The Heart Is Strange Read Free Page A

first occurrence. Here are two early premonitions of the later Berryman. Berryman wrote “The Moon and the Night and the Men” on May 28, 1940, in Detroit. He was waiting for news from his girlfriend, who was in England; he had spent the winter alone in a freezing five-room apartment. This is a strange war poem, taking place at a distance from the war that had broken out six months before but which America would not join for almost another two years. The scene is an army base, somewhere in America, and it begins:
    On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose
    Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon
    For the English or the American beholder;
    The French beholder. It was a cold night,
    People put on their wraps, the troops were cold
    No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt
    Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight
    Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.
    A new confidence is shown in the handling of syntax, which here is a little twisted in order to open up and double the meanings. The delayed “no doubt” turns an observation of local conditions into a guess about what might be happening far out of sight. And slang here is important: “killing” takes both the demotic sense of making someone laugh and also something wholly more violent.
    The second innovation is more striking, more severe. There are nine “Nervous Songs” in The Dispossessed , and they follow the same form of three six-line stanzas. Each takes a different voice: jagged, energetic, jumpy. “A Professor’s Song” is sung by a dusty, aggressive academic; “The Song of the Demented Priest” describes aging and an incipient loss of faith. “Young Woman’s Song” is anxious, taut, with something worried and sexual just beneath the lines. “I hate this something like a bobbing cork / Not going,” she says: “I want something to hang to.—” With this short cycle of poems, each in the same stanzaic form as the later Dream Songs, Berryman learned an important lesson: that the poem takes place between the lines. The young woman says, “What I am looking for ( I am ) may be / Happening in the gaps of what I know,” and this is true for Berryman’s own poetics, discovered through speaking like another.
    It is conventional to describe Berryman as “confessional”: as one of a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including also Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, for whom the use of personal material was a special and distinguishing mark. In 1962, the English critic A. Alvarez celebrated what he saw as “a new seriousness” in these poets: “I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence.” This poetry would be open to all the experience of modern life, and particularly its grit: it would address suicide, depression, banality. This claim appeared in the introduction to a hugely popular anthology called The New Poetry , and Berryman was the first poet in it.
    More recently, Adam Kirsch has suggested that our attention to the apparently intimate contents of the works of these poets has distracted us from their careful artifice. “To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry,” Kirsch writes in The Wounded Surgeon (2005):
    Plath scorned the notion of poetry as “some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”; Berryman insisted that “the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer,” that there is always “an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona”; Bishop deplored the trend toward “more and more anguish and less and less poetry”; Lowell explained that even in Life Studies , usually considered the first masterpiece of Confessional poetry, “the whole balance of the