the ball poem

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,

What, what is he to do? I saw it go

Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then

Merrily over-there it is in the water!

No use to say 'O there are other balls':

An ultimate shaking of grief fixes the boy

As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down

All his youth days into the harbour where

His ball went. I would not intrude on him,

A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now

He senses first responsibility

In a world of possessions. People will take balls,

Balls will be lost always, little boy,

And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.

He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,

The epistemology of loss, how to stand up

Knowing what every man must one day know

And most know many days, how to stand up

And gradually light returns to the street,

A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark

Floor of the harbour . .I am everywhere,

I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

With all that move me, under the water

Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

this is JB, but it's not one of the dream songs, like we talked about earlier. this is one of his early poems; before the sonnets, before the dream songs, before mrs. bradstreet. at this point he still wanted to be just like yeats. weird. i like that the grief "fixes the boy." i like the end of this poem where the narrative unravels, and suddenly the poem is in first person. everything dissolves, there's water, the ball is "out of sight," we are not talking about a ball anymore; "i am not a little boy."

we ourselves flash and yearn

i have a feeling this blog is going to turn into a parade of cool shit that my roommate shows me. i've never really blogged about john berryman, but he is my favorite poet. berryman is the author of the "dream songs." for these poems berryman created a protagonist, henry, a character that he described as a middle aged man who has "suffered an irreversible loss." there are other characters as well, but yadda yadda yadda you should look into it for yourself, and then you should call me because i always want to talk about jb. the vision/language for the dream songs was conceived by berryman through his dreams, duh. BUT the poems do not reflect the dream-like state, nor are they a stream of consciousness. instead they are intricately constructed. i think that he used his dreams less as subject matter and more as a method of research. when i say research i mean that he was able to access his deepest and truest feelings in dreams, because he felt that it was the least inhibited state.

anyway, my roommate showed me john berryman READING. on YOUTUBE. i don't know how i never thought to look for that. i've always hated that i can never see my favorite poet read (he jumped off the washington avenue bridge in minnesota in 1972.) it's truly amazing to watch him read and hear his voice, and understand how the poems sounded inside of his head.

in a field, i am the absence of field

my friend becca recently made a list of songs that she could remember hearing for the first time. there aren't many songs that i can remember exactly when or where i first heard them. actually there are only two that come to mind: "you're so vain" by carly simon and "mahgeeta" by my morning jacket. 

poems on the other hand... there are tons. i guess that's because you have to actually sit down and participate, unlike a song that can creep its way into your awareness. i like poetry, and reading in general, really, because you have to be so present. and at the end, you look at this thing that you were so absorbed in and it's just ink on a page, not like a movie or a play or something else that pulls you in through an (awesome, but) much more elaborate structure.

here's some of the poems that i remember my first encounter with...

- the nails by w.s. merwin -- once at a reading someone requested that merwin read this poem, and he refused, saying that it was too painful to read aloud. don't read this poem if you're going through a break up. i'm jus' sayin'.

- keeping things whole by mark strand -- a teacher showed me this poem when i was taking a poetry class one summer in high school. it changed my idea of what a poem was. 

- directions to the brothel (click around, you'll find it... someone made a video that scared me when i watched it with the lights off.) by michael dumanis -- michael is the teacher who showed me keeping things whole. 

- 13th dream song by john berryman -- i can't believe i haven't done a berryman post on this blog yet. just wait. it's coming. 

- author's prayer by ilya kaminsky -- this link is sweet because you can hear him reading it. ilya is deaf and has a russian accent. he can be sort of hard to understand, so when he read at sarah lawrence he passed out copies of his book so that people could follow along with him. he reads like a rabbi and when everyone follows along it felt like a religious experience. 

uhhh i guess that's enough for now. you guys should read those poems. 

oh, also, i'm reading here (school) today (tuesday) at 8 pm, in slonim house. it's a 6x6 featuring 6 slc students and 6 students from columbia university, all reading for 6 minutes each. cute, right?