FSG's Work in Progress Celebrates John Berryman

Wow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is rolling out all the John Berryman goods in the midst of his centennial celebration. As we mentioned last week, FSG is publishing four new books of Berryman verse. To sweeten the deal, at their blog, Work in Progress, they're publishing a series of reflections on the poetry and legacy of Berryman by some of our favorite poets. Posted most recently, Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes: "The incandescent temperament of Berryman’s poetry strikes the page bright and cold like the bioluminescence that seeks its way out from the lower abdomen of a firefly." Also of note, Dorothea Lasky considers "Berryman’s Haunted I":

I often think of my favorite poets as employing what I would like to call a Metaphysical I. I define this as an I who acts, within the poem, as a kind of shapeshifter. For me, this is the most powerful position an I can take: it can adopt any role, can don any costume, without promptings—external or internal—from the poem. In other words, a Metaphysical I is a haunted I.

What I have always loved about Berryman is his ability to function so well within his own haunted being, his hallucinatory movements within the poems: there, the imaginative world and the real world float together seamlessly. Part of this is due to his understanding of poem as performance, an understanding rooted deep in his love of Shakespeare: a poem sits on the stage and its job is to entertain, surprise, and terrify a reader beneath the changing moods and lights of live theater.

Read on with pieces by Rick Moody and Miranda Popkey. And if that is not enough Berryman for you, our article this week features Daniel Swift's "The Heart Is Strange," excerpted from the Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems by John Berryman, and yes indeed, published by FSG.