The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (78 page)

Anti-War Poem
This is one of Ted’s few overtly political poems. The “anti-war poem” seemed a necessary form in the late 60s. Ted’s version refers to a personal war (“I thought a lot about dying / But I said
Fuck it
”) as well as to the American war in Vietnam. In “An Interview with Ralph Hawkins”
(Talking in Tranquility)
, Ted states: “I think that every single poem I’ve ever written is a political act. They were all written in the face of a complete desire of the state in the platonic sense to exclude me as a poet, the entire possibility that there is of being a poet. I don’t believe the state as the body politic can exist in a healthy manner without poetry and without poems. Every poem I write is a political act and I have written some specific political poems, but generally the subject matter of politics is not interesting to write about. I’m totally interested in it as take-in, as material.”

Dial-A-Poem
Around 1969 John Giorno ran a telephone service called Dial-A-Poem, which one could call in order to listen to a poet reading a poem. In this poem, the telephone dial becomes the wheel of life: one’s sexuality is an aspect of the poem one dials “this time around.”

Hall of Mirrors
The title refers to Robert Stone’s novel
A Hall of Mirrors
.

Ann Arbor Song
As Ted took to writing shorter poems as seriously as he had composed his longer works, he also began to consolidate a public-reading style and to consider more how to bring pleasure to a live audience.
The Sonnets
and “Tambourine Life,” while they read well aloud, were unwieldy for public readings. In
In the Early Morning Rain
there are a handful of works which remained among his public-reading favorites, “Ann Arbor Song” being one. He also liked, for reading aloud, the poems “Heroin” and “People Who Died.”

People Who Died
Ted considered that with this work he had invented a form which anyone might use to write a poem. That is, every person has a list of “people who died.” Jim Carroll took Ted at his word and wrote and recorded a song called “People Who Died,” which is his own list of dead friends.

Telegram
This poem is based on Marcel Duchamp’s 1953 telegram to Francis Picabia as Picabia was dying: “Francis à Bientôt.” “Francis, see you soon.”

Train Ride
was first published by Annabel Levitt’s Vehicle Editions in 1978, although the book itself bears only the 1971 date (of composition): the copyright page reads “copyright Ted Berrigan 1971.”
Train Ride
had cover art by Joe Brainard.

Ted had some difficulty converting the handwritten notebook into a correspondingly presented typewritten poem; Ted and Annabel Levitt worked hard at layout for the edition. Open-field poems always posed publication problems, and Ted was finicky. The pleasurable exigencies of these kinds of translations, from handwriting to typescript and from typescript to print, seem to have disappeared with the advent of the computer. Ted was a poet of the notebook and typewriter; the medium he wrote in always permeated the poem. It is arguable that what I call, in the introduction, Ted’s “graven-ness”—that quality by which each word seems etched into the page, cannot be easily obtained if one composes on the computer.

The writing of
Train Ride
was occasioned by the circumstance that Ted had an empty notebook and was sitting on a train from New York to Providence, but also by the circumstance that he was reading a gay pornographic novel that Joe Brainard had
given him back in New York. The poem is thus “about” the fact of the train—passengers and how they look and talk, what’s out the window, etc.; the fact of the notebook—Ted actually leaves blank pages for Brainard (to whom the poem is addressed) to fill in words if he wishes; and sex—the pornographic novel provokes a long meditation on “fucking,” a word that is repeated many times. Sex eventually segues into love, and Ted expresses his love for his friend Joe; but there is another subject in the poem, as immediate as sex/love, the notebook, the train, which is money. Ted has hardly any money in his pocket: he will get off the train with four dollars and spend most of it on a cab.
Train Ride
is a poem written exactly in the now moment, about who is there, both materially and in mind, and what is urgent. By the early 70s Ted had become quite adept at this kind of in-the-instant work.

Memorial Day
was published twice as a chapbook, once in 1971 by the Poetry Project, in mimeo format, and once in 1974 by Aloes Books, London (editors Jim Pennington, Allen Fisher, and Dick Miller). For the Poetry Project edition, Anne Waldman and Ted ran off copies for the occasion of the May 1971 reading mentioned in the introduction. Donna Dennis did the original cover art, which was reproduced in facsimile in the Aloes Books edition.
Memorial Day
was reprinted in
So Going Around Cities
.

“I dreamed you brought home a baby”: One of Ted’s and Anne Waldman’s intentions in
Memorial Day
was to include other voices. This sonnet by me, designated by the number “22” and beginning with the line “I dreamed you brought home a baby” is number 22 of a sonnet sequence called
165 Meeting House Lane
(New York: “C” Press, 1971).

“having met the man at the Met”: In this convoluted passage written by Ted, the “man” is Frank O’Hara, “Joe” is Frank’s partner Joe LeSueur, and Vincent is Frank’s lover, Vincent Warren.

“It is night. You are asleep. & beautiful tears”: This is Sonnet XXXVII from
The Sonnets
.

“I doan wanna hear any more about that . . . I tried my best to do my father’s will”: One of the rules for the performance was that Ted and Anne Waldman would each have to sing one of their sections. Waldman sang the passage beginning “I
doan wanna hear anymore about / that”; and Ted sang the passage beginning “I tried my best to do my father’s will,” which was modeled on the song “Talking Casey” by Mississippi John Hurt.

During the time that Ted was co-writing
Memorial Day
, he was listening obsessively to two record albums, Mississippi John Hurt’s
Today!
(which contained “Talking Casey”) and an album by the Byrds. His composition process involved being interactive with the music, as if there were something about “voice” he wanted to get from actual singing. And the finished poem is for alternating voices, Waldman’s arrangement of the text alternating sections by the two of them.

“The windows are closed”: The final litany, written by Ted, was read by the two poets in voices alternating for each phrase ending with “is closed.” After the reading at the Poetry Project, Ted obtained a copy of the tape and listened to it as obsessively as he had to the John Hurt and Byrds albums. He continued to learn from this collaboration for many years and in the early 80s occasionally asked me to read the final litany with him, as a separate piece, at poetry readings.

As explained in the introduction, this chapbook was first published by Susan Cataldo’s Little Light Books in 1981. The majority of the poems were written in the late 60s and early 70s. The dedication is to Kenneth Koch, whom Ted credited for having first interested him in the short poem as a form. The cover art for the original edition was by Susan Cataldo.

Four poems have been omitted here and kept elsewhere. “After Breakfast,” which originally appeared in
In a Blue River
after “Chair,” has already been printed in the
Life of a Man
section in
In the Early Morning Rain
. “The Green Sea” and “Angst,” which originally appeared one right after the other after “Connecticut,” have also been omitted. “The Green Sea” is placed instead in
Nothing for You
, and “Angst” in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, where the editors feel that each is more necessary in “making a book.” “People of the Future,” which originally appeared after “Paris Review,” has been retained as the italicized introductory poem to
Nothing for You
, where it obviously serves an indispensable function.

Salut!
This poem was composed spontaneously, on the tongue, for the birthday of novelist C. D. B. Bryan, at a party in Iowa City in 1969. Ted recited it to me at the party, and I instantly memorized it. Later when Ted was working on the manuscript of
In a Blue River
in 1981, I reminded him of the poem by reciting it to him. I’m not sure he had written it down before or given it a title.

Man Alone
“Man Alone” was originally the back cover copy for Ted’s novel
Clear the Range
. The poem is indicative of the texture and manner of Ted’s novel.

bear with me
Ted had considered calling the chapbook
Bear With Me
but decided against it, keeping this untitled poem.

Category /
MOONDOG
The late, eccentric composer called Moondog was well-known to New Yorkers in the 60s and 70s. Tall, long-braided, wearing a Viking hat and lederhosen, he stood in the Times Square area publicizing and selling his compositions, which were all strict canons. In the later part of his life his work actually began to be performed and recorded in Europe and America.

Buddhist Text
Ted strongly identified with the elephant as a totemic animal.

Setback
This poem, originally written in England in 1974, had for a title “Setback: Che.” The third line read, “Che was wounded in the foot” instead of “He was wounded in the foot.”

Kinks
In the 70s, Ted was asked to write a poem about the British rock group the Kinks for a special “Kinks” issue of the
Milk Quarterly
, edited by Peter Kostakis. This poem was Ted’s contribution.

Near the Ocean
The poem obviously refers to Robert Lowell’s book by the same name and is about reading Lowell’s book in bed, though it might also refer to being in bed with a crabby partner. This is one of several references to Lowell in Ted’s poetry. Though Ted could not help having a smart mouth, he respected and admired Lowell and his work.

(Untitled) It’s Morning!
In a Blue River
contains an untitled (undemarcated) sequence of poems, written in 1979, composed of “Untitled (It’s Morning!),” “Air,” “Untitled
(Keep my . . .),” “Amsterdam,” “A True Story,” “On St. Mark’s Place,” “Just Friends,” and “For Rosina.” Ted participated in the One World poetry festival in Amsterdam in 1978 and during the same trip collaborated with the Swiss artist Rosina Kühn on a set of poems / paintings. These poems are his texts from that collaboration.

Laments, Winter, Think of Anything, Out the Second-Floor Window,
and
Life in the Future
These five poems were first printed in
So Going Around Cities
. The remaining poems in this section have never been printed in books and were kept in manuscript folders. Most of the poems date from between 1968 and 1972.

Think of Anything
In this collaboration with Robert Creeley, the “Rose of Sharon” refers to a woman named Sharon DeVries, and “Grand Valley” is Grand Valley, Michigan, where Ted and Creeley were participating in a poetry festival.

Poem (to Tom Clark)
Ted’s poetry tended to have a communal focus, even be a communal activity (the collaborations, the dedications and personal references). The short epigrammatic poem is traditionally amenable to this focus. The short poem may also “speak to” a particular person, on the grounds that that person will understand it. “Poem (to Tom Clark),” which is a list of titles by Evelyn Waugh, is dedicated to Clark because he would “get it,” but also because Tom Clark’s name contributes another name to a texture of title and name.

Untitled (Orange Black / BACK DEATH)
This little poem refers to a collaborative collage by Ted and Joe Brainard, dominated by the colors orange and black and the words
BACK DEATH
. Ted was the possessor of the collage for many years, before passing it on to the late Michael Scholnick. A number of his poems are, or contain, considerations, descriptions, meditations on the artwork hanging on the walls surrounding him as he wrote. His art collection provided both environment
(points of concrete reference) and iconic presences, and he was very deliberate about exploiting it in his poetry.

Congratulations
Lee Lally, poet Michael Lally’s wife, had just given birth to their son, Miles.

Neal Cassady Talk
An imitation of the speech of Neal Cassady, on whom the character Dean Moriarty, in Kerouac’s
On the Road
, was modeled. In the 60s Ted had briefly spent time with Cassady. The poem was written in the late 70s for the mimeo rag
Caveman
, a scandalous erratic publication with a complicated history, which satirized Lower East Side and Poetry Project activities and figures.

Inflation
The manuscript copy is dated “Apr 74.”