I wish I'd written...

I wish I'd written my favourite poem, The Dream Songs, a sequence by the American poet John Berryman. His poetry has a very sincere waywardness to it, combining an acute delicacy of instinct with despair, huge amounts of learning and a humorous bravado.

Berryman's approach to language is daring, and filled with dazzling experiments. Baby talk, Negro slang, chat-up, prayer, cliché, epic tropes, advertising jargon, elegy, courtly love elements, clowning, the language of psychoanalysis all sit side by side in his work. He also uses a huge range of idiosyncratic verbal techniques to create a language which is continually wrenched and pummelled and remade to measure the intense struggles of his hero, who lives his life, as Berryman believed poets did, out at the edge of things.

There is an impressive braveness and honesty to The Dream Songs, for the poet takes his inner world and slaps himself in the face with it. At the same time he displays the same sort of grandness of interest in himself that other great poets reserved for important classical and biblical epic themes. Yet his writing always maintains a striking note of humility.

The main achievement of the Dream Songs is that the self that Berryman gives us again and again is completely interesting. The depths of the heart that are plumbed are of such high calibre, so intelligent, funny and poignant that the poet leaves us always longing to know him better.

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