[books] JOHN BERRYMAN - 77 Dream Songs

I didn't have the heart to bring Ulysses camping with me, so I stepped sideways to another opaque modern monument that I had wanted a little quiet time with. 77 Dream Songs is the first (and much shorter) of the two books that the Dream Songs were collected into. (Or "was collected into"? The blurbs on the back refer to the 385 poems collectively as one long poem, which seems precious to me but maybe is standard poet talk.)

So okay so, if you don't know anything about the Dream Songs, the deal is that they are all (all?) about a figure named Henry, who is frequently in conversation with a second, unnamed figure. This figure distinctively addresses Henry as "Mr. Bones", which makes it very hard not to call HIM, the unnamed friend, "Mr. Bones". Often, one of the two speaks in a minstrel-show parody of black dialect; probably a lot has been written about what that means, but I haven't read it. Henry has suffered "an irreversible loss", which I'm assuming, maybe unimaginatively, is similar to the suicide of Berryman's father.

Even forgetting Berryman's own eventual suicide, these are often (dear God!) kind of depressing. I settled on the strategy of taking them in as I would a batch of songs-- letting each one off the hook right away if it made no impression and rereading only the ones I wanted to. While good lines were plentiful even in the middle of allusive thickets, I found myself returning to the poems I mostly understood, like #67:

I don't operate often. When I do,
persons take note.
Nurses look amazed. They pale.
The patient is brought back to life, or so.
The reason I don't do this more (I quote)
is: I have a living to fail--

because of my wife & son--to keep from earning.
--Mr Bones, I sees that.
They for these operations thanks you, what?
not pays you. --Right.
You have seldom been so understanding.
Now there is further a difficulty with the light:

I am obliged to perform in complete darkness
operations of great delicacy
on my self.
--Mr Bones, you terrifies me.
No wonder they didn't pay you. Will you die?
--My
	friend, I succeeded. Later.