April 11, 2013 :Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs with Jim Vrabel

                      A staged performance of poet John Berryman's masterwork:              

 

 

 

                                                     DREAMSONGS    

Jim Vrabel is a local historian and the author of When In Boston: A Timeline & Almanac (Northeastern University Press). He is co-author of John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man (St. Martin’s Press).


A long-time neighborhood activist and former city official in Boston, he now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.


Jim attended the Graduate School of English at the University of Iowa, which is where he first encountered John Berryman’s Dream Songs. After expecting others to do it, he composed Homage to Henry: A Dramatization of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, an 80-minute one-man play by taking some 90 of the most brilliant and autobiographical of the songs - in whole or in part - re-ordering them and adding a very few lines of connecting text.


The play received a staged reading at the Charlestown Working Theater, and has been performed for the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers at Boston University and at the Oberon Theater as a benefit for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge.


Paul Mariani, Berryman’s biographer and a poet himself, calls Homage to Henry “a sad and very human story, as stark in its way as anything in Samuel Beckett.”

Poet Tino Villanueva Reading Feb 28, 2013

(Left: Tino Villanueva)   (Right :Doug Holder)

                                                            photo courtesy: Emily Pineau


     Thoughts on the Tino Villanueva Reading

      By Emily Pineau

            “All of us have memory in this room.  A writer takes it one step further,” explains poet Tino Villanueva after he reads a part of his book-length poem, Scene from the Movie GIANT.   This book-length poem that Villanueva reads an excerpt from illustrates his experience of watching a scene that deals with Mexican racism from the movie Giant.   Villanueva’s memories of this scene connect to the idea of cultural identity, and he is very passionate about this subject. Villanueva also alternates writing in Spanish and in English, which is something that I find very intriguing.  When Villanueva did this reading at Endicott he passed out an English translation for his poem “Convocation of Words”, which is about his struggle and determination to understand difficult English words.  Although I do not have the personal experience of being bilingual, I have attempted to learn Spanish before. It was very frustrating for me because I used to be very close to a Spanish family, but I could not understand what they were saying when they’d speak in their language, and I always failed to de-code the Spanish soap operas on television at their house.  Villanueva’s poetry reminds me that language is very complicated, but it is also beautiful and worth untangling. 

            “Those tangled images kept coming in volumes,” Tino Villanueva reads from his poem about Ann Sexton in his book There is Another Voice.   The language and imagery that Villanueva uses is vivid and very powerful.  My personal favorite of the poems he presented is called “Catharsis” which has a jazzy feel to it.  He read this poem fast, and with rhythm.  Since this poem is about studying for a final exam, and the time leading up to it, this style and pacing that he used worked very well.  Also, I really like his poem “Something Beyond Light”, which is about writer’s block, and the moment an idea comes into light.  This concept is one of the themes in my own writing, so I felt like I could really connect.  Also, this theme of writing and writer’s block makes its way into Villanueva’s poem “Voice Over Time”, which he read in Spanish.  With the English translation in from of me, I read to myself, “I wanted to write so badly it hurt.  All afternoon tied to a desk, to a page flat on a table—I was getting nowhere, just fending off failure and the darkening light.”  As Villanueva read this poem in Spanish it made me realize that no matter what language is used, the passion that compels someone to write is a language that everyone can understand.