First Time Death is Still an Amateur: Poetry of A Man Dispossessed of Talent

During the s, as mentioned, pretty much all I did was to write in as many meters quantitative and qualitative and forms as I could find, including free verse and projective verse. It taught me about breath and breathing, and informed, as a result, though indirectly, my understanding of long and short syllables. I would quote some of the poems I wrote, but I burned them all all two boxes of them in a bonfire fifteen years ago on July 3, Nonetheless, I could write meters very easily.

And I could write a line or two that were clear, but writing a whole poem, especially with the complications I added which I will note below , was more difficult than I could expect it to be. The poems I wrote had intricate meters and sounds, but the meaning of the poems were held together only in my head. Or the poems would be too abstract. Meters, I discovered, lend themselves to polysyllabic abstract words. At least that is true for me and even Swinburne. Swinburne in his later years fell into polysyllabic music, too. Still I kept at writing in meters and forms. I even tried to train myself to speak in sonnets, but I drift off topic.

Swinburne was not only an inspiration, but he also became a testing ground. If I discovered something in another poem, I would test it out in his poems, as I briefly illustrated above. I would also test it out in my own writings. Once I got syllabics down, I moved on to iambs and then trochees and then to forms with those meters. Then I returned to syllabics and tried to incorporate other musically devices into it, like assonance, alliteration, and consonance.

This process restarted again with syllabics and then trying to incorporate etymologies into syllabic poems. I learned how to do this from Hopkins and Wallace Stevens. The poem was rooted by way of etymologies.

W. S. Merwin | The Line Break

Swinburne was then also a motivator to go learn more. Still there is one last lesson he had for me. A ghost syllable is a syllable that has no representation in words or sounds. It is a syllable that is felt. It is a syllable that lingers like a ghost lingers after someone passes away. Here are the opening four lines again, with scansion:. You can see and hear how Swinburne varies the rising rhythms in lines 3 and 4. If you listen even closer, you will hear two extra beats at the end of each those four lines. So it can be represented like this:. They create an extra tension between what is heard and unheard.

They extend the line. I thought perhaps I might be hearing things. However, once in or , I gave a poetry reading to a very receptive audience. Not too far into my reading of this chorus by Swinburne, the audience started supplying those ghosts beats at the ends of the lines by stomping their feet and slapping their tables. They picked up on the ghost syllable, and validated my reading. This effect is magical. Later on, I purchased The Fugs: The Fugs First Album. The Fugs were an avant-garde rock band, and poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg are the most known members.

Their rendition of the song has also influenced my reading of the poem, which is now more dramatic, especially at the end. To this day, I still do not know how the ghost syllables work or how to do it. This among many things is what makes Swinburne a metrical genius from whom I learned so much about the music of poetry. As a result, Swinburne prepared me for listening and listening with intent. He taught me prosody and how to talk about it.

The reader needs clarity.

The Cave (Winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013.)

Writing poems with clarity would take me a whole other decade with W. Major Poems and Selected Prose. Jerome McCann and Charles L. Yale University Press, Originally they were long, but now are variable. These styles, among others, are what one would need to successfully write a carpe diem book of poems, and neo-romantic book of poems, at that. However, this poem would be better off if it appeared further on in the book, as it needs to built in to or up to. Or better still, for the author and reader to discover together. Has there ever been a lengthier flash forward? Again, there is the turning inward for answers, meanings, and, perhaps more importantly, the turning to pure experience — the experience of events before the interference of language.

In this wordless realm, we might even get closer to how a god lives and experiences time and the world, as we eventually will. It was seamless and flowed naturally. Kestenbaum used syntax and not words to approximate the experience of time for a god. He made an experience and made it feel real. Deerbrook Editions , For my poetry workshop class at The University of Southern Mississippi with Rebecca Morgan Frank, one of the assignments was to read the collected poems of a poet.

I chose John Berryman. The notes are either something resembling an initial draft to essays or just long notes for potential essays. Perhaps, you will expand on one of my observations or disagree with what I have said. In the end, I just want to keep the Berryman discussion progressing. I tried to write about what I observed in the poems, but, occasionally, I referenced other sources, which are noted.

My not referencing other sources was not done out of arrogance, but rather to have my own intimate experience with Berryman. Plus, I thought it closer to the intent of the assignment. All other sources are noted as they appear and in the Works Cited section. I am choosing John Berryman: One, I have both books on my shelves.

Two, I want a poet who writes in meter. I want to explore the possibility that iambic pentameter is really iambic tetrameter. Instead of five feet, there are four bars of stress laid on top of a back beat of iambic pentameter. And I wanted someone who writes from the personal, as I think he does often enough. These are the main reasons. Later in the section, Berryman gets involved in the repetition of words. This creates a cadence on top of the rhythm on top of the meter. There are three beats going on as a result. In addition, it creates the feeling of expectation and the feeling of loss.

The expectation is lost. But then a new word arises. The beat is hope to loss. A down beat of sorts. Again, not a great invention, but for him at this stage in his poetry it is. I may not think in punctuation either, but my poems think better with punctuation. Also notice in this poem how for the first time in this collection of poems, the first letter of each line is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence. First, from the bigger view, there are four sentences in these excerpted five stanzas. The first two stanzas each contain one, long complicated sentence.

This provides an effect on the third stanza, which has two sentences. But like a master there are some subtle complications going on. The comma plus the line break add up to a period, at least to the ear. It does not sound incorrect. At the end of the stanza, is a list with no commas as occurred in stanza 2. In this case, one action flows into the next. So simplicity has subtle complications in it that work simply surrounded by more complicated sentences that emphasize the simplicity in the middle stanza.

Also, there a lot of commas. More and more commas appear as I read Berryman. Between the commas is information that adds to the description as well. It becomes an accumulative force in language. He following sound like Jimi Hendrix follows sounds on his guitar. Berryman has been using the two periods with space in between as an ellipsis but I wonder if it is also a musical device like W.

But in this poem the space-in-place-of-a-period creates a few effects. First, it affects how we read it and breathe the poem. For instance in stanza two:. A better example is the penultimate stanza:. In the end, all three coexist simultaneously. Early into these sonnets, I notice Berryman doing three things: Actually, Berryman so far seems atonal. But then we get to Sonnet 7.

Here are the first three lines:. The third line is very effective. Three of the stressed syllable or morphemes suggest tension of some sort and are closely associated, at least to me: The line also has two caesuras, as does line one. Line one jerks forward. The line flows uninterrupted like a man falling from a building. The sentence then continues on the line with an altered rhythm that will correct itself. The syntactical arrangement of the first line has a parallels with the last line: But because of the way the line is carved out, the similar arrangements of line 1 and 14 make their rhymes more enhanced or louder to my ear.

Line 5 also has three caesuras, but it ends on a spondee. The more I read, the more I hear a longer rhythm from these caesuras or the stress that comes after. The pause is sometimes skipped over but it picks up again. It could be better understood as: And in fact, if we look at the larger part of the poem, listen to what happens:.

Notice where the em dashes lay. This poem is about their places in environments and toasting. The first stanza is about what immediately surrounds him and the second stanza is what surrounds them both on large scale, what surrounds them in the world. What an interesting strategy.

As I continue to read these poems aloud, I feel like Ezra Pound. I feel like I should have a baton to conduct the notes. The sonnets stop hard like a Yeats poem. They just keep on in the same, flat, straight, vibrating tone. The sonnets end hard with certainty. I expect more for a moment. My throats continues to vibrate. When it stops, so does the poem. Rather, the sonnets translated my readings. Something un-American is going in the tone to say the least. Music and syntax are each of two and equivalent, but sometimes the syntax has to be altered to suit the musical needs. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet [].

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The above quote is the Second Amendment to the Constitution. What is modifying what? What is the subject or subjects of the sentence? The predicate is certain: This type of crumpling also occurs in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.

Australian poet Lionel Fogarty

But what is the effect of this? Here, things are coming to order. The fourth sentence is clear and direct. The first two sentences are clear but passive. The third sentence is active, but a bit difficult to follow. I like the opening. I read it almost like this is the effects of Spring in or on New England. The next sentence is straightforward. The third, sentence, starts to read like the Second Amendment. I move along through the images, but confusingly. Are the Milky crestings like yellow-fringed, fallen angels or are they still in heaven?

And what follows is even more confusing: Actually, what are milky crestings? Berryman was doing these things in earlier poems. There are even some places where he sounds Hopkinesque:. Listen to all those gerunds accumulating momentum and cadence and that are draped with the multiple harmonies from the many consonant sounds. Even the tone is Hopkinsesque.

This could have been written by Hopkins. He likes hard consonants more than long vowels. He must have terrific headaches. Is he trying to recreate the confusion of the times? I assume he is building to something larger, something closer to the way he mind works or perceives or thinks or aches. I assume editor Charles Thornbury has chosen a selection that is representative enough of this book.

The book opens with a six-line poem epigraph. Lines 2 and 3 rhyme and lines 4 and 6 rhyme. Already, Berryman is inverting expected word orders: Beneath these, there is a deep and stubborn individuality. These poems are not like Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. In reading this, I feel the epigraph is misplaced.

And the language of the poems is fairly straightforward, especially for Berryman. He actually seems less involved in these poems than the previous books. This is about a three-page poem of 10 sections. It appeared in the anthology Of Poetry and Power: The tone of the first section is judgmental with hints of anger. There are some syntactical parallelisms: The S sounds push this forward or hold these two lines together. To what effect of even having those three words create?

I think it adds to the rhythm. Those three words extend the line.

Being stunned though is like fragmented or jarring or disconnected thoughts. There are more people who are stunned than weeping, and, in fact, the language maybe also be suggesting that those that are weeping are also stunned. It sounds like it just came out natural for Berryman.

There are Dream Songs in total, so I plan to read about 77 per week. In stanza two there are four sentences. Both of those sentences also rhyme: With the second non-restrictive clause, Berryman uses commas on either side. Here he must or else the reader would be confused as to how to read the sentence.

This non-restrictive clause is also interesting because it pries open the sentence like Henry is being pried open. The first sentence comes across in standard diction and grammar, but sentence two uses the incorrect verb tense: The rest of this poem continues to fall into a language of an uneducated, Southern speaker. The poem the, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character not the poet, not me named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, and sometimes in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses himself as Mr.

Bones and variants thereof. So the speaker does kind of have a split personality. Then I read Dream Song 8, and I can hear that he also works on a quantitative level of rhythm, too, and in an interesting way. What results is a tension in syllabic length on either side of the caesura. In line one, the first half is shorter in duration than the other side of the caesura. The length underscores the emotional tone of the content. The first side is ordinary weather talk and is mostly short. The second half of the line is more alive and interesting.

In line three, there are three long syllables corresponding with three stressed syllables. Line three also ends the sentence dramatically with long syllables, the halving, and the oddly colored hair. In line four, there are two caesuras. In the fist third, there are longer syllables than the other two thirds.

The point of this scansion is to point out the rolling motion Berryman creates which emphasizes the schizophrenic nature of the speaker. On the lean forwards are the short-syllable measures, and the on the sway backs are the long-syllable measures. We must not say so. The first half of the line is slow like ennui and has a low pitch. The second half of the line is much quicker, despite it having more long vowel sounds than the first half. The pitch of the second half of the line is higher. The line slows and falls, then speeds up and rises.

He lacks enthusiasm that a mere dog has. The first sentence is brief and definitive. Aloud I read, and when I read, a rhythm I hear infectious to me. Those last sentences are play at mimicry. However, I have been reading aloud. When I do, I fall into his voice. I start with my voice and it takes a few lines, but then I fall into his voice, which is deeper than mine and which vibrates a lot in the throat.

Ripples of vibrating consonants fill the throat and make it hum like some Hindu mantra repeated over and over without change in inflection. The lips get their vibrations, too. A good place to hear this is in Dream Song 66, among others. Dream Song 75 seems like reflection on the books, or book, he wrote. Henry wrote a book with the possibility of revealing himself and exposing himself. Nonetheless, it was receiving some attention so something good must be happening, else why would one respond to it.

Without a response by the critics, surely means the book sucks.

• ?
• !
• Aquellos años terribles (Spanish Edition)?

But I wonder if any of that matters. Exhilaration follows as he stands on the shoulders of his predecessors. Berryman wrote The Dream Songs with similar understanding, I assume, else why call them dreams? The poems are hard to follow. They are difficult to make conscious sense of, but a sense is felt, at least a sense of movement. The poems are definitely not haphazardly put together, and neither is a dream. Dreams have their own language and syntax and so do these poems.

The poems in The Dream Songs have a structure. There tends to be three six-lined stanzas. The first stanza at times describes a personal or a Henry experience. The second stanza often goes beyond the personal or Henry and occasionally it is done metaphorically or with a metaphor or analogy or comparison of sorts.

And the third stanza realizes the other world actually does exist even though the realization comes about in a disappointing manner. I plan to read the upcoming Dream Songs with that in mind as to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Should the reader assume the poems are incomplete? This latter installment of Dream Songs is much easier to follow.

The syntax is much more normalized. The invention of content is successful and to be applauded, but based on what preceded, despair is soon to follow. Dream Song is a terrific poem, but the syntax is more regular:. The second line is an example of content invention overcoming syntactical play, as is much of the poem. The language, syntax, and music are becoming very commonplace. For the most part, I hear him writing to fit a rhyme and to please his ear, or a meter he hears.

The rhythm and rhyme are generally predictable, unlike in his previous books. The syntax is very ordinary as is the language. This can be expected, I assume. How many poets can write in the same form for poems without losing some imagination? I think even Berryman picks up on this. For instance, in Dream Song , he writes: There is a little life upstairs. Back to Dream Song There are two things to notice in those quoted lines. One, the use of long vowels. Berryman, so far, has been a consonant man. His daring and crumpling come from his consonants, especially his use of plosive consonants which mirror his gashing comma use.

Here I think Berryman is relying on the long vowels to create an emotional atmosphere, whereas before he would have done that through rhythm and syntactic variation. The second thing to notice is the period at the end of the second quoted line, which is line 5 in the poem. However, an earlier Berryman would have used the line break to his advantage. He could have created two effects from the price of one line break. Berryman also realizes his lack of invention a few poems earlier in Dream Song , which opens: If only the music were more interesting.

It sounds too much a metronome, though not a metrical metronome, but a Berryman metronome, which was gone from wild to tame. This is true up to Dream Song But if you read the lines without the accent marks, those words are already stressed. Nonetheless, what I wanted to note and point out were the effects. Or maybe he just likes creating unnatural pauses.

Hopkins, if I remember correctly, put accents over words that would be accented anyway. But there is a pause. For these following Dream Songs, I will look at the use of plosive consonants. Plosive consonants are consonants explode from the mouth after a blockage of air by the tongue against the teeth dental or alveolar plosives , tongue against the soft part of the palate or against the back roof of the mouth velar plosives , or by the lips bilabial plosives. As you can hear and feel in your mouth, there are an abundance of plosives in this stanza. The more I listen to this poem the more complicated it becomes.

• Cartagena; Or, The Lost Brigade.
• First Time Death is Still an Amateur.
• Jacket 1, October - Philip Mead interviews Lionel Fogarty?
• Ip(NO)Tic (Italian Edition).
• .
• Winter at Monte Cassino.

There are a lot of interesting sounds. There are two spondees, which both come before a pause. This stanza relies on these longer vowels and shorter consonant sounds. The second stanza relies on shorter vowels and longer consonant sounds. By longer consonant sounds is meant plosive sounds. Plosives, to my ear, lengthen a syllable.

These two stanza work in opposite directions to the same end. The first stanza is filled with tone leading vowels, and the second is filled with alliterative plosives. Stanza one is passionate with its long vowels, the second stanza is more cerebral with consonant, and the last stanza is filled with wheezing old age.

What I am hearing, though, is a heavy use of consonants, in general, at least in relation to long vowels. However, the lines are not passive, but why not? I think that is the intention. The opening could easily be: The American fate is acting on Henry, but not syntactically. Henry still does the acting. The choices he makes or the desires he wants are not of his choice, but the syntax makes it seems as if he deliberately has the desires for health, wealth, and being at home.

To add to the complexity, the rhyming pattern is also playing a role in how the poem is shaped, which is being shaped against its will. The second arrangement of condition has been altered to meet the rhyme scheme. This switch must be deliberate and for cause. Or the opening condition could be rearranged: So the line could be rearranged: I think often is the case when Berryman writes to the rhyme in compromise to a tighter image or focus, which is fine, I suppose. Maybe the last lines of Dream Song have the answer: Maybe the issue is even bigger than that.

I say this because of what he says in two poems. I hear those lines as if Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh were reading them. Hope is undermined by the passive voice. These are the types of effects I was thinking about with American fate. Is he tired of trying to satisfy and audience and critics? Is his ego his downfall? Is Henry his ego? Henry, the Id, has a great deal to say: Whatever it is, these Dreams Songs in the last section are certainly taking a turn toward the desperate and suicidal.

I expect something new to happen with this book. The music is just him pushing forward in authority and syntax and not in sound and rhythm. This request of change is very selfish of me. One of the reasons I chose to read Berryman was to learn to write about the personal.

Posts Tagged ‘W. S. Merwin

The first line creates the parallel between writing and muse. The image also shows he is domineering. The muse is nymph. He is distanced from her. Second, we realize this is an incomplete sentence. He is distant from action or completion. He is alone with her memories. It suggests a few things. First, it suggests he is sending out poems to journals. It then suggests that his poems were receiving the rejection form letter. They were no good. It also underscores that he is nobody and is alone. These lines also show that as she grew taller, his poetry got better.

How do we know? Someone signed the letter. The rejection has become more intimate.

Follow the Author

Berryman must be gaining some confidence and not feeling so alone. He might be feeling like he is somebody. And the next two lines tell us this:. Eventually, his muse gets married and he almost does. In the end of this poem that so far has been 7 four-line stanzas, there is one isolated line: Berryman has exposed an inner sentimentality while acknowledging the harsh realities.

He lowered his pride to show his vulnerability. Muse and His Poetry. I think the poem invites that. Some readers may say that these matters of substance have no ultimate importance aesthetically and should not concern the critic, whose job is to examine, not the experience but how the experience is turned into poetry.

I do not agree. A critic has moral as well as aesthetic obligations, and certainly a journalist-reviewer, as distinct from a critic has a duty, to report the substance of books which he has seen before they are available to the public. In addition, I think many of us, especially us poets, have an Elspeth. And in learning to write personal poems, I need to negotiate my experiences into his poems to see how my possible personal poems might appear.

At the same time though, maybe he needs some more pride to gauge what is interesting in his life. Many of these poems have uninteresting content, such as concerns about grades he got in school. Uninteresting content can be fine, maybe, but only if it finds something out about the self or is written well. Many of these poems just seem written. I had this feeling in Dream Songs , too.

Provocative statements are made and they sound cool, but connecting them is the issue. Is Berryman trying to find god? The title to the opening poems of this collection are: So it seems that Berryman is turning to religion, which explains his turn in style, tone, and language. Cash on Delivery Pay for your order in cash at the moment the shipment is delivered to your doorstep.

Don't have an account? Update your profile Let us wish you a happy birthday! Make sure to buy your groceries and daily needs Buy Now. Let us wish you a happy birthday! Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Year Please fill in a complete birthday Enter a valid birthday.

Watches Casual Dress Sports. Eyewear Aviators Wayfarer Pilot Square. Underwear Boxers Briefs Undershirts Swimwear.