Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...This poem was chosen because it deals with Berryman's preoccupations with poetry and survival, although it lacks his characteristic humor...
...book contains 308 poems, divided into four sections, and these complete a work called "The Dream Songs." The first three sections are in 77 Dream Songs, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965. The 385 poems are all in one form: three stanzas of six lines each, often rhyming, and occasionally with extra lines. The form is Berryman's own, and he uses it well, making each poem a sort of three-part sonnet...
...flair. There are supposed to be two schools of American poetry: one that is effluent like Whitman and Ginsberg, and one that is precise and economical, like Frost or Lowell. Berryman is a member of both groups, being both extravagant and craftsman-like. One has the feeling that each poem was once much larger, and that he has somehow squeezed it all up. His words expand to take in more and more, and then collapse together, so that when one reads them, they explode in the mind, like the little pills that become animals when one drops them in water...
...other than that I cannot see the pattern. It may be something like a movie, with each poem representing a frame that catches one particular mood or incident, but the movie is without a plot. Henry's life has no clear climaxes and denouments. Each instant is equal. "The Dream Songs" starts and ends in the middle of Henry's life. It goes nowhere and proves nothing, but that Henry is Henry and is still alive. The pattern, if there is one, may not be evident even to Berryman, and certainly not to Henry. Berryman says "its ultimate structure...
...complete works. There were a song cycle, Vox damans in Deserto, a piano suite called Evocations and a short composition for muted brass called Angels. Most impressive was the granite-hewn intensity of his orchestral miniatures, Men and Mountains, Portals and Organum. His most ambitious work, the tone poem Sun Treader glinted with an ice-age grandeur, evoking craggy ranges and northern lights...