John Berryman Analysis

Essay by Anne Wilkes Tucker

“and empty grows every bed…” John Berryman

Growing up in Louisiana, I would sit by the Mississippi watching river traffic: ships heading to and from the oil and chemical refineries, tug boats maneuvering linked barges around the river bends, and ferries crossing cars and pedestrians from my hometown Baton Rouge to the west side of the river. When riding the ferry, I watched flotsam swirl in water so brown and thick that one couldn’t see more than a foot deep. Sometimes at the ferry landing, I talked to an old preacher who had walked the length of Mississippi from its source to its mouth at least twice, on legs so crippled by an accident that he could only walk aided by canes. He stood at the ferry landing beckoning…show more content…
When the river passes Baton Rouge, it is very deep, and wider than the height of the state’s phallic capitol, then the tallest building in Louisiana. By the time the river reaches New Orleans it has carved a depth of 25 stories and the currents are so treacherously swift that whatever falls in, including bodies, may not resurface before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. So I grew up drawn to the river and warned against it. Alec Soth lives at the northern end of the river and is equally drawn by its power, its lore and its physical grandeur as well as the rich legacy of literature that it has inspired, most especially Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Trekking along the Mississippi, Soth wasn’t interested in the large cities or industries. Few cities, or even small towns, that were originally founded for river commerce still rely on the river for their existence. Most cities have turned their backs to the “Father of Waters” as the Algonkian Indians named it. 3 With no interest in creating an economic or socio-political document about the river and its environs, Soth choose the rich imagery in certain poems as models and inspiration for his photographs. “ I see poetry,” he wrote, “as the medium most similar to photography … or at least…show more content…
Then, throughout the book, Soth strategically includes photographs of beds and mattresses, which are “like Lindbergh’s plane and Huck’s raft … vehicles for dreaming.”5 The coherence of the project places Soth’s book exactly within the tradition of Walker Evans’ American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, two books that have shaped the history of photography. While there are many differences in the three books, each photographer repeatedly uses certain physical objects symbolically within individual pictures and within the sequence of the pictures. Soth uses beds the same way Evans used cars and artifacts of American popular culture in American Photographs and Frank employed automobiles and American flags in The Americans. Dreams are, of course, not the only association evoked by the beds, and Soth’s pictures embody the rich multiplicity of possible references. For instance, the hospital bed in Green Island, Iowa might first evoke images of illness, before one would wonder what feverish dreams taunted its occupant. Or, a bed as a site of procreation is implied in the image of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home. Then, for anyone who grew up in Louisiana, the book’s last picture evokes thoughts of sweat and mosquitoes. Why did someone carry a bed to that spot, so close to the edge of the marsh? Surely it was not for assignations? Surely the need for privacy was not so great that someone would bare themselves to the gnats, ticks and other vermin,