tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5409555464635498587.post4015235126896678603..comments2023-06-01T08:39:51.620-07:00Comments on elenabella: John Berryman Poetry Celebrationelenahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07195930445294044722noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5409555464635498587.post-10480349373842770072009-01-07T02:26:00.000-08:002009-01-07T02:26:00.000-08:00Hello Lyle,Thank you so much for your post. As it ...Hello Lyle,<BR/><BR/>Thank you so much for your post. As it happens, I just finished reading Eileen Simpson's book, and the words you chose to describe it strike me as perfect: deeply sympathetic and compelling. I plan to write more about that soon.<BR/><BR/>Berryman is one of the powerful ghosts haunting Dinkytown, the Washington Avenue Bridge, and Ford Hall. I think he is kind, compassionate, anguished, and inhabited by his own many ghosts. I am learning a lot from him these days.elenahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07195930445294044722noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5409555464635498587.post-46887553108070349582009-01-06T20:53:00.000-08:002009-01-06T20:53:00.000-08:00John Berryman ended his life (in January 1972) the...John Berryman ended his life (in January 1972) the year I was in the Urban Arts Poetry and Songwriting class. One of the other students in the class especially liked Berryman's poetry.<BR/><BR/>A couple of years later I met a man, a local theatre actor, who had seen Berryman jump, or very nearly did.<BR/><BR/>The man was walking on the Washington Avenue bridge, and casually noticed an older man standing by the railing. He didn't pay close attention, was looking off in another direction, then he saw several people running toward where the man had been standing. It was in fact John Berryman, and he had just jumped from the bridge.<BR/><BR/>It was at the West Bank end of the bridge, on the north side -- on the river bank below that part of the bridge were huge piles of coal that the University kept there in the winter for heating the buildings. The man who described this to me specifically mentioned the coal piles.<BR/><BR/>Somebody else I met a couple of years after that, a woman who had been a student at the U. in the early 1970's, told about seeing Berryman sometimes, a solitary man in a seersucker suit and bow tie, sitting alone drinking coffee at the counter in Bridgeman's in Dinkytown. This would have been sometime during the last year or so of his life.<BR/><BR/>Don't know if you've ever read <I>Poets in Their Youth</I> by Eileen Simpson, Berryman's first wife (and a writer herself). It's her memoir of their life together, in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and of many of the poets and writers and other people in their life during those years. I found it deeply sympathetic and compelling, it shed much light for me on the poetry world in the United States during that time. Includes some marvelous photographs.<BR/><BR/>The word verification word for this comment (I'm not making this up) is "cults."Lyle Daggetthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com