By Stuart Mitchner

…the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him….

—John Berryman, October 1970

The Paris Review interview with poet John Berryman was conducted in Minneapolis, the site of the May 25, 2020 crime scene that fired the-three-word shot heard round the world (“I Can’t Breathe”). Rereading the interview during the George Floyd summer, I underlined what Berryman said, twice, after he was asked, “Where do you go from here?” Both times he began his non-answer, “When I get my breath back.” Despite claiming that he was “very interested” in the question, Berryman wasn’t ready for it (“I’m hopelessly underweight and the despair of about four competent doctors”). For an amateur poet of the long view like myself, the stress on catching breath was worth noting at a time when the words “I Can’t Breathe” were being spelled out on signs all over America.

There was an eerie sort of poetry in the way Berryman’s need to get his breath back resonated 50 years later, especially for a poet who often reads his work as if the words are being forced out of him, not to mention the fact that he was being interviewed in the Alcohol Treatment Center of a Minneapolis hospital at the time. Before declaring that “ordeal” is “among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement,” Berryman confessed to having “a tiny little secret hope that … I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the world has never heard before.”

After repeating his line about artists who are fortunate in their ordeals, Berryman mentioned “Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness,” and ended by saying, “I hope to be nearly crucified.” When the interviewer pointed out, “You’re not knocking on wood,” Berryman said, “I’m scared, but I’m willing. I’m sure this is a preposterous attitude, but I’m not ashamed of it.” Half a year later, in March 1971, he recanted the last statement, adding a one word comment: “Delusion.” His collection Delusions Etc. was published on January 1, 1972. Six days later on January 7, he jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Last Act

The night before his last act, Berryman drafted a prelude to it in the style of one of his Dream Songs: “I didn’t. And I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade / to gash my throat after I’d climbed across / the high railing of the bridge / to tilt out, with the knife in my right hand / to slash me shocked or fainting till I’d fall / unable to keep my skull down but fearless.”

Thinking back to Minneapolis and the bridge and Berryman’s last day of life, January 7, 1972, I read April Bernard’s introduction to the 2014 reprint of Berryman’s Sonnets, where she notes that his “Dream songs are just over when they are over; they do not ‘end’ or ‘conclude,’ and that refusing the end” is characteristic of his late work, where the poems become a kind of ongoing “diary,” in which he “tries to outrun mortality, and all other endings, by the mad, brave, exuberance of refusing to stop.”

Endings

Biographer John Haffenden’s account of Berryman’s last morning is based on the eyewitness evidence of one Art Hitman, a university carpenter who was crossing the bridge inside the glass-enclosed pedestrian walkway when he saw Berryman climb over the north side at about 9 o’clock: “He jumped up on the railing, sat down and quickly leaned forward. He never looked back at all.”
In Paul Mariani’s biography Dream Song, Berryman climbed “onto the chest-high metal railing and balanced himself,” and while several students watched, “made a gesture as if waving…. Then he tilted out and let go.”

My guess is Berryman would prefer Haffenden’s version, if only because his Dream Song characters Henry and Mr. Bones would enjoy the idea of a witness named Hitman. Also, if Berryman’s preferred ending for a poem is closer to the “mad, brave, exuberance of refusing to stop,” he would dismiss the gesture of waving to the students as superfluous. The whole point is how quickly it should happen. No looking back, as if such a thing were possible.

The one word in Mariani’s version he might retain is “tilted,” with its mirroring of the line in the fifth stanza of Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge,” where a “bedlamite” appears on the bridge’s parapets: “Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, /A jest falls from the speechless caravan.” Berryman’s first published poem was an “Elegy for Hart Crane,” who jumped to his death not from a bridge but from the stern of a ship 40 years before, April 27, 1932.

Dylan on “the Road Ahead”

After leaving his hometown Hibbing, 18-year-old Robert Zimmerman spent a year in the Dinkytown section of Minneapolis, taking classes at the University of Minnesota, which is when he became Bob Dylan. In the closing pages of his memoir Chronicles (2004), after mentioning fellow Minnesotans Roger Maris, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eddie “Summertime Blues” Cochran (“Native sons — adventurers, prophets, writers and musicians, all from the North Country”), Dylan says, “I felt like I was one of them or all of them put together,” but within a decade “the national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble the Night of the Living Dead. The road ahead would be treacherous, and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either.”

Poetry Happens

Doing what I do and have been doing every week for two decades is itself a sort of poetry. You begin with the date on which your “poem” will be appearing. Then you look around at current happenings that can be connected to, as in rhymed with, the people, places, and themes that the date puts in play. In this case, the month of January itself is of more consequence than its 21st day if only because it begins with the birth of J.D. Salinger, which brings to mind, immediately and maddeningly, the ongoing literary mystery (one beyond even Henry James) about the 45 years of work Salinger readied for publication during his self-imposed exile from the world of books and bookchat. In the 15 years since his death in January 2010, nothing has been published, in spite of his son Matt’s promise in 2019 that it would be forthcoming.

January 7

According to Wikipedia, on January 7, 1894, Thomas Edison made a kinescope film of someone sneezing. On the same day he received a patent for motion picture film.

On January 7, 2025, a series of wildfires ravaged the Greater Los Angeles area, resulting in at least 16 deaths and 13,401 structures destroyed.

Also noted was the January 7, 1972 death of “poet and scholar John Berryman.” Still to be noted is the shooting death of Renee Good, a poet, on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. Berryman’s “impossible life situation,” no “almost” about it, is now, and the nation has responded with “rage and love.”