John Berryman is frequently cited as an influence by contemporary writers. But aside from “the greatest hits” in his Dream Song collections, his poems are seldom studied carefully for their intertextual weavings of theme and tone. Are the poems too difficult? Too whacky? Too politically incorrect? This course will dig into Berryman’s work through close reading and class discussion, and attempt to make sense of a difficult, but accessible masterpiece in American poetry.
Mike Perrow is the author of Five Sequences for the Country at Night, a poetry collection, and he received an MFA from U-Mass, Amherst. His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Shenandoah Review, Volt, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, storySouth, Willow Springs Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of Boston Review’s eighth annual poetry prize, judged by Mark Strand.
