White Like Me: John Berryman and the Institutionalization of American Poetry at Midcentury

Robert M. Brimingham Lunch Series: "A Conversation With...": 10/22 Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, Assistant Professor, English Department. How should we make sense of the fact that a major twentieth-century American poet’s appropriated, in the central work of his career, the racist performance tradition known as blackface minstrelsy? The Dream Songs were Berryman’s response to what he saw as a dead end in the history of modernism; they were also conceived and published within the period of some of the most intense violence of the Civil Rights Era. Berryman’s minstrelsy suggests the deep connection between those twinned crises.