Homage to Berryman

¹   Well, that’s if you disqualify poets who cheat by using a guitar. Bob Dylan, coincidentally, named himself after Berryman’s close personal friend, the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Berryman was waiting outside Thomas’s New York hospital room when he died). Unfortunately, the Pulitzer committee disagrees with my guitar disqualification—this year actually awarding Dylan a special lifetime achievement prize for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

²   I prefer The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations” to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?” Okkervil River’s “John Allyn Smith Sails” is better than “Stuck Between Stations.” On “Stuck,” infamously adenoidal Craig Finn, an Edina expat living in Brooklyn and clearly yearning to romanticize the Twin Cities the way Bruce Springsteen romanticizes New Jersey, imagines John Berryman and the devil on the Washington Avenue Bridge in a conversation with the Mississippi River, before describing Berryman as a soft-bodied intellectual who “loved the Golden Gophers but hated all the drawn out winters.” I’m not sure about the Gophers, but Finn’s assessment of his distaste for the cold is accurate. Okkervil’s “John Allyn Smith Sails” also name checks the bridge, before descending from a meditation on literary suicide into a satire of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.” It lends deeper meaning to Brian Wilson’s plaintive lament, “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on,” in a darkly funny way, which Berryman himself might have approved.

³   Regarding suicidal poets being fetishized by indie rock bands: Late in his short life, only a couple of years before he drank himself to death in a cheap Manhattan hotel, Delmore Schwartz taught creative writing at Syracuse. His prize pupil, Lou Reed, would go on to front the Velvet Underground, the world’s first indie rock band, about whom Brian Eno famously claimed, “They only sold a few records, but anybody who bought one started their own band.” On their debut album, The Velvet Undergroud and Nico, the band dedicated the last song, “European Son,” to Delmore, who had passed away the year before. In a not so roundabout way, then, poor Delmore, who hated rock ’n’ roll lyrics (which is probably why “European Son” is basically one minute of lyrics and seven of guitars), may be responsible for the entire trend.