My John Berryman: A Poet of Deep Unease

When writing the introduction to a handsome new edition of John Berryman’s long poem “77 Dream Songs,” I was happy for the chance to consider why it was that I was first drawn, thirty-five years ago, in graduate school, to his baffling book. Perhaps it is the strange combination of decorum and distress that I love most, or, to put it another way, the volatile mix of tenderness and unease. And I love that the dream songs are not tidy little poems following each other tidily into silence, like so many poems published today.