The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2 page)

This collection begins with
The Sonnets
, Ted’s most famous book. It really is quite close to where Ted began, despite the fact that it is a classic. It is a young man’s book, the product of relentless self-education, and being partly constructed out of lines from “early poems,” often suggests the awkward intensity of inexperience. But
it floats above that place as if observing it from the dead: “dear Berrigan. He died / Back to books. I read.”

It is important to say once again that
The Sonnets
was written in New York, that Ted had arrived in New York via Providence and Tulsa; that Ted would leave New York for a while but then return to it; that he was always called a New York School poet, and that he mostly liked the attribution.
The Sonnets
, in fact, could reflect no other setting than that city. In these poems New York bricks and human density have become the interior walls of someone always reading and thinking. Outside-in.

The Sonnets
was written in the early 60s, most especially in 1963: that is, it seems to have been in 1963 that Ted realized he was generating a long sonnet sequence, though he had written some of the poems as early as 1961. Entries in his journals, dated November 16 and 20, 1962, record the composition of the first six sonnets out of lines from previous poems and from his translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre.” But there was a point, early in 1963, when he suddenly knew what he was doing: with Dadaist cut-up and Cageian chance methods, transforming not-so-good poems into an astonishing and original structure.

The reader will come to notice that Ted returned to the strict form of
The Sonnets
several times, in his books, to make points about his life and the passage of time. The form is suited to detached self-scrutiny, using lines and phrases from past and present poems, reading material, and ongoing mind, in an order determined by numbers rather than syntax. The pieces of the self are allowed to separate and reform: one is not chronology but its parts and the real organism they create. Ted liked to say that poetry is numbers, and maybe everything is numbers. The sonnet form is “about” the number fourteen, but Ted’s sonnets use fourteen as a frame for the disassemblage of the number, making a real advance in the form and its relation to the psyche. To the extent that Ted broke and remade the form, it became possible to use it for more than argument. One could condense cognition into fourteen or so lines, if each piece, each segment of the fourteen, even each phrase in a line, meant enough.

The Sonnets
has been through four editions. There were originally eighty-eight sonnets, but in the first two editions (from “C” Press and Grove Press) he allowed only sixty-six; in the third edition (from United Artists) he added six more; and in the fourth edition (Penguin Books) I included seven more that he had authorized before his death in 1983. This collection conforms to the Penguin edition in including seventy-nine sonnets.

After the composition of
The Sonnets
, Ted entered a period of further involvement with aleatory methods, cut-up, collage, and transliteration, overlappingly with the more direct poems of
Many Happy Returns
. We have placed three works written according to a “method” (a word he liked) in a single section called
Great Stories of the Chair
. They are the eight-poem sequence “The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford,” the sequence of prose paragraphs “Great Stories of the Chair,” and the long poem “A Boke.” All of
Many Happy Returns
is included in a separate section.

On the manuscript of “The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford” Ted scrawled “1963? or 4?” The first version of the sequence was published in two issues of Ted’s magazine, “
C” (A Journal of Poetry)
, in 1964. The eight poems are hilarious and ferocious. They are obviously transliterations, that is, translations via sound and thought association of works in a foreign language. The original texts are to be found in Pierre Reverdy’s
Quelques Poèmes
(see notes). Ted had previously written several transliterative poems: one example from
The Sonnets
is “Mess Occupations” (Sonnet XXXIX), with the note “
after Henri Michaux.”
There is an especially fluid, automatic quality to the lines of
The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
, and an occasional vicious literalness: “Eat a potato she said you sober All-American.”

Great Stories of the Chair
reveals a new influence on Ted’s writing, that of the prose of William Burroughs, whom Ted did not read until after the composition of
The Sonnets
. Three of the “stories” were published in the journal
Mother
, in 1965, under the title
Paragraphs
. The entire sequence of twelve prose blocks was published in
Angel Hair
4 (winter 1967/68). The cut-up methods of Burroughs and Brion Gysin do not seem essentially different from Dadaist procedures. However, applied to prose structures which coaxed plot out of words themselves, Burroughsian cut-up resulted in novels that are full-blown visions generated as much verbally as through the senses. Poetry originating from within words (not from within the poet per se) was already Ted’s practice. He always asserted that he thought in words, that he was usually either reading, writing, talking, thinking about/in words, or sleeping. Words were literally his mind in process. And to cut up his own poems, for example, was not to do anything other than to think and feel.
Great Stories of the Chair
is blocks of thought and emotion—what else?

Though “A Boke” is dated 1966 in
So Going Around Cities
, it was first published in the journal
Kulchur
in the autumn of 1965. It is a cut-up of an article by the poet James Dickey, first published in
The New Yorker
, about traveling around the United
States giving poetry readings. “A Boke” is a send-up of mainstream humorlessness, but with an autobiographical air to it, and, as Ted once told me, intentionally drawn out to a point veering toward (not quite arriving at) boredom. Interspersed from time to time throughout “A Boke” is the line “Remember the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen?” which Ted lifted from Burroughs. Also included in the mix are references to the folk songs “John Henry” and “Nine-Pound Hammer.”

It is the book
Many Happy Returns
, published by Corinth Books in 1969, that is Ted’s first major statement after
The Sonnets
. The poems included in the collection span a large part of the 60s, beginning with a poem from 1962, “Words for Love,” and ending with “Resolution,” written in 1968. The forms used include cut-up and collage but also the “personal poem,” as derived from Frank O’Hara’s work, the “things to do” poem based on the examples of Gary Snyder and Sei Shonogon, and the long poem, as well as what one might call simply the “poem” poem, Ted’s version of the emotionally direct, realistic shorter poem. There is a new open-field style in evidence, characterizing especially the great “Tambourine Life,” dated “Oct. 1965–Jan. 1966.” “Tambourine Life,” divided into seventy sections of varying length, is an opening of Ted’s voice; it sounds like him talking, though it also sounds “constructed,” in unexpected and witty ways. The poem contains much domestic detail, specific 60s references, philosophy presented lightly, and an under-current of tragedy. It is dedicated to Anne Kepler—the Anne of
The Sonnets
, who died in a fire set by an arsonist while Ted was writing the poem; the book itself is dedicated to Anne Kepler and to Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966.

Another larger poem in
Many Happy Returns
is the collaged (and visually collage-like) “Bean Spasms,” dated 1966. It was written in conjunction with images by George Schneeman and first published in the book
Bean Spasms
, a collaborative volume involving Ted, the poet Ron Padgett, and the artist Joe Brainard. Ted later incorporated into other books the work from
Bean Spasms
that was uniquely by himself.

The late 60s mark Ted’s departure from New York, and his work from the early 70s is replete with references from other locales. It is significant that Ted’s first book of the 70s,
In the Early Morning Rain
, was published by Cape Goliard, a British publisher.

In the Early Morning Rain
made lavish use of drawings (now lost) by George Schneeman to create spaciousness and to emphasize groupings. The book is a mix of work in older styles employing found materials, chance methods, transliteration, the form of
The Sonnets
, etc., and poems from the late 60s and 1970 in the new, open style of
Many Happy Returns
. In 1968 Ted had begun leading a migrant poetry teacher’s life and was spending time in Midwestern university towns like Iowa City and Ann Arbor. The light was different, he was making new friends, and he had begun to feel fated: to be addicted to drugs (pills, mostly speed) and perhaps to die early. The new poems elegize people who have recently died (Jack Kerouac, Rocky Marciano, Franny Winston, and others), allude to the war in Vietnam, celebrate specific evenings and occasions, and also celebrate the overcoming of emotional shakiness through the writing of poetry and through affection for others.

The long poem
Train Ride
, written in 1971 but not published until 1978, is a lavish example of an affectionate poem for a friend: it is a “love poem” addressed to Joe Brainard, and is about love, sex, and friendship. The poem speaks to Joe throughout, informally, frankly, a little in Joe’s own style, and includes mock complaints about Ted’s and Joe’s mutual friends, about Joe himself, and a projected complaint, too, about Ted. The poem was written on a single day, February 18, during the course of a literal train ride between New York and Providence; it filled a rather large notebook. I remember Ted returning from the trip with the poem, slightly confused by the fact that it really was everything he wanted to say to Joe but also probably really a poem. This ambiguity, an unsure edge between life and art (not like Rauschenberg’s “gap” but much more razorlike, something that might hurt you in its reality) kept Ted from publishing it for some years.

“Memorial Day,” written around the same time in collaboration with Anne Waldman, is a long poem in a similar voice, though the voice is Ted’s and Anne’s fused. The voice is open, plain speaking, and flexible. It can take on everything a conversation can; and though the poem has a back-and-forth movement in it, it also feels unified and inspired in the way that two people talking sometimes become one thing, the conversation. The poem was written to be performed at a reading at the Poetry Project (St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie, New York) on May 5, 1971, and Ted and Anne worked on it for several months. Since Memorial Day falls in May and is potentially rich in its association with death and sacrifice/heroism, it was decided in advance that Memorial Day would be the title and subject of
the work. The two poets were living in separate towns on Long Island and wrote separately, in asterisk-headed sections, giving or sending their work to each other from time to time for response, but there was no chronological ordering going on. At some point Ted wrote all of what would be the last section, and then Anne arranged the material. Ted always considered it to be the most successful literary collaboration he had participated in, in view of its seriousness and depth.

Meanwhile, and in deliberate counterpoint to such longer structures, Ted was writing many short poems. He often cited as formal influences the work of Giuseppe Ungaretti (the sequence “Life of a Man” in
In the Early Morning Rain
consists of transliterations of Ungaretti’s work), and Aram Saroyan’s poems, particularly the one-word poems. The section we have called
Short Poems
is divided into two parts.
In a Blue River
contains most of the chapbook of that name, published in 1981 by Susan Cataldo’s Little Light Books.
Uncollected Short Poems
consists of a handful of poems first published in
So Going Around Cities
, as well as many uncollected short poems. Most of the poems included in
Short Poems
were written in the late 60s and, especially, the early 70s.

The short poem obviously involves more thought process than writing/reading process, if one can split the two. A short poem is peculiarly naked, whether it’s a weighty short poem or a lighter short poem. It often seemed to take years for Ted to decide that a particular one was good enough to be published. And it’s not surprising that
In a Blue River
is a later publication. A successful short poem may be capable of projecting new meanings on successive readings, but in a monolithic way, as if a new room has opened out, rather than in the overall, textured way that a longer poem can light up in a mesh of changeable meanings. For example, it may take the reader some time to connect the title “Larceny,” in the poem which reads “The / opposite / of / petty / is
GRAND
,” with the crimes of grand and petty larceny. One may be content with the observation that the opposite of petty
is
grand, a meditation on that. On the other hand a poem like “Laments,” which both praises and judges Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is awesome on the level of judgment: “you did it wrong.” The fact of judgment, and also this particular judgment—is it only of their deaths? their lifestyles?—constantly opens up more thoughtful space.

Red Wagon
, published by the Yellow Press in 1976, is possibly the volume of Ted’s that least shows his book-constructor’s touch: it is more purely a “collection,” assembled while he was ill with hepatitis. The poems, however, are solid, and
many are among his best. By the time of the publication of
Red Wagon
Ted had taught at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa, Iowa City; at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; at Yale; at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago; and at the University of Essex in England. In 1976 he moved back to New York, where he would spend his remaining eight years.
Red Wagon
includes work written in many cities and two countries. It contains important shorter poems (such as “In the Wheel”), a number of open-field poems (for example, the popular “Things to Do in Providence”) and sprawling long-lined poems (“Something Amazing Just Happened”).