Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and giving thanks always makes me think of W. S. Merwin’s “Thanks”:
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
A slightly different version of “Thanks” was first published in the Nation on March 14, 1987, and the final version of the poem was then included in Merwin’s collection The Rain in the Trees (Knopf, 1988). The aching irony of the poem above was even less subtle in its 1987 Nation iteration (“in a country up to its chin in shame / living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you”; “in the banks that use us we are saying thank you / with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable / unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you”).
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Thanksgiving itself always makes me think of John Berryman’s Dream Song 385:
My daughter’s heavier. Light leaves are flying.
Everywhere in enormous numbers turkeys will be dying
and other birds, all their wings.
They never greatly flew. Did they wish to?
I should know. Off away somewhere once I knew
such things.
Or good Ralph Hodgson back then did, or does.
The man is dead whom Eliot praised. My praise
follows and flows too late.
Fall is grievy, brisk. Tears behind the eyes
almost fall. Fall comes to us as a prize
to rouse us toward our fate.
My house is made of wood and it’s made well,
unlike us. My house is older than Henry;
that’s fairly old.
If there were a middle ground between things and the soul
or if the sky resembled more the sea,
I wouldn’t have to scold
**********************************my heavy daughter.
Back in 2010, Cody Walker also brought this favorite poem of mine to the attention of readers of the Kenyon Review blog in a post on Thanksgiving Day. This was not the last Dream Song Berryman wrote, but it was the Dream Song he chose to end his 385 poem sequence. Berryman’s The Dream Songs (the FSG volume that brings together the first 77 Dream Songs and the next 308 Dream Songs published in 1968 in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) begins with a 2007 edition introduction by W. S. Merwin. Merwin, born in 1927, writes of Berryman, born in 1914:
In 1964, when 77 Dream Songs was first published, even readers of John Berryman’s poetry . . . were startled by the impact of this unprecedented book . . .
Such astonishment was certainly something that John had wanted . . . The hunger for it was a craving that had presided over the whole of his youth. He was fifty in the year that 77 Dream Songs was published, and his feelings about age were influenced by belonging to a generation of poets who had grown up in the shadow of T. S. Eliot — or felt they had — and, partly as a result of that, felt old before their time . . . Once, in his thirties, after a bookstore reading of poems by other poets whom he loved — in this case, Hardy and Yeats — someone had been so foolish to ask him whether he did not, perhaps, take these things too seriously, and he had answered, ‘They’re a matter of life and death’ . . .
Berryman’s poetry, I believe, is among the major achievements of his gifted and bedeviled generation, and the Dream Songs — intimate, elusive, wild, unbearable, beautiful — are its summation.
Though not actually much older, Berryman was one of Merwin’s teachers and mentors at Princeton. Though there doesn’t seem to be much of a recognizable stylistic lineage from Berryman to Merwin, there is a human lineage there. Read Merwin’s poem “Berryman” (first published in the Nation in 1983) here: “he suggested I pray to the Muse / get down on my knees and pray / right there in the corner and he / said he meant it literally.”
In his “Art of Poetry” interview, conducted by Edward Hirsch for the Paris Review in 1986, Merwin says, “When you talk about prayer in Judeo-Christian terms, prayer is usually construed as a kind of dualistic act. You’re praying to somebody else for something. Prayer in the Western sense is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with the recognizing of that connection, rather than trying to create something that isn’t there.” Of Berryman’s advice to “pray to the Muse,” Merwin says, “I think it’s excellent advice. Writing poetry is never a wholly deliberate act over which you have complete control. It’s important to recognize that writing is at the disposition of all sorts of forces, some of which you don’t know anything at all about. You can describe them as parts of your own psyche, if you like, they probably are, but there are lots of other ways of describing them that are as good, or better—the muses, or the collective unconscious. More suggestive and so, in a way, more accurate. Any means of invoking these forces is good, as far as I’m concerned.” Hirsch asks him what he learned from Berryman as a Princeton undergraduate, and Merwin responds, “I tried to put some of that in the poem I wrote about him, some of the main directives that he made. Intransigence was one of them. He taught me something about taking poetry very seriously. He was certainly one of the two or three brightest individuals I’ve ever known, and his sense of language was passionate and had immense momentum. His integrity was absolute. He was a wacky man, but that devotion was like a pure flame all the time and that was a great example for me.”
Berryman gave an “Art of Poetry” interview as well, conducted by Peter A. Stitt for the Paris Review in 1970 (published in the Winter 1972 issue, the year Berryman committed suicide on January 7). Speaking of T. S. Eliot’s work, he says, “It’s a very strange career. Very—a pure system of spasms. My career is like that. It is horribly like that.”
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In Mary Ruefle’s personal narrative “I Remember, I Remember” in the July/August 2012 issue of Poetry, she writes:
I remember my Thanksgiving poem being pinned to the school bulletin board, where everyone could see it, and leaves cut out of orange construction paper were stapled all around it. It began, ‘We thank God for the living land.’
She writes:
I remember when I graduated from college, we were asked to submit exactly how we wanted our names to appear on our diplomas, and I spelled my middle name (which is Lorraine) Low Rain, because the day before I had been reading W.S. Merwin’s new book and in it was some kind of brief Japanese thing along the lines of “Low Rain, Roof Fell.”
I remember when my parents saw my diploma, they were horrified and kept asking me how I could have done such a thing, after they paid for my education and all.
I remember finding the diploma among my mother’s things after she died, and throwing it away.
I remember I never did like to save things much.
I remember saving everything.
She writes:
I remember a reading W.S. Merwin gave in a tiny chapel, with the audience sitting in the pews, and how after a while we were all lost in a suspension of time — I know I was — and after the reading there was a Q&A and someone asked a bizarre question, she asked what time it was, and Merwin looked at the clock (there was a clock on the wall) and every one of us could see it had stopped, it had stopped in the middle of his reading, literal proof of what we already felt to be true, this spectacular thing, the dream of all poetry, to cut a hole in time.
She writes:
I remember [something an] Irish poet told me: once, drinking in Dublin with Berryman, they had a shot of ouzo and Berryman immediately disappeared. It was a matter of hours before they discovered he had walked out of the bar, taken a taxi to the airport and flown directly to Athens using his American Express card.
I remember reading John Berryman’s “Dream Song #14” in my twenties, with its famous opening words, “Life, friends, is boring.” I remember being struck by its wit, irony, playfulness, delight: it is the kind of poem students read aloud to each other in a pool of laughter and admiration, and there is nothing wrong with that, for it reinforces their sense of cynicism and superiority, and it is crucial at that age we find a like-minded group to whom we can belong. I remember rereading the poem, not for the second time, some thirty years later, and being struck by its excruciating pain, which is entirely without irony. Many persons who knew Berryman have remarked that he spoke, always, without irony, which means, simply, that he always meant what he said. If you are going through a particularly stable period of your life, and you encounter his bleakest statements, you will react with chagrin and disbelief, as if listening to the ablest jester. If you are going through a particularly unstable period of your life, the straightforward articulation of suffering that has already twisted and dislocated its bearer renders a tension that will very nearly kill you. But I did not know this then.
Her poem “White Buttons,” published in Poetry in 2011, begins:
Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet
(mother do not worry
letters are not flesh
though there’s meaning in them
but not when they are mean
my letters to you were mean
I found them after you died
and read them and tore them up
and fed them to the wind
thank you for intruding
I love you now leave)
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