I've never been a huge fan of poetry. Without the assistance of music, poetry usually doesn't hold much rhythm to my ear. Not like prose does, anyway. Sometimes reading good prose feels like I'm reading a poem. And that's usually the stuff I like.

So my favorite poets are mostly modern songwriters. They'll probably never end up in an Anthology of English Literature. But what they do—communicate thoughts through rhymed and unrhymed verse, use words to illicit feeling, emotion—seems a lot like ... um, poetry, doesn't it?

There is some "academic" poetry that has appealed to me over the years, too. Unfortunately, my taste in this stuff is a lot like my taste in fiction: I am drawn to the stuff that is darkly comic, ironic, irreverent, or preferably, all three, please.

I've never participated in the "Blogger (Silent) Poetry Reading" before, and I hesitated doing so today, due to my mixed feelings about what we as a culture refer to as "poetry" and because I knew anything I put up here would most likely be depressing. And, you know, I'm normally so chipper. But in the end, my desire to partake in something my blog friends were doing won out. And yes, if they jumped off a bridge, I guess I would, too. So long as they were jumping into a whiskey river.

So here goes ... this is Dream Song #14, from John Berryman's Dream Songs. It has stuck with me and haunted me ever since I read it in Freshman English over 15 years ago. It's not necessarily pretty or pleasant, but it does have a sort of dangerous beauty to it that I find compelling. And while on first read the message seems entirely pessimistic, on subsequent reads, I've gleaned a faint note of hope in it. But maybe that's just me.

14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

—John Berryman

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