berryman taking a breath, pausing to get outside of himself and face up to the fact that he’s spiraling in ever-tighter circles around his own compulsions. Maddening, too, because of the knowledge that Berryman was finally unable to bear living in the body he couldn’t keep healthy or away from temptations, throwing said body off of a bridge in early 1972.

So where is any of this leading? I’ve often asserted, after all, that I have a hard time figuring out what poetry means, or how to determine whether it’s good or bad or respectable. What I’ve come to discover is different about Berryman’s poetry and my reception of it is that sense of the poet being all-in, mind and body, and unalterably so. In dealing with himself and whatever else that brought, that confrontation had for him to take the form of poetry. It was a call that wouldn’t leave him or let him alone, even while the body he often let fall into malnourishment or alcohol toxicity also wouldn’t let him forget he had to attend to something other than the words that wanted to absorb everything else that was not word. A fundamentally mental-physical experience—but whether it was at all “consoling” for Berryman, as Jackson says poetry can be for us, I couldn’t even begin to say.⁸

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