Chimera Song Mosaic
Saturday, November 13, 2004
 
To further shore up Josh's comments about Berryman's influence on live poets (me too), check out Joyelle McSweeney's "Animal Instruction," which includes this evidence:

"At the postmaster's soiree
I wanted to be filled
as with risotto . . ."

compare to these lines from Dream Song #4:

"Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice."

And the end of McSweeney's poem:

"The yellow eye boiling, the
beak pointing blackly to the floor
it goes over it again, and again
nothing is skipped."

compare to the end of Dream Song # 29:

"He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing."

(I did not post McSweeney's poem in its entirety. For that, go to CROWD 2, 2002, or The Red Bird.)

- posted by Deborah Wardlaw Pattillo @ 2:42 PM

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