Sarah Fletcher: 'Life, friends, is boring—’
so goes the first line of John Berryman’s most famous Dream Song. It’s a flagrant provocation. It’s also a secret: he has counted us among his friends, whether we want to be or not, and we are thus confided in. Yes, life, friends, is boring. Why write a poem about being bored? It is the ultimate antidrama. The speaker knows that this is the case: ‘we must not say so.’ and recalls his mother scolding him as a boy, saying: ‘Ever to confess you’re bored | means you have no inner resources’.
It makes sense to invoke the mother. Boredom is embarrassing to admit because it is so childish. I teach primary school kids at the moment and being bored is their constant bleat. They become bored at the slightest bit of difficulty. And their boredom is understandable, forgivable. They want another project: they have listened to their boredom and it has suggested they move on to the next thing.
This has got me thinking a lot about boredom recently. Part of it, yes, is this mewling choir of ‘I’m bored’ I hear from my students at school, though I suspect much of this is me imbibing an international mood more than my own idiopathic ingenuity. It’s tidy to see the 2010s as anxious and the 2020s as boredom, but I’ve not quite convinced myself we’ve replaced one mood with the other. Instead, we remain suspended, unable to fully commit or feel either state. We are bored of anxiety and have anxiety about being bored. We are often in denial about both. Before then, we were swarmed with anxiety: starting with 9/11 and ending with Covid-19, and punctuated by various states of disaster and unease in between, against the backdrop of an accelerating climate crisis on which no individual action can touch. But we realised that the world did not end, and will not end, and sadly, as we know, the disasters continue. Urgency has fatigued us: perhaps it is too late.
One of Berryman’s brilliant anxiety poems, Dream Song 29, has this echo: ‘All the bells say: too late’. They ring with an inevitable morning in which truths are brought to light. In which nothing can be fixed. This makes his speaker panic, and examine his own affairs. But if it is too late, resignation seems like the least difficult choice. I’m bored. Life, friends, is boring. Dream Song 29’s speaker is wasting his time being terrified at the prospect of ‘too late’. They are two emotions that seem unable to establish a dialectic, so rather reverberate off each other ad infinitum. Yes, as Berryman says ‘We must not say so’: Boredom is a moral failing: a failing of our own creativity. I hear the speaker’s mother in my own ear: ‘ever to confess you’re bored | means you have no inner resources’.
But we’ve outsourced the resources. Boredom is no longer coming internally but is now arriving externally. We are all bored because we are all externally suffering the same malaise. Boredom is heavily linked to attention: we get bored when our mind wanders, when a project ceases to excite us. And of course, attention spans are rapidly dwindling. As one viral tweet goes, ‘attention so bad that now watching a film feels productive’.
Our boredom is now more understandable. Or, rather, not our fault. We are all big children. We have seen our stages of life extended and extended, with thirty-five year olds living in dorm rooms (at 35, Berryman was on his second marriage and third university posting), and eighteen year olds who cannot read studying at elite universities. Our childhood is not only being extended but we ourselves are regressing. So why focus on ‘inner resources’ in such conditions? Like climate change, like every disaster, individual action is useless in the fight against our increasing boredom. There is something else afoot. And still, as I say, I am unconvinced the boredom we feel now is true boredom.
Doomscrolling is a very specific manifestation of this quasi-fear-quasi-boredom: we are bored while it is happening, retaining little information of the short lived fleet of videos and images and words we see. It is boring but it is also a salve, far more preferrable, to the untenable bored-ness that happens outside of that. It is both relaxing and unpleasant. Without that, we imagine ourselves plucking out our feathers like unstimulated pet parakeets, or garnering zoo psychosis, like isolated orcas forced to perform. This is a very mundane cyborgism. Scrolling on my phone, I want to distract from the more pressing belief - that I am not bored, but rather, boring.
‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no inner resources’, the poem goes. Here, the use of the word ‘confess’ is wonderfully provocative. At the time of this book’s release, the confessional movement had reached a trendy, fever pitch (and 70 years later we are still dealing with the worst of its excesses). The literary scene was stripped of shame and from that undressing came deluges of poems about divorce and menstruation and, most of all, asylums. The book was released a year after Plath’s suicide, which, in its own way, put a morbid exclamation mark at the end of the confessional movement.
In the midst of this, Berryman’s confession is one of boredom. That seems to have more weighty shame than even the grossest bowels of Lowell’s domestic disputes or Snodgrass’s custody case over his son. And it is not for Berryman lacking things to confess: Berryman’s father committed suicide in front of him when he was a child, and by the time Dream Songs was released, he was on his third marriage and had a crippling dependency on alcohol. When asked years later in an interview how he felt about being associated with ‘confessional poetry’, he guffawed, ‘with rage and contempt! Next question’.
John Berryman’s speaker is relatable in his short attention span. Nothing can snag his interest. He acknowledges the greatness of the physical world: ‘the sky flashes | the great sea yearns’. He has been told to touch grass and found it no more green than he had hoped. But how bored can Berryman be? He released 77 dream songs in this collection, and this is only the 14th. When we hold the tome in our own hands we see he’s writing through it. The book is big enough to be used as a weight, and I make use of it as such in my studio apartment. Was it written because of boredom, through boredom, or something else?
In group therapy about five years ago, a therapist told us that boredom is actually a form of anger. This tidbit has stuck in my mind since. Firstly, because it seems on the face of it, untrue, despite being satisfyingly axiomatic. Boredom can give rise to frustration, but this seems different. If it is anger, and I am not convinced of this yet, it is an impotent anger. I wonder if the therapist’s opinion, though, is antiquated, or at least, in reference to a sort of boredom in which production can occur: the boredom of ‘Here We Are Now / Entertain Us’ Nirvana. The suburban-nihilism-of-living-in-the-shadow-of-your-parents boredom. The therapist was old and confident. She had long white hair and told us that anger is healthy in itself: it just matters what we do with it. Anger has directionality. Nirvana wrote Nevermind. Now it’s our turn to do something. The new, added constant anxiety into the mix of boredom has made both states subsequently less creative and worse off. We now have boredom without impetus, anxiety without a future.
Dream Song 14 is angry: it’s a denunciation of everything around him. ‘Life, friends, is boring’ is a lyric that wouldn’t be amiss amongst the grunge bands of the 90s. There is a similar well from which both talents spring – a well from which we have been cut off because of our obsessive fear.
What cure is there, at all, for this state? Berryman as a writer was a surprising advocate for anxiety. Pure anxiety: the type that sends people to the hospital with panic, that writhes cruelly through the body like it’s taking revenge upon it. He very charmingly in an interview in The Paris Review stated that he wished to be scared to death half of the time. In other interviews, he asserted that no great endeavour could be created without fear. Rather darkly, he once stated, ‘the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business’. At some point, Berryman’s ordeals did kill him, or at least, were not possible to write through. He is right, perhaps, in telling us ‘we have good reason to be afraid. The world is a terrifying place.’
Dream Song 14 ends cryptically and maybe even anticlimactically: though what climax do we expect in a poem about boredom, that is so clearly goading of its reader, unserious in its tone? It ends with a hilly landscape looking like a ‘drag’, before the intrusion of a dog that disappears only three lines after it is first mentioned: ‘leaving behind me | wag’. This is how the poem famously concludes. Even man’s best friend has abandoned our bored speaker. Scholars usually say the dog is when the speaker manages to focus his attention on something, anything. The dog is where the other steps into the poem and adds energy. But I dispute this. Before the dog, the speaker mentions ‘gin’. It is mentioned in passing, without qualification, with the quickness of someone who is ashamed of it. But after its mention, the poem manages to find itself nearing some conclusion.
For a man who was such an advocate for anxiety, he managed to go far and deadly lengths to diminish his own. He was a drinker. He was more than a drinker. He was an alcoholic, which ended up accelerating his mental health issues and had deleterious impacts on his marriage, job prospects, and creativity. Booze creates a negative feedback loop for both easing and aggravating anxiety. Lewis Hyde’s examination of Berryman’s poetry in light of his alcoholism in ‘The Booze Talking’ (1988) introduces astute close readings of his poetry with this in mind. Dream Song 29, which I referenced earlier, with its ominous echo of ‘too late’ was given particular attention. Hyde posits it is the obsessive ruminations of an alcoholic trying to remember what happened in a black out. The energy there is propulsive and manic, a world away from the bar-stool joker of 14.
If Berryman did not take his own advice and preferred to blot his fear out with drink, the speaker of The Dream Songs, Henry, did: The Dream Songs, if not about fear in content, are marked by their heterodox, stuttering syntax and bizarre tangents, not-quite-right rhymes. Reading them is disorientating and puts the reader on uneven footing. We are as nervous as the narrator. Or rather, often, as confused. Dream Song 14 sticks out so much because it is so confident, so much more syntactically simple. It is bored, and the form reflects that. It is an oasis in an otherwise jagged collection of many voices.
But boredom makes another appearance in The Dream Songs. Berryman published a sequel to the original 77 Dream Songs, so that they amounted to an astonishing 385. This book has had considerably less scholarship around it: critics called it bloated and uneven and obsessive. They were right. The second appearance of boredom here takes on a theological bent, and we chart Berryman’s rising interest in religion as it seeps through the latter dream songs. On a personal level, he was reacquainting himself with God. This period was the start of many repeated attempts to get sober and a variety of recovery programmes, that he persisted in wanting to take until his suicide. I wonder too if the death of so many of his colleagues through suicide and disease caused him to contemplate an afterlife: in Dream Song 153 he writes plaintively ‘I’m cross with the god who has wrecked this generation’. In Dream Song 256, boredom finally reappears, and it appears in reference to the speaker contemplating Heaven:
—I confess
that notion bores me dead,
for there’s no occupation there, save God,
if that, and long experience of His works
has not taught me his love.
His love must be a very strange thing indeed,
considering its products. No, I want rest here,
neither below nor above.
Of all the words here, dead bored sticks out the most. It runs in funny parallel to Berryman’s assertion that one should be scared to death half the time. Both suggest that these emotions, if taken to their fullest and most embodied extent, could kill. Forget the sky, the great sea, peoples, literature, and great literature. Even here, even in Heaven, he is bored. No resources. No occupation. If Dream Song 14, is farcical, then this is surely tragedy. His move towards God seems sprung from fear, and in it, he finds boredom. Wherein the Gen Z and late millennial renewed spirituality seems vice versa: sprung from boredom and, within it, finding fear.
If I had to choose between boredom and fear, I find myself in favour of fear: fear is an excess of “what ifs?” and comes with its assumed future (no matter how neutered by fears of death may be) while boredom does not. I think though, choosing any side, instead of this endless, overstimulated suspension we find ourselves in, is most admirable. Maybe we have no external resources, rather than inner, in which to entertain us. But we must not find ourselves agentless: therein is the death of poetry. Nothing is nothing for us. To quote Dream Song 76, ‘I saw nobody coming | so I went instead.’
/
Dream Song 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
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
a
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,
a
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
Sarah Fletcher is an American-British writer. Her debut collection PLUS ULTRA was published by CHEERIO Publishing in 2023; her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and The White Review. She is currently completing a PhD on pain and language at Aberystwyth.
