In a 1966 interview with the BBC, John Berryman, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his celebrated poetry cycle 77 Dream Songs, boasted that, in the entire world, he had a total of thirty good readers. He was being interviewed at Ryan’s, his favorite Dublin pub, and he was drunk. He made big, looping motions with his hands and he slurred his words, but his voice retained its distinctive learned tenor with a curious flat accent you couldn’t quite place—New York? London? Minnesota?

He smiled beneath his feral beard. “Now I call thirty readers quite a lot,” he went on. “Don’t you think it’s quite good? I’m impressed!” He peered at his drinking companion through his trademark horn-rimmed glasses. “Have you got thirty readers?”

“I haven’t got three readers,” his companion, the English poet and critic A. Alvarez, answered.

Berryman’s head tottered on his narrow shoulders. “Well, then, I’ve been boasting,” he said. “Thirty is too many. That’s a lie. Maybe I have eight. Does that make you feel better?”

“That makes me feel much more cheerful,” Alvarez replied.

Berryman took a drag on his cigarette. “OK, eight,” he said. “But those people are awfully bright.”

Read on at MSP Mag.

“Dream Song 29” by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

And click here to learn more about all the bands that make reference to Mr. Berryman in their songs.