The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (75 page)

Stanton in
PROSE KEYS TO AMERICAN POETRY

Which I must admit is disconcerting in light of

My premature weaning! Because actually I was in love

With all of those Saturday Serials even if Charley Mackin

did beat me up every week for sixteen weeks

straight! I simply repressed it all!

(FOR MARTIN COCHRAN)

Across the trolley tracks

deep in the cemetery

were the Jr. Marines.

“Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor

as

We did the Alamo”

Gregory, high

up on Porkchop hill,

sleepy, grumpy, dopey,

Oliver Hazard Perry, and

of man’s first disobedience and

the forbidden fruit

This too, and love,

three

“they’ll pick us off like sittin’ ducks”

his mouth tightened

He buckled on his gun, the one

Steve had left him

“Gather ye rosebuds,” he ordered.

The white poet with his book

And the ox-blood, do they agree?

With his throat which is beating,

Does he agree?

And the hands oh so plentiful,

And the architecture,

Symbols in his journals of summer?

The hands

Are words in the journal.

Wind giving presence to fragments.

In the book of his music the corners have straightened:

Torrents have faded down the bent frontier.

Voici la tête d’un chien

Il est à la fenêtre noire

For fire for warmth for hands for growth

So green and formal to the bone

Whose hands hold up whose head?

Wind fans the red fire and its flames burn hand bones

Is there room in the room that you room in?

Fire it, and hand me the bones, over the blue wind

That I receive fire, fire to pierce like the wind

So black, bête noire, in the burnt-by-fire plume

A darksome tiger

dreams in “The Poems.”

No one put the tiger

In “The Poems.” A tiger

In a dream

Is still a tiger.

In “The Poems” where the Tiger

Is, dreams are alive.

We are alive

When a tiger

Leaves his cage

In “The Poems.” “The Poems” are not a cage.

We are not a cage

Nor a tiger

In a cage

Where a cage

Keeps “The Poems”

From “The Tiger”

Although we dream

A darksome dream

Of a cage.

“The Tiger” is a dream. Alive

We are alive.

“The Poems” are alive

In a cage

Where alive

Is more a dream than alive.

Like a tiger

Is alive

In a cage, this alive

Are “The Poems.”

We are “The Poems”

When we’re alive

But when we dream

Then we dream.

“The Poems” are not a dream.

“The Tiger” in “The Poems”

Is a dream

When “The Poems” are a dream.

Then “The Poems” are a cage

And a cage is not a dream.

So a Tiger’s not a dream

But a Tiger

Is not a Tiger

But a dream

In a cage. “The Poems”

Are not a dream of “The Poems.”

We dream up “The Poems”

In a dream

And “The Poems”

Contain a Tiger. “The Poems”

Are alive.

The tiger in “The Poems”

Except in “The Poems”

Is a cage

And will cage

Up “The Poems”

Unless we are the tiger

In “The Poems” dreamed up by “The Tiger.”

A darksome tiger

Dreams in his cage.

“The Poems” dream “The Poems.”

We have had this dream

And we are alive.

FOR JOHN WIENERS

Out we go to get away from today’s

delicate pinpricks: awake and scheme

to pay the rent; the room is littered

with laundry, my desk turns

my stomach; in my stomach a white pill

turns to warmth; I stretch and begin

to flow; a door opens; the day

is warm, and we join hands

for a journey to courage in a loft.

A man signs a shovel, and

so he digs. I fear to become a crank,

alone in a dreary room, grinding out

poem after poem, confused, concerned,

annoyed.

But Edwin offers us

cookies, and coffee and beer and grace.

By his presence he offers us leads, and

his graciousness adds to our courage.

John,

we must not be afraid

to be civilised, meaning

Love.

It is 5:23 a.m., and the sun

is coming.

These notes are not intended to be exhaustive but rather to provide assistance in reading a poetry characterized by a profound density of reference and naming. The notes would ideally offer reading clues that would transfer from poem to poem, rather than supply definitions to fit capitalized nouns. References are so layered, embedded, and characteristic of both conscious and “subconscious” levels of thought that full explanation would not only be too lengthy—and too contrary to the purposes of poetry—but also impossible. We offer a quick glossary of the proper names used most frequently in the poems, but it’s useful to remember that one doesn’t really need to know: the poetry, in its various ways, takes care of the reader all by itself. These notes are also intended to demonstrate the wide range of formal methods used in the poems.

Both the “C” Press edition (New York, 1964) and the Grove Press edition (New York, 1967) of
The Sonnets
were composed of sixty-six sonnets. The United Artists edition of 1982 included six new sonnets, XXXIV, XXXV, LX, LXI, LXXVII, and LXXXI. The Penguin Poets edition of 2000 included seven more: XIV, XXII, XXV, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXIII, and LIX, fulfilling Ted’s instructions to me in late 1982, when the latter seven were finally judged ready. This leaves the following sonnets: XX, XXIV,
LIV, LVIII, LXII, LXIII, LXIX, LXXIX, and LXXXVI. They are not strong enough to be published.

Joe Brainard was the cover artist for the “C” Press edition. A second cover illustration by him, intended for the Grove Press edition but not used by Grove, finally adorned the Penguin edition in 2000. Louise Hamlin was the artist for the front and back covers of the United Artists edition.

The Penguin edition for
The Sonnets
includes an introduction by me, as well as notes based on Ted’s annotations of an early typescript of the entire sequence. This typescript will be referred to from time to time in these notes.

Names—of friends, writers, artists—appear throughout
The Sonnets
and, to a lesser degree, all Ted’s work. One can almost always tell if the name refers to a “friend” or a “poet/artist” or both, or can gauge the formality/informality of the reference (a friend referred to by full name in a dedication is being treated differently from the same friend named familiarly in another poem). A name is a word like any other in poetry, and the use of names is an old literary tradition (Dante, Catullus). The reader has had her/his own friends and knows what a friend is in the mind; the reader can look up certain other names in the encyclopedia or on the Internet. Detailed annotation would be contrary to the spirit of the poems, which, though literary, is egalitarian and intimate. However, I would like to offer some examples of usage, focusing on five lines in Sonnet XXX which are particularly replete with names:

Dear Marge, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
Andy Butt was drunk in the Parthenon
Harum-scarum haze on the Pollock streets
This excitement to be all of night, Henry
Ah, Bernie, to think of you alone, suffering

Marge Kepler was a friend/girlfriend of Ted’s: this is rather obvious, she is “Marge,” she is “Dear Marge.” Andy Butt is a name that works like that of a character in a novel: he is a fiction, like a man in a rather bad novel, “drunk in the Parthenon” (though “Butt” and “Parthenon” conjure up certain associations). The
“Pollock streets” suggests the lines of paint in Jackson Pollock’s great paintings. The reader doesn’t know for sure who “Henry” is, though one suspects him of being Henri Michaux, the French poet, who is often mentioned in these poems (see “Mess Occupations,” which is also Sonnet XXXIX “
after Michaux
”). The point is less that he might be Henri Michaux than that someone named Henry is being addressed; and more, that the word “Henry” works metrically. “To be all of night, Henry!” sounds just right, as “Dear Marge, hello” works clearly on a point of sentiment. “Ah, Bernie” feels like it refers to a friend, and does; the whole line is funny, because Bernie’s name—a real name—sounds antithetical to “suffering” (but all real people suffer).

By the repetition of names, a relational tension is built up over the course of the sequence, which is modeled very generally on Shakespeare’s sequence, with its love plot and its pitches of exaltation and viciousness. The reader experiences this tension through the lens of the poet’s mind in process, as the poet mulls over the past and present actions of himself and his friends and lovers.

A quotation from an interview by Tom Clark is clarifying (“Interview with Tom Clark,”
Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan
, ed. Scalapino and Ratcliffe [Bolinas and Oakland: Avenue B and O Books, 1991]). Speaking of
The Sonnets
, Ted says, “There is no such thing as a message and media in the abstract. I mean, they’re the same thing to the perfect extent. That is, surpassing McLuhan where he says the message is the media. No. When it all works right there’s no message, it’s only sort of the media. Which is fascinating because of just the words.” That words are, materially, words, somewhat as paint is paint, applies in varying degrees to all of Ted’s work.

I made a dating error in the Penguin edition, in regard to the dates of the inception of
The Sonnets
. I was following Ted’s annotations on the typescript of the sequence, and he appears to have misremembered. The genesis of the first six sonnets in November and December of 1962, not in early 1963, is confirmed by two sources: a handmade booklet called
Rain Dance
containing the six as a gift to Pat (Mitchell) Padgett for Christmas of 1962, and an entry in Ted’s journals (see
from Journals
, excerpts chosen by Larry Fagin, in
Shiny
, no. 9/10, 1999):

(1962)

20 Nov 5 5:15 a.m.

Wrote (?) (Made) five sonnets tonight, by taking one line from each of a group of poems, at random, going from first to last poem then back again until 12 lines, then making the final couplet from any 2 poems, in the group, one line at random from each. Wrote by ear, and automatically. Very interesting results.

Groups used

Sonnet #1—Six poems 1962

#2—Personal Poems

#3—Le Bateau Ivre

#4—My 14 Selected Poems

#5—My 10 Newest Poems

All this was partly inspired by reading about DADA but mostly inspired by my activities along the same line for the past 10 months (or since reading LOCUS SOLUS TWO & seeing the Assemblage Show & Working on Collages with Joe (see our Self-Portrait)

Now back to more Dada.

The sixth sonnet in
Rain Dance
is Sonnet VI, made from lines by Dick Gallup.

The above journal entry indicates the kind of compositional method used throughout
The Sonnets
, as well as the types of materials employed. Ted incorporated old and new work by himself, a translation of an Arthur Rimbaud poem, and lines by Dick Gallup into the first six sonnets. One sees that though Ted is using a method, he is also working by ear and that he is being influenced by Dada and by collage and assemblage, as practiced both by the original Dadaists and by his contemporary and friend Joe Brainard.

I
Ted told me that the “he/his” in this poem is meant to be Ezra Pound, though the poem of Ted’s from which the opening lines are taken is called “Homage to Mayakovsky” (see
Early Poems
).

II
“How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine”: “How much longer shall I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher” is the title and first line of a
poem by John Ashbery in
The Tennis Court Oath. The Tennis Court Oath
, with its broken, phrasal texture, was a major influence on
The Sonnets
.

Poem in the Traditional Manner
and
Poem in the Modern Manner
Not all of
The Sonnets
are sonnets, as these two sixteen-line poems prove. Here we are being shown what the two “manners” are that this sequence will mix and change. The point would also seem to be to keep the surface of the whole work various.

In “Poem in the Traditional Manner,” Dick Gallup is called “Richard Gallup” in an allusion to Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory.”
The Asiatics
(see also Sonnet XXV) was a novel by Frederick Prokosch, published in 1935.

In “Poem in the Modern Manner,” Huitzilopochtli refers to the Aztec god of war. Cos is the Greek island.

From a Secret Journal
Also Sonnet IX. Ted’s note on the typescript says: “Made from Joe’s ‘Secret Journal’, a prose work by method. probably made earlier—62 or not? my best.” Joe is Joe Brainard. The “secret journal,” which remains unpublished, is actually called “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night.”

Penn Station
“Gomangani,” according to Ted’s notes on the typescript, is “either White Ape (Tarzan) or Black Apes (The Apes) hence I forget—i.e. clarity is in the language not its precision.” That is, the word is taken from the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

XIV
“Blake-blues” probably refers to Blind Blake, the blues guitarist (b. early 1890s, d. 1933) as much as to William Blake.

XV
This is perhaps the most famous of all the sonnets. It is obvious how this broken work can be put back together into its first version, Sonnet LIX, by reading first line, last line, second line, second-to-last line, etc. Sonnet LIX was omitted from the first two versions of the sequence and reinstated in the Penguin edition. One of the most interesting things about Sonnet XV is that it becomes stranger after you understand how to reassemble it: its disjunctive form seems to assert itself more and more strongly as the real one.