Succession and poetry

From Andrew Epstein’s blog Locus Solus: Succession, Jeremy Strong, and Frank O’Hara.

Also with John Berryman: did you know that the the final episode of each season of Succession takes its title from Berryman’s “Dream Song 29”?

*

Having watched the show’s final episode, I tend to think that the primary purpose of the Berryman quotations is to add yet another layer of literariness to the proceedings — to deepen the veneer, so to speak. As when Mad Men invoked Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky,” I think that the Berryman invocations here amount to much of nothing.

[“Much of nothing”: a favorite fambly phrase from the early years.]