The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (3 page)

Partway through
Red Wagon
, variety of form cedes to a denser, more slablike entity, beginning with the poem “Frank O’Hara” and the five poems succeeding it, the remnants of a disbanded sequence called “Southampton Winter.” In the original
Red Wagon
, poems from
Easter Monday
(still in the process of composition) rounded out the book for the most part, as well as a group of five sonnets. These were, in fact, five of
The Sonnets
, three previously published and two seeing print for the first time. Our version of
Red Wagon
omits the
Easter Monday
poems and the group of sonnets. It ends with “The Complete Prelude,” a poem made from words and phrases of Wordsworth’s poem. The use of another poet’s work as a word source had always been a favorite method of Ted’s (see, for example, “Sonnet VI,” made from a poem by his friend, the poet Dick Gallup.) This method could result in a kind of book review, or a dialogue with a poet’s style, or could be used to delve into Ted’s own consciousness. Here it is also a way to employ the now-forbidden language of English Romantic Poetry, which being part of the poet’s education is part of himself.

If “Southampton Winter” had dissolved as a conception, poems such as “Chicago Morning” and “Newtown,” written in Chicago in 1972 and resembling the “Southampton Winter” poems, became the basis for
Easter Monday
. The sequence was not really conceived until Ted’s arrival in England in 1973. At both Northeastern Illinois University and the University of Essex Ted took teaching positions that had been held by Ed Dorn, who, like Ted, had recently entered into a second marriage and fathered two more children. Ted became interested in the concept of the second act, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now clichéd statement, “There are no second acts in American life.”
Easter Monday
, dedicated to Ed Dorn and named for Willem de Kooning’s beautiful painting as well as for the day after the
day of rebirth, is meant to address the possibility of the second act. Ted had hoped for fifty poems, inspired by the artist George Schneeman’s notion that once he’d started a project, a set of collages, say, he might as well do fifty. Ted ended up with forty-six.

Ted kept
Easter Monday
in a folder on the cover of which is inscribed
EASTER MONDAY/Poems (1972–1977)
. The poems were written in Chicago, London, Wivenhoe, New York, and Boulder; many are sonnets, most have an impasto texture—thick abstract expressionistic paint—and many of them are composed of other people’s words. “From the House Journals,” for example, is made from the first lines index to the
Collected Poems
of Frank O’Hara; “In Blood” is a selection of lines from a sequence of mine; and “The Ancient Art of Wooing” is made from a poem of mine I’d given up on, which was itself made out of a magazine article. A poem like the latter is a little like a palimpsest and a little like urban erosion. But the poems speak to and with the words of people Ted cared about or was interactive with. A few of the poems, on the other hand, are direct addresses to friends, delivered in an almost courtly manner. The sequence is very much about “not dying,” in William Saroyan’s phrase, not giving in to deathy forces. Ted didn’t declare the sequence finished until shortly before he died in 1983, when he made the final decisions for it. There are a handful of
Easter Monday
out-takes to be found in
Nothing for You
and
So Going Around Cities
.

It should be noted that Ted was always open to chapbook and broadside publication.
In a Blue River
and
The Morning Line
are in fact chapbooks, and, as I’ve indicated, parts of
Easter Monday
were first published in chapbooks. A mimeographed stapled book with the singularly lovely title
A Feeling for Leaving
(Frontward Books, 1975) contains twenty-two of the poems. Another nine were published in 1980 as
Clown War
22 (edited by Bob Heman) under the title
Carrying a Torch
.

By the time
Nothing for You
was published, in 1977, Ted’s and my sons, Anselm and Edmund (my co-editors of this edition), were five and three years old. Ted had two other children, David and Kate, from his marriage to Sandy Alper Berrigan. He had always delighted in being with his kids, and there are references to all of them throughout his work. The title
Nothing for You
comes from a word game Anselm and Edmund had made up, which went something like: “No cookies, no candy, no soda. Nothing, nothing for you.” This was a great joke, a chant accompanied by laughter. Ted had been asked by Lewis Warsh for a book for Angel Hair Books, but
it was one of those times when he felt he had nothing. So he conjured a manuscript out of piles of rejects and old poems and gleefully named it after our sons’ chant.

As he constructed the book, the concept of using rejects, supposedly second-class works, became interesting to him. A world was being created out of poems that
did
belong together, having been written in the process of discovering forms rather than perfecting them.
Nothing for You
actually has something for everyone and was much appreciated, at least by Ted’s circle, when it came out. It begins with some twenty poems from the early to late-ish 60s, mostly very old works which had been tinkered with over the years until exactly right. Then there are a number of poems from the late 60s and early 70s that he was very excited by at the time of composition but abandoned when he got something that seemed superior. I remember how much he loved having written “In Bed with Joan & Alex” in 1969; but later it felt as if he’d dropped it in favor of poems like “Things to Do in Providence.” Finally there are more recent poems, such as the rejects from
Easter Monday
, interspersed with poems about people: Paul Blackburn, Tom Clark, Kirsten Creeley, Sandy Berrigan.

Ted’s first publication in the 80s was
So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1979
. Appearing midway through 1980, it was a generous selection of poems, honoring, to some degree, the primacy of Ted’s books as artistic shapes. There are scaled-down selections from
The Sonnets
and
Easter Monday
, and a section called
Many Happy Returns
, which is slightly different from the book itself. Collections like
In the Early Morning Rain
and
Red Wagon
are broken up into new kinds of groups, small sections reflecting the chronology of Ted’s life.

For this volume, we have created a section called
In the 51st State
corresponding to the period of the late 70s through circa 1981. It is composed of a subsection, also called
In the 51st State
, containing twelve poems first published in
So Going Around Cities;
the chapbook
The Morning Line
, published by Am Here Books in 1981; and uncollected poems of roughly the same time period.

For Ted the “51st State” was New York City; the poem “In the 51st State,” dedicated to Ted’s daughter Kate, ends with the lines: “Bon voyage, little ones. / Follow me down / Through the locks. There is no key.” Thus this is also a new and puzzling
“state” that Ted has entered, one of feeling older, irrelevant, and failing in health. And yet, in the same poem, after he writes “Au revoir,” he counters with the parenthetical lines “(I wouldn’t translate that / as ‘Goodbye’ if I were you).” Ted is in the process of “not dying,” though he’s only a few years from his death.

The new element in the poems of this section is a longer line combined with discursiveness and apparent autobiography, though Ted continues to use other people’s voices and autobiographical facts as well as his own. In “Last Poem,” “I once had the honor of meeting Beckett and I dug him” is a quotation from Robert Creeley and in no way corresponds to anything that happened to Ted, except emotionally. There is always a “Beckett” in one’s anecdotes. The practice of incorporating the lives of others into his is evident throughout Ted’s previous work: in the use of others’ poems and prose in cut-ups, in such “found” works as “Autobiography in 5 Parts,” in the weave of voices in
Easter Monday
. These techniques are an assertion that he is part of everything and everyone around him, that his reading and his interaction with others do literally become him, and that all words are free and usable. As Tom Clark once said to him, “Who owns words?”

The poems from
So Going Around Cities
—which make up the first part of
In the 51st State
—include several works that became favorite performance pieces of Ted’s near the end of his life: “Cranston Near the City Line,” “Last Poem,” and especially, “Red Shift.” So-called Performance Poetry had been in the air for a while, and Ted picked up from it the possibility of extending his performing voice and, consequently, his writing voice. “Red Shift” wasn’t written to be performed in a splashy way, but over the course of a year or two, he developed a set of vocal changes for it, a deliberate tremolo and a slowing down of the long lines, which seemed to stretch the poem far into time and space, allowing him to express the poem’s angry urgency. On the other hand, a slightly later poem like “After Peire Vidal, & Myself,” in
The Morning Line
, was written precisely with performance in mind. It was declaimed publicly, in mock-troubadour fashion, to answer his friend Rochelle Kraut, who, briefly mad at him, was reading Catullus-like poems “against” him around the Lower East Side.

The Morning Line
was a flat, stapled, mimeographed chapbook of twenty-two poems in a number of forms. “Sonnet:
Homage to Ron
” is made up of words by Ron Padgett; “44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s” is a sentimental birthday poem for Ted himself containing a dream; “Avec la Mécanique sous les Palmes” is entirely
in French; “Kerouac / (continued),” is deft maneuvers with found material; “D N A” is like the poems in
Easter Monday;
and so on. The title
The Morning Line
refers to betting on horses—which poem, which style shall we choose?—and to a song from the musical comedy
Guys and Dolls:
“I’ve got a horse right here / His name is Paul Revere . . .”

The
Uncollected Poems
of this section demonstrate a continuation, even further development, of Ted’s preferred and reliable forms. One discerns the arrival of the Language Poets in the poem “ISOLATE,” as Ted uses Bruce Andrews’s words to review Andrews’s book
Film Noir
for
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
magazine. The “Ten Greatest Books” form (see the two examples in
In The Early Morning Rain
) reappears in the poem “My 5 Favorite Records.” For the “Ten Greatest Books” poems, Ted had named books he was actually reading or could see in his room (they tended to be the greatest books of that exact moment), but “My 5 Favorite Records” was a response to a request for a list (not for a poem) from Dennis Cooper, editor of
Little Caesar
magazine. Ted then asked Art Lange, editor of the jazz magazine
Downbeat
and music critic for the
Chicago Reader
, to make a list of what
ought
to be Ted’s five favorite records. The result is quite Byzantine; Ted was extremely amused by this work, but public readings of it produced some bafflement in the audience.

The poem “Rouge,” on the other hand, is a particularly successful version of what one might call the “linguistic poem,” a form with Creeleyesque overtones that Ted had been working on for some years. In the linguistic poem he defines and works out with small words:
it, this
, and
that
in this case, but also the word
know
. I seem to remember giving him the title of the poem, which serves to negate any pedantry. Finally, one is delighted by certain poems that Ted was unable to publish due to the brevity of his remaining years: “Compleynt to the Muse” and “Thin Breast Doom,” with their allusions to Phil Whalen’s manner, the several autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical poems, and the list poem “Memories Are Made of This.”

Ted’s final book (though these are not his final poems) was
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, which occupied him for all of 1982. This sequence of poems was written on individual postcards, 4
inches by 7 inches, sent to him by Ken and Anne Mikolowski of the Alternative Press. There were five hundred cards to work with, one side left blank for a poem and/or image, and the other side incorporating space
for a message and address.
Postcard by Ted Berrigan
was printed at the top of the message space, and running sideways,
The Alternative Press Grindstone City
. Many other artists and writers participated in the Mikolowskis’ project, producing original art or text for the blank sides of their own five hundred postcards; the finished cards were always sent out singly, along with other Alternative Press items—broadsides, bumper stickers, etc.—in the Press’s standard free packets. Ted, so far as I know, was the only participant who turned the postcards into a full-scale writing project and then a book.