Grandeur is intrinsically fragile."These lines are not meant to be understood, you understand?/ They are only meant to terrify and--- comfort." John Berryman

I always defend youtube when people say ‘oh, it’s just a bunch of videos of people falling over and such’ because if it wasn’t for YT, I wouldn’t have found out about John Berryman or The Dream Songs, of which I am reading now

@ljrees1721

8 ай бұрын

Beautiful comment

@jemery569

8 ай бұрын

Perfection.

@CreamedCheesed

8 ай бұрын

…and I’m still reading it twelve years later!

Two observations: 1) When he starts reading, he almost sounds like he’s going to cry. His voice sounds like it is going to very emotional places then suffocating itself before the destination is reached. Deeply rooted confessions are always difficult to make. 2) He kind of sounds like Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black.

A man who seems intent on shedding his skin but fails and then fails again and continues to sing as he would alone or with any camera rolling. That he comes off all peculiar amplifies his presence in a glorious way. He is the person who was there when what needed to be said was precisely what he chose to say.

I could listen to John Berryman for ever.

His personal life is key to understanding his poetry. Once you familiarize yourself with this, his work is easier to understand. Of course anyone who has a similar history will know this already.

One of the incredible but also sad things about writers is that they see much more than we do, or at least can express what we see and cannot say, to the point, though, that they end up feeling quite lonely because there is a reason that many don't know how to say what they see and cannot say, because what that is is hurt.

Very moving indeed. Thank you hugely. I'm astounded to have found this clip, after reading Berryman for so many years. Again, many thanks.

There's a fantastic book by Olivia Laing called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, which goes into some detail on the life and struggles of John Berryman and other writers. Really worth a read if you're interested in the intersection of alcohol and the craft of writing. Happy to be able to hear Berryman's voice, here.

@gillesdelatoet

9 ай бұрын

I've just read it and what touched me the most was how intense life is if you open up the world not only to "consensual reality" ( Laing) but the world of fiction and the emotions you expose yourself to then

@DrDanLawrence

9 ай бұрын

@@gillesdelatoet Absolutely, been thinking about this a lot for a new book I'm working on about madness and creativity. I start with Plato, looking at divine madness. I am probably a bit romantic about it, but it seems there is a kind of sacrifice one has to make, here, in creative expression. It's probably very evident in some modern examples like certain method actors who suffer horribly inhabiting the role of a deeply disturbed character. Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human comes to mind, too--that fiction can essentially shape the possibilities of expression and behavior. Creativity in itself can be very painful--to view the world differently than others is almost by definition to go against the social grain, to open yourself up to a great vulnerability.

You can't avoid the question of his alcoholism because he was a deeply personal writer and he addresses his drunkennesss, his ongoing struggle with depression and mania.... He released a book called "Recovery" which relayed episodes from his efforts toward getting sober in a treatment center and his grappling with the propositions of the 12 Steps.... What strikes me is the delivery of the Dream Songs here, and the way in which he talks about Henry as a stage character... You don't really get that from just reeading it on the page. How much of the poems were conceived as dialogue, narration... the Poet describing and explaining what he thinks of the story he himself is telling... Eleven Addresses to the Lord, to me, is still my favorite work of his, so rich and beautiful, personal prayers to what he variously understood about God.

May I thank you deeply for posting this moving film.

As Woody Allen says, reality is for those who can't do any better.

I suspect those initially hostile views of the poem were based on a misunderstanding. This poem presents a fine approach to boredom: rather than making hollow cliched affirmations about/against boredom, Henry faces boredom head-on, without excuses or justification. He faces the fact that he lacks "inner resources", engages in self-mockery of sorts, plays with language, and in so doing, transmutes the initial boredom into something interesting, funny, and imaginative. The image of the dog and its tail moving "considerably away" and leaving behind "me: wag" is the image suggesting the transcendence of boredom. The "me" could also refer to stale memories and deadening habits.

Life my friends is boring......how true!

@Velvet0Starship2013

6 жыл бұрын

If you're an unfucked man of a certain age: obviously.

I have never seen a more incredible reading of a poem.

Panera advertisements attached to a John Berryman reading. Have I lived long enough?

Thankyou so much for this video, I have always wondered if he acted as intence as his poetry is, I guess he did. Please upload more if there is any.

I love the periodic sounding of a cash register in the background! A friend of mine, Bill Heyen, who knew Berryman said he was the only genius he has ever met. I love: "Poets don't get very much fan mail..." Some more than others, I'm guessing.

It's September 2021, and Autumn is beginning to puff its chest. As I sit here at 8:30pm drinking whiskey (with work tomorrow), Mr Berryman very much brings a smile to my face. What a tragic yet entertaining man.

Cafe setting and clinking background was perfect

My favourite poem

i want to see this unedited. ...o! the loss of footage of the great poets! ...we make due, and we love it.

So I took henry in various directions. The directions of despair of lust, of memory of patriotism. Various other things to take him further than anything a ordinary life really can take us. Unless a girl leaves him that a special case, we make a exception.

@argieav

11 ай бұрын

'Leads him...' not 'leaves him', surely. Directions. He means a girl can magify a guys life beyond the ordinary in life. Thats what I think he is saying anyhow.

Wow, I've read that song so many times before. Never knew there was video of it.

read it 2 years back, never will forget

Fascinating...

This video, in all trueness, is not boring.

After 13 years came to know about him, after studying "the ball poem" written by him.

I don't believe he's drunk. He is a man under pressure, no doubt partly as a result of heavy drinking - he probably was most of the time. I had a professor of philosophy when I was a student 50 years ago - I never forgot him, because he had this strange head-shaking whiny groany style of talking which was unique in my experience till many years later I saw Berryman on TV. I am quite sure my professor was not drunk but caught in a kind of rapture, as it were.

@grainnequigley8131

3 жыл бұрын

Dju know that over expressive body language and speech patterns are usually autism and people just chalk it up to eccentrism. The body language and speech patterns are self learned and not innate and so often differ slightly or a lot from people who dont have autism. Conversely autistic people can also have very under exaggerated body language etc it's either or

2 жыл бұрын

I wonder if, by that time, the slight slur was something that afflicted him even when he wasn't drunk. Could it have been the decades of drink catching up with him?

@user-qk8er9jq4u

5 ай бұрын

Berryman was a man who rang the changes...there is so much background to the songs.. he didn't want Foot notes so you have to get to know as much as you can about the man to understand them in depth but taken cold they are still mesmerising. He met everyone.. upset many of them..his relationship with women would be considered very debatable today. He gave credit his peers. his drunken style connection to Dylan Thomas is interesting.. funny how all the greats somehow converged on The Chelsea Hotel.. Patti Smith..William Burroughs if those walls could talk? I found Mariani's biography on Berryman exhausting but fascinating.. human frailty crossed with genius. What a rich period of American writing and poetry that was... not really noticed or valued by the English Literary scene for years. Al Alvarez did what he could to promote it.

Was reading #133 --"a television team came/from another country to make a film of him/which did not him distress"-- realized it might exist here, came downstairs, typed his name in. Thank you for posting it. First impressions are to be a little frightened by his drunkenness off the page, and that his voice is similar to J. Malkovich's.

"I have a sing to shay..."

This is not for tears, Pal.

Q: .....drunk or how he talked?" A: Both.

I’ve been working pretty hard with the Buzan. You end up feeling you’re a visual artist visualising the little connections- like Donald Duck eating an apple before a tomato explodes. More for the Colin Dexter enthusiast, I think. So I’ve returned to remembering lines. Poems, in fact. I did once remember SKUNK HOUR- then forget portions. I decided to prioritise this poem, and Berryman’s THE STATUE. Both poets had poems in The New York Review of Books- a publication as old to the day as I myself.

It's not art itself that you dislike, but some people's attitudes towards it

Virgina Woolf said something similar.....in classic literature there is always boring parts....after reading her stuff one was bored often...

Long dainty fingers, pal? Yes, pal.

Bravo

He sounds like Foster Brooks.

yes.yes.

@JakSacul The sensibility that this particular artist is evoking is what we are moving away from in 2010. If not "gloom and doom" necessarily then parody and irony. You're not alone in being sick of it. In his day it was new and seemed to be saying something, but I think we're finding out that it doesn't have anything to say in itself.

@molitovguardian Nice work, way to let someone know what they said on youtube. really cool.

What a great genius! Does anyone know what film this is from? I’d like to teach it.

@molitovguardian Nice work, way to take the format of baseless criticism & make it self-serving. really unique. (on the other hand, this routine is amusing.)

It looks like he's been clawing away at the wallpaper behind him.

it's the beard

drunk and brilliant

@jacobssandy Very true. It has its negative sides though, sometimes I think a work NEEDS to be separated from the artist. Then again, my love for the Beat generation is half their work, part their personas. Out of interest, how did you imagine his "voice" before seeing any video or hearing any audio? Berryman is much more intelligible here. Seems almost sober. Hehe

He sounds like he's doing an impression of Tom Brokaw.

WAG

What is he saying?

i am considering seriously to switch from beer to bourbon

@vivianstanshall8121

5 жыл бұрын

Red Wine is the road to take

-- specially since its obvious Henry is reading his poem here

in the interview Berryman appears a demented genius. is he posing or is that the real Berryman? although he is not Henry, he has been deeply wounded by his father's suicide when Berryman was a boy. all questions on that subject obsess him and will not let him free. (only an opinion, i am not an expert).

does anyone hear that deafening high pitched ring ??

@dvrath334

4 жыл бұрын

quickly puts one in berryman's state

Victor Heringer brought me here

1:12, 4:33

mporeis na kaneis upload to dream song 33 pls?

It's a shame a lot of the comments glamorize his self-destruction. I wonder how cool Kate Berryman thought it was. Or his young daughter. He was a fine and brilliant man. A poet for the ages. Unfortunately, a crippling addiction and childhood trauma of the first order robbed American literature of one of its most unique voices. Thankfully, the work remains. We should celebrate that and not shovel romance on his grave. The kind of drinking he did is not pretty to watch.

Olive Kitterage

I am NOT a poet!

4:09

ohhhh, of course, berryman's coffee is actually irish coffee minus the cream. it's probably laced with the 140 proof jameson.....and goofballs are beatnik for barbiturate. letterman used the stock phrase, "hopped-up on goofballs" quite liberally in the late '80s.

2:50 - Catjiiing! :)

am interested in watergate here....these where big timres ...he's just trying to explain...drunk, yeah

From a medical standpoint Mr.Berryman looks as if he is in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease.

Is he high or drunk or insane, or all three? Serious question for any Berryman scholars out there.

@kifn2 I wish I could agree that we're moving away from "parody and irony" in today's literary/cultural world. Seems to me that postmodernist "ironic detachment" (which others call "snarkiness") is the virtual coin of the realm in the arts (if not in the overall culture) today. I don't find Berryman's irony to be "detachment" -- I find it to be immolation and then horrified recoiling. Major difference from the current aesthetic, in my opinion.

What I want to know-seriously- is how many fans of Berryman have written their own Dream Songs, using his style, meter, etc.?

4:09 = Poem... I remember a good many of those lines even though it's been about 25 years since I last checked out Dream Songs, (2nd floor of my college library...). The lines about bored and inner resources I've remembered all this while... though, it turns out, they've altered some over time. And that last line... he doesn't give it the right reading I must say.

clearly it is how he talked, but i think he may be hopped up on goofballs or coffee, too.

leaving behind me...wag

@herrkamphenkel that is a pretty ignorant statement.

So is Henry bored excited? Is life, Mr. Bones so hostile, so boring, ghastly too? We must not say so.

Butt a butt healing.

wag

heisenberg

too many AHHHHH

That beard....

@MrOhjok

4 жыл бұрын

@swindle That beard That biblical beard, ancient symbol Of wisdom, brilliant beard, Berryman Beard, become bar rag beard of beer spill, Beard of the bard, bread in the wilderness Beard, that beard, that beard, that beard.

why not your own style?

Wag!

There's no such thing.

Lol! I am more Fucked Up but without the talent!

WAG.

@TommyTomato93 ad hominem lamer

I was heavy bored after wasting my time reading Anna Karenina, what a tedious door stop and on a par with Woolf's to the Lighthouse for waffle. I would also disagree that Crane was "one of the greatest story writers the world has ever seen". Surely a case of the drink talking John.

My 2 cents: Berryman was a horse's ass that wrote garbage and scammed it off as "poetry". Everything about him and his writing grinds me sideways.

Hes like what Ginsberg wanted to be