John Berryman: and lyricism to die for

I've mentioned the name John Berryman at only one place here but choosing the most opportune occasion to do it: referring to him in a discussion of my own poetry beginnings as the one poet to whom a true contemporary lyric is most beholden, even going so far as to make him (certainly the Henry persona) into a 'body without organs'. It's a poetry that's found in a clear identity & position of the lyrical voice: in fact, so closely tied to the bloodied body of its subject is Berryman's lyric in general I'd be tempted to call it 'biolyrical'. But the biolyrical, of course, can never be torn from its host body: whatever the torture being inflicted.

Berryman's "The Song of the Tortured Girls" on YouTube isn't just the best poem I've ever heard read anywhere by anyone (compare it to Yeats's awful lilt): it's quite possibly the only way to read a poem. The poet's anguished narrative, told in Berryman's own hoarse, scarcely sober rhythms, cannot be separated in intensity and truth from that of the young girl ("heroine of the French resistance") who's being tortured by the Nazis as we read. There are possibly two places in the poem where pain's at its most unendurable. The rending of a spirit & body is to be identified in the poet's (the poetic) voice alone.

Berryman's is not the lyrical voice poised outside of life (as how can the lyric tied intransigently to the body every be); in fact, so much fashionable 'intellectual' poetry, having cast off the word's true flesh, is often coldly indifferent to social relevance. The poem's heart—and there are as many hearts as girls who fought for liberation, the French heroine of Berryman's poem metonymic for an entire movement—is to be accessed, even as we read, through the movements of torture & resistance themselves: it's the very life world that's indistinguishable from Berryman's verses, and not just a narrative. What an artistic achievement!

Anything as powerful as this (both a poem & a reading) has the potential to help the reader find a way out of the 'heartless' hegemony of pastiche, installation and language poetry today, towards a lyricism to die for. When language has the force of resistance & physical pain inscribed within it, poetry writing in Berryman must necessarily be conceived as both corporeal and lyrical activity, i.e. 'biolyrical'. Here's a poetry with the power to restore to a position of centrality the subject of verse all but submerged in too abstract post-avant theory.

Hear and feel for yourself.

"The Song of the Tortured Girls"

After a little I could not have told -
But no one asked me this – why I was there.
I asked. The ceiling of that place was high.
And there were sudden noises, which I made.
I must have stayed there a long time today:
My cup of soup was gone when they brought me back.
-
Often ‘Nothing worse can now come to us’
I thought, the winter the young men stayed away,
My uncle died and mother broke her crutch.
And then the strange room where the brightest light
Does not shine on the strange men: shines on me.
I feel them stretch my youth and throw a switch.
-
Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows
Making a mild sound, softer than a moan;
High in a pass once where we put our tent,
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
- I no longer remember what they want. -
Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.
                                   (from Collected Poems 1937-1971, 1989)