Thank you, Lawrence, for that post. From my perspective a writer's personal life has nothing to do with his writings. No more so than any of the equipment I fix everyday has anything to do with my personal life. I learned how to do what I do through my personal life, of course, and maybe some bits of intuition help from time to time -- mechanical intuition, I've often found, is strongest in those more mechanically trained than I am. But the point is that if the best AC man in the city kills himself tonight, it has no reflection on his work -- why then that of an artist? An artist is no different than a mechanic. An artist's work is his work, it's not him. Artists work in paints or stone or words or body movements or sound. AC artists work in metal wear.The inclination to identify an artist with her work is bullshit. Artists are all merchants, don't forget that. Just like preachers. Only Academics are pure souls. And Marines, of course. Mike Geary Memphis ----- Original Message ----- From: Lawrence Helm To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 9:46 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] American poetic scene at the beginning of 72 -----Original Message----- From: Steve Chilson Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the end of 52 thanks for this, Lawrence. I wouldn't mind reading more excerpts of it if you're so inclined... Steve: I finished Berryman's biography yesterday. Berryman became a great success. He won all the prizes, got all the recognition, had women falling all over themselves for him (and he really liked women -- lots of them) and he was famous. Everyone knew who he was. So here he is for us, we poetasters, we who fall short of the real thing. Here is what it would be like to move from amateur to professional: No more money worries, no more worries about having to teach classes he didn't want to. It is all his. He is there. It is January 1972 and he is at the pinnacle of his success: "Friday morning, January 7, after another restless night, Berryman told Kate he was going to his office to put his things in order. Kate sent Martha to school, then bundled Sarah to do the shopping. 'You won't have to worry about me anymore,' he told her as she went out. But she'd heard that one before too. At half past eight he put on his coat and scarf and walked down to University Avenue. There he caught the shuttle bus heading west toward campus. He passed the stores along the avenue, then got off with the morning crowd at Ford Hall. But instead of going to his office, he walked out onto the upper level of Washington Avenue Bridge. It was bitterly cold, but, rather than use the glass-enclosed walkway, he began waling along the north side of the bridge toward the west-bank campus. Three quarters of the way across, he stopped and stared down. "A hundred feet below and to his right rode the river: narrow, gray, and half frozen. In front of him were the snow-covered coal-storage docks, and directly below the winter trees and a slight knoll rising like a grave. So it was still there, waiting. He climbed onto the chest-high metal railing and balanced himself. Several students inside the walkway stopped what they were doing when they saw him and stared in disbelief. He made a gesture as if waving, but he did not look back. From this height, he must have figured, the blade did seem redundant after all. Then he tilted out and let go. "Three seconds later his body exploded against the knoll, recoiled from the earth, then rolled gently down the incline. The campus police were the first to arrive and found a package of Tereytons, some change, and a blank check with the name Berryman on it. Inside the left temple of his shattered horn-rimmed glasses they found the name a second time. An ambulance took the body to the Hennepin County Morgue, where Berryman was officially pronounced dead." So, some on Lit-Ideas might ask, 'what was his problem?' Well, we would have to define 'problem.' He could only write well if he was drinking heavily. Not while he was drunk of course but maybe during the first few, and then afterwards when he sobered up and someone told him what he had done the night before and he felt remorse. Remorse is another good subject for poetry. Then too there are the deep psychological problems. His father committed suicide or his mother murdered him, but he mostly thought the former. He always kept going back to that, his father's suicide, so obviously that was one of his psychological problems. Then there was his mother. She was a dominant lady and when he was losing an argument with her he discovered as a child that passing out always ended the argument so he did that a lot. His wives weren't as impressed with that procedure as his mother was. Then too there was his philandering, usually done while drunk. None of his wives appreciated that as much as he did. Perhaps the last wife, Kate, telling him that if he didn't quite drinking and philandering she was really, really, really going to leave him and this time she really, really meant it tipped him over the edge, so to speak. Maybe at his age, 58, he didn't think he had enough energy left to acquire another wife. He was a really, really, really old 58. I've been rereading the Dream Songs and discover that I'm not nearly as impressed with them as when I first read them years ago, when they were first published. Lawrence