Consisting of the original, Pulitzer Prize winning, 77 Dream Songs published in 1964, and then the subsequent 300 other poems published in 1969, The Dream Songs is generally considered John Berryman’s masterwork. Berryman worked within his own developed form with each poem consisting of 18 lines, divided up into three stanzas with six lines in each, and often with the third and the 6th line being shorter than the others. However, the content is anything but formal. Fracturing the syntax with both high and low speech mannerisms, Shakespeare mixed with street talk, drunken murmurings and declarative orations, drawing upon subjective personal experiences as well as other literary references (the deaths of American authors in particular), even interjecting the poems with multiple voices, the formal qualities to the poetry become secondary to the speech derived associations that make up the voice for the poetry. And the voice for these poems is not Berryman’s, but a man named, Henry, who often talks to and from himself in first, second and third person, as well as through Mr. Bones, a black-faced minstrel that plays a role similar to that of a Greek Chorus, or, if you place significance with his name, a memento mori that can quickly turn all of the poems into morbid elegies.

A bit confusing yes it is, as this is dense poetry that needs to be read with lots of breath space in order to allow the poetic shifts to come through with their own inflection and register; reading the poems in a singular, evenly paced, narrative voice rendering them incomprehensible. Yet, even with a carefully paced reading, there are still many that seem to not move beyond their obscurity. But when the poems do come together for the reader, that is when the magic happens, when the mishmash of emotions, the tangential thoughts, the loosely associated connections, create the core experience of Berryman’s idiosyncratic lingual gestures. 'Our breakdowns guarantee us,' sad a pal. (226)

At first I thought working through these poems is sort of like panning for gold, where after I found a poem which I thought was particularly striking, I placed a check beside its number in the Table of Contents for future reading. Although, the poems proved later to be more elusive for such solid impressions because when I went back to read the poems I had noted, on the second go around sometimes they didn't grab me as much as they originally had and on top of that, some other poem, say on the next page over for example, would then completely enthrall me even though I had not ‘checked’ it the first time around. “What’s going on with this book?” It felt like some sort of Borges short story where nothing is added or taken from the content of the book but between the time the book is closed and then reopened, the words and phrases take on a new lives of their own as they reformulate their textual arrangements, making it impossible to ever read again what had been read before.

And that’s what the title means to me. Despite Berryman often being classified as a confessional poet, these are not his dream songs, nor are they Henry’s, but the reader’s own dream songs. And perhaps this is why Berryman composed the poetry through the voice of a fictional character, so that the poetry would remain as material in which there could constantly emerge new relational experiences. So despite the abstraction, these poems are too much in the jugular to not have the potential to become powerful, even painful, transmitters for their emotional and psychic disturbances, the recognition of which largely being based upon the reader’s momentary receptivity. But like any dream, there is both prominence and graciousness derived from the ephemeral nature of these subconscious dwellings, which occasionally surface only to then sink back down into the opaque depths. What to make of them? The next person you see begin telling them one of your dreams last night and see how long you can hold their interest, noticing yourself how impossible it is to fully convey the experience of the dream– yet there is no doubt in your little baffled mind just how real that dream was.