Robin Hamilton wrote:
>Berryman was easily the best elegaicist of the 20thC -- amazing what {be
>warned!} watching your friends die around you can do as an inspiration for
>poetry.
>
>Mister Bones
>
>
I adore Berryman but find myself, in the wake of my former
brother-in-law's attempted suicide last week, coldblooded about his
gift. Berryman seemed to have a reserve tank. I'm not sure what was in
it. He seemed to run on a mixture of nerves and alcohol that let him do
this stuff. Indeed, a great elegaicist--though Auden's poem on Yeats is
not exactly bad news either. Yet it was Berryman's tone...he pings
grief rather than flogs it to death. In the poem on Schwartz, in the
poem on Roethke, and there is one of the late Dream Songs where he
catalogues the dead: Plath, Sexton, Jarrell, Roethke, "but Lowell he has
not touched." Not much "he" hadn't. Define annual thorazine dosing at
Payne Whitney as something other than "dead."
Schwartz himself has left me a bit cool forever. The poem Jon posted,
too. I see the skill, the technique, etc., etc., yawn, but I find him
offputting. De gustibus, etc. For me Delmore Schwartz's glory moment
was one of his earliest creations, a short story called "In Dreams Begin
Responsibilities." Not the whole book, just that story. It has haunted
me since the early 1970s when I first read it. It has wormed its way
into my own writing--every time I approach my family, there sits that
story as a challenge from the grave. "Outdo this." I can't, if I can try.
Oddly, Schwartz late in his life was one of Lou Reed's teachers at
Syracuse University. David Wojahn's monologue in Reed's mouth, Reed
riding the C train in the NY subway on the way back from Schwartz's
wake, is a sardonic and sad commentary on what had to be one of the
stranger student-teacher relationships.
ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
|