Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann

such a hurry to quit, is the world, a world, further, in which the world (or something very similar—an apple, or a green apple, or perhaps Snow White’s poisoned—“witchy”—apple) falls into your lap, but without making you any the happier for it. The poem revisits the theme of Arthur Hugh Clough’s “So pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!” or Brecht’s “Song of the Vivifying Effect of Money,” but in an agnostic or unsatisfied mode, the mode, if you like, of Midas or, worse, a Midas with a paper touch. It is a poem of accursedness or ill fortune, set up as in a parallel world (the world of depression, or perhaps a mirror world, which would help account for the role of the mirror at the end of the poem in breaking the spell?) similar, say, to the “vast landscape of Lament” in Rilke’s Tenth Elegy (“ Einst waren wir reich ”—We used to be rich). From “whence,” from “departed,” from “airless,” from “that witchy ball” and from “green living,” I have a sense that the earliest Russian and American space missions—Gagarin and Shepard, both in 1961—may have played into the poem, and the very earliest satellite photographs of ourselves—mirrorings—from space. If one strand of the poem’s thought is cosmic, the other is monetary; it is there in the play on “interest,” “living,” and “green”—with its echo of “greenback”—in “buck-you-up” and the spectacular “Figurez-vous.” Berryman learned this sort of image cluster from Shakespeare, who is a constant pressure on his style. Typically, such literariness and ambition are balanced by an early use of the illiterate particle “like.” The verbs are conspicuously loose fitting and vitalist: “drops,” “swarms,” “sheds,” and “eaten.” It is out of the vegetable nature of these that the animal character of “Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat” is compounded. “Stillwater” in the third stanza is a penitentiary in Minnesota (Berryman, as one would have suspected, actually owned such a mirror); and “plink” is a bit of family slang. There is no one else in the poem but Henry: it is he who smiles, who is “alone,” then “desolate,” and finally triumphant. Still, the very clever introduction of the murderer, as it were, flavors the poem (Berryman identified his particular area of expertise as a poet as the personal pronoun!). The murderer brings in society, depth, risk, an alter ego (“in feelings not ever accorded to oneself,” it says with stern magnificence). The poem is an authentic Dream Song, diffusely coercive, unconventional, complex, bleak, tender in adversity, rallying.
    The Dream Songs vary through every degree of lucidity and opacity: some of them, beautifully, add up; many others are at least consistent in their gestures; a few leave unanswered difficulties; but almost all make their own distinct mark on silence and the page. They are dramatic poems—few more so. Cliff-hanging or stalling episodes in a long-running series. Vainglorious or Pyrrhic, addled or plain: “His wife has been away / with genuine difficulty he fought madness / whose breast came close to breaking.” Often, they end up in rhetorical reaches most poems don’t go near: threat, prayer, promise, action, resolve. Berryman always insisted on their unity—“The Care & Feeding of Long Poems” was his special study—but that no longer seems a plausible or even an important claim, if it ever did. (Nor, analogously, does the siting or defining of Henry: he may not be Berryman, but he shares too many of the trials and tribulations of the twentieth-century American poet.) Reading through all the Dream Songs is like remaining in your seat while the lights go up and down on three