BY BENJAMIN MYERS

in JOHN BERRYMAN WAS KNOWN AS ONE OF THE GREATEST AMERICAN POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AND HE SPENT MUCH OF HIS CHILDHOOD IN OKLAHOMA. IN THIS ESSAY, A FORMER STATE POET LAUREATE GOES IN SEARCH OF THE ENIGMATIC, TORTURED WRITER’S LEGACY.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HEIDI JO MANN

HEN I WAS young, my parents sometimes took me Oklahoma ghost hunting, loading my sisters and me into the car to visit some reputedly haunted location. I remember vividly our W trip to a hanging tree in the Cimarron Valley, its broad reach of branches still bowed by the weight of the dead. My parents were writers, and they were hunting ghost stories more than actual ghosts. Still, the hobby must have rubbed off on me, because I find myself hunting my own Oklahoma spirit: the ghost of the great American poet John Berryman. Berryman’s 1969 two-volume opus was a compilation of 1964’s 77 Dream Songs and 1968’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. In it, Henry, the persona adopted by the poet, stands at his father’s grave, where “the marker slants, flowerless” and admits, “often, often before / I’ve made this awful pilgrimage.” The poems in The Dream Songs trace Berryman’s obsession with his father’s death, so the pilgrimage in question may be metaphorical. Nevertheless, it makes me wonder if Berryman ever did return to visit his father’s grave, where the body lies, as “Dream Song #143” says, “stashed in Oklahoma.” While his poems rarely mention Oklahoma, in what reference Berryman makes to the state, it’s clear he associates it with his lost father.

In 1969, poet wrote, “The English (American) language, who knows entirely what it is? Maybe two men in this decade: Bob Dylan, John Berryman.” Heidi Jo Mann illustrated Berryman for Oklahoma Today using charcoal, cigarette ash, and coffee.

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70_Berryman.indd 72 12/5/17 5:14 PM 70_Berryman.indd 73 12/5/17 5:14 PM ERRYMAN WAS BORN John Allyn Aware of his reputation as a diffi cult Smith Jr. in McAlester in 1914. poet, I fi rst read Berryman hesitantly BHis father, John Smith—the poet and only because he was born in Okla- would take the name Berryman from his homa. His wit, imagination, linguistic mother’s second husband—was a banker, acrobatics, and emotional honesty won and his mother at one time was a school me over, and I learned to go along for teacher in the Seminole County town the ride in a wild Berryman poem, of Sasakwa. e family moved around not trying to arrive at an easily para- Oklahoma a lot during Berryman’s early phrased “meaning” for the poem but years before settling in Anadarko, where rather absorbing the mood suggested Smith was a vice president and loan by the images and allusions. As he says offi cer at First State Bank, in 1921. Like himself, “ ese Songs are not meant to many Oklahomans, they were following be understood, you understand. / ey oil money. e younger John attended are only meant to terrify & comfort.” school in Anadarko and was an altar boy Berryman’s poems became a part of my at Holy Family Catholic Church. life, and I began to wonder how this John Smith eventually became assis- place, where he was born and lived such tant game and fi sh warden for the state. formative years, marked his soul. Despite this success, the boy’s parents left for Florida in 1925, leaving Berryman ITTING AT MY desk, I look out the and his younger brother at St. Joseph’s window at the sycamore across Academy in Chickasha. e boys were Sthe street, and I think of “Dream miserable at the boarding school, how- Song #1,” specifi cally of the poignant ever, and were retrieved by their mother lines: “All the world like a woolen lover before the year’s end. us the poet’s / once did seem on Henry’s side. / en time in Oklahoma concluded when he came a departure.” He continues, “Once was eleven, but many of the factors that in a sycamore I was glad / all at the top, would infl uence his writing already were and I sang.” present, including the smoldering dis- Singing in a sycamore is an image integration of his parents’ marriage and of boyish freedom and, as Berryman the infi delities and deceptions that may biographer points out, it have contributed to his father’s apparent gestures toward the poet’s childhood suicide the following year. in rural Oklahoma. In the fi rst poem of Berryman’s masterpiece, Oklahoma ROM THIS BEGINNING, Berryman is a paradise lost. In “Dream Song became one of the most sig- #195,” Berryman laments, “Oklahoma, F nifi cant American poets of the sore / from my great loss leaves me.” mid-twentieth century. His master- is association makes sense of the piece, the 385-poem sequence called fi rst poem’s penultimate line, “Hard e Dream Songs, won him a Pulitzer on the land wears the strong sea.” is “. . . beneath the gruff surface and Prize and a National Book Award. e image perhaps recalls Berryman’s move the high jinks of these poems we hear, elliptical, purposefully illogical nature from the safe interior of the country deeper down, a vibrant, loving man with of his writing—along with his in- to Florida, where things went terribly a vast spirit,” wrote poet Henri Cole in a tensely personal subject matter—made wrong for his family. 2016 New Yorker profi le of Berryman. him, with poets like Occasionally, Berryman off ers idyl- “Exacerbated and enormously learned, and Sylvia Plath, part of the transition lic memories of life in Oklahoma. In Berryman was a master of the poem from modernism in the fi rst half of the “Dream Song #11,” he recalls skating written with manic energy from the edges twentieth century to postmodernism up and down in front of the house of

of human experience.” TERRENCE SPENCER/GETTY IMAGES in the second. a childhood crush named Charlotte.

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70_Berryman.indd 74 12/5/17 5:14 PM 70_Berryman.indd 75 12/5/17 5:14 PM Speaking in third person, he describes catch sight of young Charlotte. I won- his younger self as “wishing he could, der which one might have belonged sir, die,” an expression of childhood to the Callahan family, whose son F.J. passion which seems whimsical when Berryman remembered as being one contrasted with the pronounced death of the fi rst people he knew to die—a wish that runs through many other death which he appears to recount in poems in the volume. In “Dream Song “Dream Song #129,” which took place #167,” he comically contrasts the poor by a cottonwood tree and made the boy postal service in his current city with permanently a “part of Henry’s history.” “the town in Okie-land when I was Crossing the four-lane that cuts the young— / three and four deliveries a block short, I spot a large, low-limbed day!” In “Dream Song #241,” he recalls sycamore suitable for climbing. “Once watching his father march with his in a sycamore I was glad / all at the National Guard unit on a rainy hillside, top, and I sang.” It is a very small, very which he describes as “a fraction of sun uncertain victory, but I gladly take it. & guns / ’way ’way ago,” a kind of boy’s I’ve come to Anadarko looking for paradise. In all three poems, Oklahoma a ghost, and I feel like that ghost has is the unrecoverable golden world be- remained just outside my grasp, like Ber- fore the fall. Yet I fi nd no mention of a ryman’s elusive and disorienting poems. return to the state of his birth. Perhaps But I understand e Dream Songs better he thought it impossible to come back. for having been here, if only in that I can more perfectly picture the sidewalks, the ANTING TO SEE Berryman’s trees, the setting of his earliest memo- Oklahoma, I decide to drive ries. On the way out of town, I stop at a Wto Anadarko.  e land head- renovated soda fountain and sandwich ing into town on U.S. Highway 62 from shop on old Main Street just a few Chickasha is typical Oklahoma—rolling blocks from Berryman’s neighborhood. but still wide open under domed blue Reading the history of the building, I see sky. Round bales and pump jacks are that it began in 1901 as Dinkler’s Drug. scattered across the yellowed fi elds along It is easy to imagine young Berryman the highway, an occasional silo reaching sent here to pick up prescriptions for upwards.  ere is smoke in the distance, his high-strung mother. It is easy to perhaps from a controlled burn. I feel imagine him stopping in for a soda with hopeful about encountering a ghost. Charlotte or F.J. I have no evidence that Mariani’s 1990 biography Dream he did so, but I enjoy imagining a young Song: e Life of John Berryman gives man—before his father’s suicide, before the family’s address, and on the appro- his own alcoholism—taking a moment priate block, I fi nd a few houses, all on of simple enjoyment here. the wrong side of the street.  e entire If Berryman’s ghost haunts anywhere, block on the Smiths’ side is occupied one would expect to fi nd him around by the Caddo Baptist Association and the bridge in from which, Berryman has remained a source of a crisis pregnancy center. Berryman’s following his father’s example, he jumped inspiration for contemporary poets and childhood home is gone.  e surround- to his death in 1972. But I wonder if lyricists. The band Clap Your Hands ing neighborhood, however, is as I pic- his spirit also returns to the wind-swept Say Yeah refer to him by name in song. tured it. Many original houses remain, plains of Anadarko. Does John Berryman Australian singer named his some of which may have belonged to haunt Oklahoma as Oklahoma seemed 1992 album Henry’s Dream after the Berryman’s childhood playmates. I to haunt him? All I can say is that his narrator in The Dream Songs and included wonder which house might be the one spirit haunts me and eludes me. It keeps the lyric “Berryman was best!” in the 2008 little John skated in front of hoping to me reading. It keeps me hunting. song “We Call Upon the Author.” HEIDI JO MANN

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