#john berryman

[mournfulroses]

John Berryman, from The Heart is Strange: New Selected Poems; "Posthumous Dream Songs,"

[apocryphics]

john berryman, this is a poem written from the pov of a sheep

[bluemonkwrites]

lost in berryman’s sonnets (and who wouldn’t be, impenetrable and marvelous light, like you, whom i think about even & always when you’ve been gone from my unlife thus many years) wondering my nonlove now wandering

[derangedrhythms]

—I suppose it was lust / But it was holy and awful.

John Berryman, The Dispossessed: The Nervous Songs; from ‘Young Woman’s Song’

[sapphisae]

dream song 29

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.

[artemlegere]

POEMS INSPIRED BY PAINTINGS

Four modern poets have written in response to Pieter Brueghel’s 1565 painting, “Hunters in the Snow.” Of the four: John Berryman, William Carlos Williams, Walter de la Mare and John Langland, the piece by Berryman (1914-1972; Pulitzer Prize 1965) is the most descriptively interesting ...

Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Hunters in the Snow, 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

The three men coming down the winter hill In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds At heel, through the arrangement of the trees, Past the five figures at the burning straw, Returning cold and silent to their town,

Returning to the drifted snow, the rink Lively with children, to the older men, The long companions they can never reach, The blue light, men with ladders, by the church The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,

Are not aware that in the sandy time To come, the evil waste of history Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow Of that same hill: when all their company Will have been irrecoverably lost,

These men, this particular three in brown Witnessed by birds will keep the scene and say By their configuration with the trees, The small bridge, the red houses and the fire, What place, what time, what morning occasion

Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds At heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders, Thence to return as now we see them and Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

[lionofchaeronea]

Because a man's got to pass the time somehow, I'm reading John Berryman's Dream Songs -- all 385 of them. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

[poetrysmackdown]

ROUND 1

"I'm going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense" by Danez Smith

"Dream Song 29" by John Berryman

Voting ended onJul 17, 2023