Making room for the pain …

… My John Berryman: A Poet of Deep Unease - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Now, a half-century later, the dream songs remain a delicious, horrible, grotesque, ridiculous, fragmentary, tortured, diary-like transcription of a life in which a man worked hard, got up early each day to work at his desk and assemble language into art, strived to love his young wife and children, taught his classes, lectured, wrote letters of recommendation, mentored his students, and fulfilled the obligations that come with being a lonely man of letters living in the Midwest. Envy doesn’t appear to have been one of Berryman’s afflictions. But he was a poet of deep unease, and in this unease he longed for stillness, silence, and the peace of lying down.