Monday, January 07, 2019

Sad anniversary …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `Wave From the Fat Book Again'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)



John Berryman committed suicide on this date in 1972 by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. I visited the site once while driving through Minneapolis. Oddly enough, I live right down the street from Philadelphia's Washington Avenue.
One poem in his last collection, Delusions, Etc., seems to me have prefigured his end:


He Resigns

                   Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.
                        Her having gone away
                        in spirit from me. Hosts
                        of regrets come and find me empty.

                        I don’t feel this will change.
                        I don’t want anything
                        or person, familiar or strange.
                        I don’t think I will sing

                        anymore just now,
                        or ever. I must start
                        to sit with a blind brow
                        above an empty heart.

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