John Berryman’s poetry collections 77 Dream Songs and its follow-up, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, won the poet the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, as well as the accolades of contemporaries and critics. Only Sing, edited by the poet Shane McCrae, collects 152 previously unpublished Dream Songs, 18-line poems that form an extension of what McCrae views as Berryman’s great American epic, which sketches the world of Berryman’s alter ego, Henry. The poems veer exuberantly between high and low diction, love and work, friends’ visits and the fear of death. They also, as McCrae writes in his introduction, posit “race relations as a, perhaps the, central problem for white Americans.” PW talked to McCrae about the epic and the lyric, the poetry of license plates, and the surprising places Berryman (who died in 1972) has shown up recently.
You write in your introduction to Only Sing that you spent some time at the University of Minnesota with the archival materials, then made your selections. How did you decide which poems to include?
I mostly made my determination according to which poems Berryman had actually typed up and seemed to have made something like a final draft of. For the most part, his typescripts aren’t written on by hand, so the poems I’ve included are ones that seemed to me to be finished, or at least finished enough for him to have typed a clean version.
How does that compare to Berryman’s own selection process?
He picked the poems that he thought were strongest and made the most sense for the story he wanted to tell. I think that resulted in wonderful books, and I also think he left out a number of poems that were certainly strong enough to be published. He expressed that although the Dream Songs as a whole were finished with the publication of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, if there were further volumes, it would be up to readers to slot the new poems in among the already-existing epic, wherever they could find a place for them. When people ask me about Only Sing, they want to know: are the poems any good? I guess they think that because these poems weren’t collected earlier, they must not be good poems. And I understand that, but I want to say, yeah, they’re very good. Some of my favorite Berryman poems are in Only Sing.
Has Berryman always been an important poet for your work?
As I was writing the introduction, I remembered that when I was in my late teens or very early 20s, I had a scooter—a Honda Spree, an ’80s scooter like a little plastic Vespa—and I got a frame for its license plate with a quote from Berryman: “His thought made pockets & the plane buckt.” I had it custom-made. So he was important enough to me, then, that I would get a license plate frame with a quote from him on it. But I don’t think I realized until putting the introduction together that he was a central poet for me, one of the two or three most important poets for how I write. That’s maybe almost entirely because of his syntax—because of the sense that I get, when reading him, that one can do whatever one wants in a poem.
You’ve called the Dream Songs an epic. Can you say more about how these short poems function as an epic?
The epic is a culture-establishing form. It’s a poem you write in order to nail down a sense of what a culture is, of what you want future readers to think about that culture. So epics, at least historically in the West, have been central to the cultures in which they were written. The Iliad and the Odyssey were central to Ancient Greek culture, the Aeneid was very significant for the Romans. And epics tend to involve a single hero who is one of the establishers of that culture, or a central figure for it. There are certain tropes, like journeys to the underworld, battles, things like that. But epics lose their prestige around the time of the rise of the novel. And in the 20th century, there were a number of solutions proposed for this. The solution that seems to have stuck arises out of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, where the epic is a containing history, according to Pound. That didn’t stick for everyone, but it sets the parameters for what Pound does, and the epic becomes, to some extent, a loose collection of shorter poems.
So Berryman’s solution, keeping both the ancient model and the twentieth-century model in mind, is a long poem made up of shorter poems that themselves all seem complete, but that also move with something like a narrative. The Dream Songs is a narrative the way a human life is a narrative. It’s a narrative of the actions one takes in a day, but mostly it’s a narrative of the mind—what the protagonist, Henry, thinks about. That’s the kind of epic the Dream Songs is. It’s talking about the inner life.
You also say in the introduction that despite its monumental geography, the United States is a lyric nation, a group of states “organized in a lyric way.” Do you think Berryman intended to write an American epic disguised as a group of lyric poems?
I think that because the poems are very discrete—they’re 18 lines long, and they read, almost all of them, as single poems—the book can appeal to people who want to read lyrics. But if you read the whole thing, keeping in mind Berryman’s goals, you do get a sense of the epic out of it.
How do you hope people approach these poems?
As a teacher, one is always trying to guide one’s students away from the idea that the speaker of the poem is the person who wrote it. I think it’s fairly natural to read poems that way, and after poets like Berryman and Plath, Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass, and a bunch of other people, readers’ inclination to read poems autobiographically has only gotten stronger. But—not only for the Dream Songs but for poems by pretty much everybody—I would like for them to not be read as autobiography, at least not at first.
How do you think Only Sing will alter readers’ current idea of Berryman?
I tend to think of Berryman as a fairly well-known poet. He features in songs by several artists. As I say in the introduction, the season finales of Succession all had titles that were lines from his poem “Dream Song 29.” And this book arose out of my desire to read what hadn’t been published. I’m very much a completist; I want to read everything my favorite writers wrote. So I hope that Only Sing expands readers’ sense of who Berryman was as a poet, and what his life’s work, the Dream Songs, was like—what it was doing, what he was trying to contain, do, express with those poems. I hope that it helps people get a better, bigger sense of Berryman.
