Word: berrymans
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...hardly call a writer Esoteric whose work is taught in two courses in the University. But the poet John McArdin Berryman, who visited Cambridge last month to great for the Advocate, enjoys a certain underground popularity in the East that is greater than the sum of the responsible remarks people make about him--partly because there is still a communications gap between the literary East and the no-less moneyed, no-less-well educated, but far less established West (Berryman lives and teaches in Minneapolis), and partly because his witty, original, finely wrought and somehow insurrectionary poetry offers a marked...
Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared n the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings...
That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where...
...Dream Songs, a chunk of an unfinished long poem on which he has been working since 1955, was published two years ago by Farrar Strauss. The dream songs, in a word, are unexampled. All the difficult on a first reading; a few, for me, remain nearly opaque after many. Berryman's of-repeated description is helpful: "The poem is about a man named Henry. ('It is entirely about a man named Henry,' he told his Harvard audience last month.) He has a tendency to talk about himself in the third person. His last name is in doubt. It's given...
...John Berryman, author of Seventy Seven Dream Songs and the Homage to Mistress Bradstreet will read from his poetry at 8:30 p.m. Sunday at Emerson 105. Tickets are available at the Coop or the door...