John Berryman once had an intense argument with a fellow professor, and

when the workshop was over, Berryman retreated to [Irene] Kenney’s Bar and began drinking heavily, arguing with anyone unlucky enough to get in his way.

While John Berryman was on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, W. D. Snodgrass, the original confessional poet, was one of the members of his class.

I have been very fortunate twice in my career as a student of poetry,” William Dickey wrote in Ed Dinger’s Seems Like Old Times, “first to have been at Reed College as an undergraduate with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, second to have been in John Berryman’s extraordinary and intense poetry workshop with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette.

On the evening of September 17, Berryman boarded the Pullman sleeper for Iowa City, and the following morning checked into the Jefferson Hotel. […] John Montague, the Irish poet, had enrolled in Berryman’s workshop and remembered seeing him eating alone at the Jefferson Hotel, a copy of The ‘Caine Mutiny’ open before him, ‘nervous, taut, arrogant, uneasy.’

Berryman spent his first few days back in Iowa City

registering students, then moved into an apartment at 409 East Jefferson Avenue. Later, after an intense argument with a fellow professor, and a night of drinking heavily, Berryman staggered back to his apartment, where, unable to find his key, he tried to force the door. When the landlord saw how drunk he was, he refused to let Berryman in. Upset, and desperately needing to go to the bathroom, Berryman began shouting obscenities. But when the landlord refused to let him in, Berryman squatted on the front porch and defecated. Berryman was locked up for ‘disorderly conduct,’ and was fired shortly thereafter.

At six in the evening on February 4, [Berryman’s] train arrived in Iowa City. He settled into his second-floor apartment at 606 South Johnson, then spent the rest of the evening drinking with some old friends from Princeton. By the time he got back to his apartment, he was very drunk. He managed to negotiate the stairs to his apartment, but as he came out of the bathroom into the dark hallway, he fell down the stairs and crashed into a half-glass door.

Philip Levine talks about being taught by Robert Lowell and John Berryman at the University of Iowa, where his classmates included Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass and Henri Coulette.

Jan Weissmiller, poet and co-owner of Prairie Lights Bookstore, describes a few of the haunts and hangouts in Iowa City where Robert Lowell and John Berryman would meet in the 1950s:

On the way from Prairie Lights to Iowa Book, are two bars and two restaurants that surely contain either writers or ghosts of writers. The first is Micky’s Irish Pub (11 South Dubuque Street). The antique bar at Micky’s was moved from the original Donnelly’s bar on Dubuque Street, now at 110 East College Street, where Workshop writers Robert Lowell and John Berryman met …