Sifting through Berryman’s manuscripts and correspondence was humbling and fascinating. I still haven’t digested it all. Since writing the essay:

I’ve thought more about the structural origins of The Dream Songs. Now I think Byron’s Don Juan may be as significant as Pound’s Cantos as a model for the Songs. Berryman had read (and remembered) everything, so perhaps it’s too easy to construct an argument for almost any source as significant. But I do think the anti-romantic, confessional dandy of Don Juan is a voice that recurs in The Dream Songs. The verse form bears interesting similarities to Byron’s Don Juan too.

I also regret not spending any time looking at the manuscripts of Berryman’s sonnets. Although he did not initially write these for publication, that fact alone makes them less inhibited than his other early work. They are remarkable not only for anticipating the Songs, but for how they reinvigorate the sonnet itself. You can really hear Hopkins in this work.

“…. by putting flesh on the bones of the biblical passage, Mierau forces us to feel a tinge of resistance that makes the biblical passage at once more meaningful and more troubling. These kinds of pleasures are common in Fear Not, and give the book its consistent energy.”

The review also makes the point that I’m self-indulgently clever at times, although a different review in the same issue skewers the entertaining Alessandro Porco for a level of puerility more extreme than what I’m charged with. I admit it’s all true. And it’s the kind of thoughtful review that every writer hopes for.

Elise has published widely in lit mags that are very hard to get into–Poetry (Chicago), the New Yorker, Slate, and many other places in Canada and the UK. With her wide experience, and recent work as a (virtual) resident poet for Arc magazine, I thought it would be fun to have a public talk about poetry and publishing. We did that on April 13 at the Manitoba Writers’ Guild classroom. We had a public conversation about poetry at the Winnipeg Public Library on April 14, at which Elise again read her work. A few dozen people attended both events, Elise sold and signed books, we had drinks at the King’s Head, and you should have been there if you weren’t.

Note that I’ve crudely altered the sign in the photo below to reflect the MB Writers Guild’s new address. Thanks to John Toone for the photo.

Here’s a couple of my favourite passages from Self-Consciousness. In this one he responds to the charge that he “wrote all too well but had nothing to say,” surely the last word in George Orwell’s direction on this subject:

“My own style seemed to me a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is exactly what it wasn’t–other indulgent, rather. My models were the styles of Proust and Henry Green as I read them (one in translation): styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real. In this entwining and gently relentless effort there is no hiding that the effort is being made in language: all professorial or critical talk of inconspicuous or invisible language struck me as vapid and quite mistaken, for surely language, printed language, is what we all know we are reading and writing, just as a person looking at a painting knows he is not looking out of a window.”

And in the following passage, after talking about giving up cigarettes and coffee, he discusses writing. (He’s also devoted many insightful and entertaining pages to his psoriasis):

“So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world–it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slightest acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light–in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it–approaches blasphemy.”

Updike’s memoir exhibits all his strengths–beautifully precise visual observation, intimate knowledge of a specific locale (his home town in Pennsylvania, obviously the model for Rabbit’s home town in the novels), and deep understanding of both other people and himself. It made me want to go back and re-read the Rabbit books and the early short stories, which I will do soon.

Bookstore owner and host Kelly Hughes gave an entertaining rant about the merits of cake at Eat Bistro compared to the (in)famous Jeanne’s Bakery. I was one of four present who admitted to liking Jeanne’s fare. My guess is that some people were lying about their low-brow taste, since there were a couple of dozen people present and Jeanne’s is a Winnipeg institution.

The readings were fun. Kerry Ryan has taken up boxing and is writing poetry about it. Rosanna was funny as usual, and Charles Leblanc strongly encouraged Laurent to tell an amusing anecdote.

Fear Not has also been nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award along with some novelists whose names I can’t remember.

It was great to be on a university campus, something that’s increasingly difficult for Canadian poets. Thanks to Di Brandt for arranging this reading as part of an ongoing BU series.