“Now these are strange opinions, self-confessed,/ from an ex-baby.”

Once, participating in the longstanding Iowa City tradition wherein emerging poets pick up established ones at the airport, I was tasked with collecting Philip Levine and his wife, Franny, in Cedar Rapids. Surely I had been chosen for this honor because of the quality and promise of my poems, and not because I was moderately well-adjusted and had a car. They were both in their eighties at the time, and after I loaded their luggage into the trunk of my Prius, Phil took the front seat and Franny the back. Returning to town, at a stoplight just off the highway, I gained the courage to turn to the poet in my passenger seat and say what had been on my mind: “I heard you once clocked John Berryman.”

Back then, in a graduate seminar, I had been reading Berryman’s masterwork, The Dream Songs, for the first time. These are the 385 funny, sad, sharp-shooting poems that precede Shane McCrae’s beautifully edited edition of 152 previously uncollected ones, Only Sing, newly published by FSG. This massive total, 537 Dream Songs, enough to read one a day for almost a year and a half, still excludes the 45 that John Haffenden published, along with other late, unpublished Berryman poems and fragments, in his 1977 collection, Henry’s Fate, now out of print. It was Haffenden’s introduction to that volume that tipped off McCrae to the existence of “several hundred more” unpublished Dream Songs, an archive from which, through what McCrae describes as “months of reading, typing, and wonder that the unpublished work, much of it strong, of such an important poet has gone uncollected,” he compiled Only Sing.

Including the new collection, the Dream Songs will now have been released as a sort of trilogy, a franchise starting with 77 Dream Songs (1964), which won a Pulitzer Prize, followed by 308 more in the National Book Award-winning His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), and ending with Only Sing. A threequel always begs the same question: do we really need more of these?

Dream Songs are Berryman’s invention and his “permanent” (to borrow Helen Vendler’s term) contribution to American Letters. The Songs mostly adhere to a form: three six-line stanzas, each following its own abcabc rhyme scheme. What sets them apart from other poems, even those by John Berryman, is their language, which, at its best, is so activated, taut, joyful, allusive, cacophonous, and fresh that, to read other poems after immersing oneself in the Dream Songs, is like entering a dark room from a bright day.

As a graduate student, I found The Dream Songs to be a crash course in poetic technique. In them, Berryman hefted euphemism and wielded enjambment and reinvented the ampersand, the caesura, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sprung rhythm for generations to come. He also threw punctuation around like Jackson Pollock is said to have thrown paint—with apparent randomness but shocking precision. A single comma in “Dream Song 46,” for instance, turns the plain phrase “I am outside” into a tragically hilarious story of false and true selves: “I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.”

But the Dream Songs have a problem, one they share with many a formative, beloved, canonical white man’s work from the past. Berryman’s poems deal with race, and specifically blackness, in a way that makes at least this contemporary white reader feel a need to reevaluate her attachment to them. That the Dream Songs contain what McCrae aptly terms “verbal blackface” is a thing for which Berryman himself was forced to account. After 77 Dream Songs, he revised his author’s note to further emphasize how separate his own voice was from that of the poems, and to name the blackface outright.

The first author’s note directs one’s reading only to the dream in Dream Songs:

“Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work.”

The revised note added the following:

“The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.”

The passage from Only Sing from which McCrae derives the collection’s title shows a characteristic interaction between Henry, here speaking in third person, and his friend. The Song takes the form of a petition, ending with this stanza:

could not he be replaced in Paradise, 
with the Serpent, here now 35 feet long 
which can not sting?
—Well, how we work it out? Don’t. Mr Bones, Ise 
prepared to come on heavy and strong 
on your side. Only: sing.

Without those well-thrown commas, we’d read the opening question as: could not the Serpent take Henry’s place in Paradise, which Henry, since he has and uses a stinger, does not deserve and would be willing to cede? But with the commas, we get: Could not Henry and the Serpent, both of whom have been thrown out of Paradise, be put back there again, please? After all, they are both harmless, or, at least, can not sting if/when they choose not to. Henry’s interlocutor offers support in this pursuit before correcting him: it’s sing, not sting.

The intrusion of blackface in this moment, “Ise prepared…,” is part of the larger jumble and slurring of language, including sing/sting, that is common to these poems. I am reminded of the moment in a previously collected Dream Song, “MLA,” where Henry insists to his listeners, half-drunk, half claiming that poetry is speech made into song: “I have a sing to shay.” McCrae’s title, in classic Dream Song fashion, means many things at once: Only Sing is a correction, a command (since singing is the only thing worth doing), and a suggestion of a different outlet for the violent impulses we have toward ourselves and others (how about you sing instead?). Even the lispy echo of the word “thing” is in there, as in the only thing, which poetry was to Berryman.

I recognize a version of my own anxiety in Vendler’s argument, in a 2015 article in the New York Review of Books, that the Dream Songs cannot be praised without qualification. “Flawed as they are,” she writes, they “remain infinitely quotable—the witty lament of a singular man with the courage to exhibit himself in shame, indignity, and exuberant speech.” This view, which takes these to be genius poems with a timebound, racist flaw, maintains the idea that such works, nowadays, are to be read as a sort of guilty pleasure, and that, subsequently, they are unteachable, because the blackface is unjustifiable and all you can do about it is wish it away.

In Only Sing’s introduction, McCrae offers a different view. The blackface is not an inconvenient flaw but is as “essential” to the poems as the whiteness of their speaker. For him, the Dream Songs document a

“representative 20th century American mind, and it is important that it is understood to be the mind of a white person. To contemporary readers, Henry’s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential. With Henry’s verbal blackface, Berryman externalizes the racial anxieties of the white, mid-century American. And he seems to do so consciously…he did not allow whiteness to be a default position.”

McCrae here allows the Dream Songs to be holistic, complete poems that make up the holistic, porous series into which their previously uncollected counterparts may now be freely slotted. It is their subject position that becomes conditional and limited, as it should be, as all subject positions are.

If McCrae has shown us how the Dream Songs do not allow whiteness the neutrality it claims in so much canonical literature, he has done so from a subject position of his own. As his recent memoir disclosed, McCrae was kidnapped from his black father by his white supremacist grandparents who tried to raise him without telling him he was black. McCrae’s own highly accomplished poetry is deeply inflected with this trauma. With Only Sing, McCrae’s contribution is not just the smart, useful things he has to say about the Dream Songs, but the fact that he would be willing to say anything about them at all, to put his name on them, and to work painstakingly in Berryman’s archive to give us more of them.

McCrae, in a sense, rescues these poems from being sites of debate, and presents them to us as something to be enjoyed on their own terms. “This is not,” he writes in the introduction, “a scholarly volume of Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs—my first concern was to make a book for a nonscholarly audience, to be read for pleasure, a book similar in layout to the already-published volumes of Dream Songs.” We may not have desperately needed 152 more Dream Songs, but we did, to my mind, desperately need a new way to love them, teach them, and trade in them. McCrae has provided the occasion for that.

Aside from this review’s epigraph, I can’t say I discovered many new favorite lines while reading the poems in Only Sing, but I did feel that my relationship with the series as a whole had been restored and deepened. Following from this, my relationship to the burgeoning poet I had been in Iowa, the poet who loved and learned from the Dream Songs, has also been restored and deepened.

• • •

During that time in graduate school, I found Iowa’s much-vaunted Writer’s Workshop to be a kind of paradise where no one would have used the word “difficult” to describe a poem, because the tacit agreement was that, as a poet, it is your responsibility to bring language to its fullest activation and bear witness to others doing the same. We loved to insist that poems’ speakers were separate from their authors at the same time as wanting to know everything about who their authors were and how they lived. Berryman’s poems made me wonder: what did it take to write like this?

Since the wind itself circulates less freely in Iowa City than gossip, I quickly found out that Berryman, born in 1914 in Oklahoma, drank self-destructively and killed himself at 57 by jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis. This was bad news. A suicide at 57 scared me—I thought there might come a time, maybe at 30, when you become an adult and those impulses abandon you. Berryman’s suicide confirmed for me that it might be possible to wrestle with your mind until one of you loses the battle—and until you are the loser, as one Song tells us, the mind might keep coming back for more: “Fancy the brain from hell / held out so long. Let go.”

Such a fate makes it hard to separate Berryman’s voice from that of his poems, especially when they say things like, “He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back. / He thought they was old friends.” In this one, “Dream Song 46,” it turns out that he and ruin “were not old friends,” since even when you think things are familiarly bad, they can get unfamiliarly worse. The poem ends this way:

He did not know this one.
This one was a stranger, come to make amends
for all the imposters, and to make it stick.
Henry nodded, un-.

When the true ruin shows up, revealing that all the others had been fakes, it greets Henry and he nods in reply: “un-”— the sound you might make to acknowledge something addressed to you, but also a prefix with no root word, the undoing of Henry.

Ah, ruin. Poets came to Iowa and ruined themselves all the time, mostly by getting drunk and falling down, sometimes onto students or other peoples’ spouses. But when I found out that this poet I was soon to collect at the airport had punched John Berryman while they were student and teacher at the Workshop—well, this was next-level, or so my peers and I thought. It was what poets had done in the past, before they became the domesticated, medicated, morally superior little freaks we were becoming.

So, when I turned to Philip Levine in the car and said, “I heard you once clocked John Berryman,” I thought I was, out of respect and awe, giving this seasoned poet the chance to recount for me the equivalent of a war story.

But he turned somber. “I had to,” he said, almost grief-stricken, as though it had happened yesterday. “He kept putting his hand on Franny’s knee.” A polite retelling of a hand up a skirt, if Berryman’s biographer Paul Mariani is to be taken at his word.

I glanced into my rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of Franny in the backseat. Her blue eyes met mine and I was struck by a sense of how much life this couple had lived together, and how dumb I must have sounded. “That’s terrible,” I said. Incredible panic ruled.

Levine then gave me a poet’s education: transformational and brief, a life and a literary lesson in one. He said Berryman had been his teacher at Iowa, and that this teaching had changed his life. He had even written an essay about it, which of course I hadn’t read, called “Mine Own John Berryman,” the title of which, he said, was a play on Sir Thomas Wyatt.

“Difficult poems are like difficult people. We can pathologize them or we can love them. Some of us are hopelessly attracted to them, some of us run. We might read the Dream Songs as symptoms of a madness or despair so profound that the weight of it breaks lines, warps syntax, and severs contact with social mores. But when we do, we forget that the best poems, the best art objects, are made things, not documents of an artist’s unmaking.”

“I love Wyatt!” I said, since I did, but I didn’t yet know his epistolary poem which begins, “Mine own John Poyntz, since ye delight to know/ The cause why that I me homeward draw”—a syntax that sounds like a Dream Song. I didn’t know the poem because, as W.S. Merwin says in “Berryman,” his poem about having John as a teacher, “I had hardly begun to read.”

Difficult poems are like difficult people. We can pathologize them or we can love them. Some of us are hopelessly attracted to them, some of us run. We might read the Dream Songs as symptoms of a madness or despair so profound that the weight of it breaks lines, warps syntax, and severs contact with social mores. But when we do, we forget that the best poems, the best art objects, are made things, not documents of an artist’s unmaking. I thought about this a lot when I studied acting: that an actor who has to bang on a door threateningly is a better actor if she can do so without bruising her hand. Is that Berryman? Is he the actor who, forgetting to act, banged on the door until his hand was beyond recovery?

But the Dream Songs are not the suicide note they have sometimes been taken to be. They are a wedge between the poet and his own destruction. As his first wife, Eileen Simpson, puts it in her memoir: “Many—I too at moments—blamed the suicide on John’s having been a poet…After a while I began to feel that I’d missed the obvious. It was the poetry that had kept him alive.” In Only Sing, he lives on, collected and un-.