The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (83 page)

4 Metaphysical Poems
and
Who Was Sylvia?
Both poems involved the participation of Steve Carey. The former poem is dated “17 Feb 82” and the latter “20 Feb.”

Anselm
Though the poem called “Anselm” contains language by Anselm Hollo, it also refers to Anselm Berrigan. Ted invoked the two of them simultaneously more than once, the other notable instance being in the dedications to
So Going Around Cities
.

Wednesday Evening Services
Dated “20 Mar 82.”

Head Lice
Dated “24 Feb 82.”

Little Travelogue
Dated “6 Mar 82.”

Sleeping Alone
This poem was lost after Ted’s death, at least as text. He considered it integral to the sequence, and it should have appeared in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
. We present a version reconstituted by us from a taped reading. For a slightly different reconstitution by an anonymous tape transcriber, see “Workshops at the Jack Kerouac Conference,” in
On the Level Everyday
.

(Another has. . .)
The poem was never typed up by Ted, existing only as a postcard—a gift to me—until this publication. The postcard, entirely of Ted’s design, has a baseball sticker affixed to it, with a photo of one of the Minnesota Twins of 1982: that is, a twin self to the poet. “Another” has arrived. Ron Padgett states (in a letter to me) that the initial lines of the poem are a “variant on the first line of a 1959 poem by David Bearden: ‘Another has come to the silver mirror.’” Bearden’s poem was published in
The White Dove Review
5 (summer 1960).

The Pope’s Nose
This poem plays with Anne Waldman’s poem “Paul Eluard.”

The LADY, JUST WHEN I THINK I KNOW . . .
Dated “21 Mar 82.”

Treason of the Clerks
The poem is based on an explanation by Edmund Berrigan, then seven years old, of a drawing he’d made, probably on the postcard on which the poem was written.
Treason of the Clerks
is a book by the French writer Julien Benda:
The Treason of the Intellectuals
(
La Trahison des Clerks
, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington (New York: William Morrow, 1928). By its title, this
poem would probably belong near “To Book-Keepers” in the main volume. It is dated “29 Mar” on the manuscript.

All A-Glower Went My Love Riding
Dated “10 Apr 82.” Along with “Fern,” it involved the participation of Bernadette Mayer.

With Eileen in Locarno
Dated “Easter. 1982. nyc.”

Three Lost Years
Grace Murphy (“Grace falls . . .”) and Peggy DeCoursey were friends of each other and Ted. The poem was written in Boulder in 1980.

Butchie’s Tune, La Bohème, To a Young Painter,
and
Upside Down
These four poems were all written in conjunction with Ada Katz. One of Alex Katz’s paintings is called “Upsidedown Ada.” “Butchie’s Tune” is dated “Mid Apr 82,” “To a Young Painter” is dated “5/3/82,” and “Upside Down” is dated “7 May 82.”

Der Asra
Ted and Gordon Brotherston’s translation of Heinrich Heine’s “Der Asra” was done during the
Easter Monday
period, in England. Ted loved this translation, which he sometimes included in poetry readings, and kept trying to find a place for it in his books; but it never seemed to belong alongside his other work.

Fern
Dated “18 May 82.” See the note for “All A-Glower Went My Love Riding.”

O, Sexual Reserve
Dated “6/15/82.”

One Day in the Afternoon of the World
Dated “18 Aug 82.”

Two Serious Ladies
Dated “1 Sep 82.” The reference is to Jane Bowles’s great novel
Two Serious Ladies
.

Down Moon River
Dated “12 Oct 82. nyc.” “Charlie” is the late Charlie McGrath, a neighbor at 101 St. Mark’s Place.

At 80 Langton Street (S.F.)
Dated “1 Dec 83 NYC,” this poem was also one that Ted never typed up but left to exist only on a postcard. It was transcribed by Bill Berkson, to whom the Mikolowskis finally sent the card. The poem refers to a four-day residency by Ted, at the San Francisco arts center, 80 Langton Street, in 1981, where Hollo, Thomas, and Acker had held previous residencies. There was a clash between Ted and the Language Poets, thus the final word “Duck.” Bill Berkson chaired a panel during the residency.

The fourteen poems in Ted’s final folder of poems date from between December 7, 1982, and May 15, 1983. Ted had been a sporadic dater of poems, but each of these has a date affixed, or in the case of “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” contained in the poem. One cannot help but have the feeling he is counting down to his final moments. Ted died on July 4, 1983. The poems were first published together, under the title
Last Poems
, in
Arshile
No. 6, 1996.

Robert (Lowell)
See “This Guy” in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
. Ted was reading a biography of Lowell at the time of the composition of these two poems, and much of the language comes from material quoted from Lowell and others. The “we” in this poem is significant, including both Ted and Lowell, especially in the last line, which seems to sum up a lifetime. The last sentence is definitely Ted’s words.

Today in New York City
As with “The Way It Was in Wheeling,” both “Today in New York City” and “Stand-up Comedy Routine” were made using
Mad-Libs
forms. “Today in New York City” involves a set of forms, probably in multiple-choice format, for writing newspaper articles. The forms disappear into the text, which is laid out like a poem and embellishes considerably on the
Mad-Libs
diagram. In places where one would have been meant to make a single choice, Ted included several: e.g., “& is contemplating / The return of Billy, / Suicide, / 3-Mile Island, / Unleashing ‘The Hammer’,” etc. “The Hammer” refers to Sonnet VI in
The Sonnets
. The poem is dated “7 Dec 82.”

The Short Poems
Dated “23 Feb 83.”

Something to Remember
Dated “2 Mar 83.”

To
Jacques Roubaud
Dated “11 Mar 83,” this poem is a note of condolence on the death of Roubaud’s wife. Ted had met French poet Roubaud at a poetry festival in Italy, in 1979, and they had become friendly.

Villonnette
Dated “29 Mar 83.”

After Petrarch
This poem, once again using Petrarch’s “labyrinth” lines, is dated “1 Apr. 83.”

Old Armenian Proverb
Dated “4/83.”

Ambiguity
Dated “7 Apr 83.”

Stand-up Comedy Routine
Dated “21 Apr. 83.” The
Mad-Libs
form is considerably embellished and drawn out. The show-biz names used in this poem were probably all contained in the form, except for that of “Sammy Davis, Senior,” which Ted changed from Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy Davis Jr.’s father was also an entertainer, and Ted remembered him quite clearly. The dedicatees, poets Bob Holman and Ed Friedman, were both heavily involved in performance; the dedication implies that either one of them might perform the poem. Ted once read a book composed of Lenny Bruce’s routines and had thought about the form of the “comedy routine” outside of the
Mad-Libs
format.

Positively Fourth Street
Dated “11 May 83.” The title is that of a Bob Dylan song.

Down on Me
Dated “13 May 83.” This title is from a song sung by Janis Joplin.

Don Quixote & Sancho Panza
This, Ted’s last sonnet, contains the date—“May, 1983”—in the body of the poem.

This Will Be Her Shining Hour
Dated “15 May 83,” Ted’s real “last poem” was written over the course of a couple of hours, late on a Saturday night. I was in one room watching the Fred Astaire movie, and Ted was in the other room listening to my voice and his own, and to the voices of the actors.

Each of the fifteen poems in this section contains lines (or in the case of “Prose Keys to American Poetry,” the single word “Perceval”) that reappeared in
The Sonnets
. Along with some of the poems in
Nothing for You
, these are the earliest usages of these materials.

What are you thinking
 . . .
Dated “May 16th, 1962, Denver.”

Lady Takes a Holiday
Dated “8 June 62.”

For Bernie
There is another version of this poem with the same text but a different title, “The Awful Responsibility of History.”

Homage to Beaumont Bruestle
Bruestle was one of Ted’s professors at the University of Tulsa.

Lines from Across the Room
Dated “March 23, 1962.”

Homage to Mayakofsky
The poem leads straight into the world of
The Sonnets
. These lines referring to Mayakofsky became in Sonnet I a reference to Ezra Pound.

Bean Spasms
was published by Lita Hornick’s Kulchur Press in 1967. The title page qualifies the volume as “Collaborations by Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett / Illustrated & Drawings by Joe Brainard.” Brainard was also the subject, in the volume, of an interview by Ron and Pat Padgett.

Much of the work in
Bean Spasms
consists of literal collaborations between Ted and Ron Padgett, in the form of poems, an exchange of letters (“Big Travel Dialogues”), an excerpt from the collaborative novel
Furtive Days
. However, the book also contains important poems by each poet as sole author. Authorship of all work in the volume is unattributed, left up in the air; when reading the book it is impossible to know without knowing already, e.g., that Ted is the author of the poem “Bean Spasms,” that Ted and Ron Padgett are the co-authors of the excerpt from
Furtive Days
, that Ron Padgett is the author of the poems “December” and “A Man Saw a Ball of Gold.”

One of the more notorious pieces in the volume is “An Interview with John Cage,” which purports to be an interview with Cage but is completely fabricated by Ted, out of real interviews in contemporary journals with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and the French playwright Fernando Arrabal. The interview was first published in Peter Schjeldahl’s and Lewis Macadams’s magazine
Mother
. The interview was subsequently selected for inclusion in
The National Literary Anthology
as best interview of the year (1966), as judged by a panel including such figures as Susan Sontag and Robert Brustein. The interview had been taken at face value as an interview with Cage. After Ted’s informing George Plimpton, who was somehow involved in the awards, of the interview’s fabrication, Plimpton had to notify Cage. Cage asked if Ted were “for me or against me”; Plimpton assured Cage that Ted was for him, the interview having been made using methods of composition learned from Cage himself. Cage then declined his supposed share of the thousand-dollar award, on the grounds that he hadn’t been involved in the interview at all, not having spoken or written a word of it.

As indicated in the introduction, Ted incorporated the poems by himself in
Bean Spasms
into subsequent books of his (as did Padgett).

So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1979
, first published by George Mattingly’s Blue Wind Press in 1980, is a unique volume, which feels less like a “selected poems” than a new book constructed by Ted. The cover art is by Donna Dennis; but the book, which is quite large, makes generous use of drawings by George Schneeman in a manner reminiscent of
In the Early Morning
Rain
. In this case there is a drawing for each section of the book, appearing after the section title.

The sections in
So Going Around Cities
present poems in groups that have overlapping chronologies: for example, the section called
Many Happy Returns
(which does not strictly correspond to the Corinth Books edition) dated 1961–1968, is followed by
A Boke
, dated 1966, which is followed by a section called
Waterloo Sunset
, which is dated 1964–1968. With the exception of the section titled
from The Sonnets
, the
Many Happy Returns
section, and
Memorial Day
, the sections do not employ titles of previously published books. Ted was, in general, honoring chronology of composition rather than chronology of publication. He was also asserting the individual identities of the previously published books: they were too unique to be excerpted from in a systematic way; and so it was necessary was to construct a whole new entity. Each section of the book bears an epigraph on its title page, as the title page of the section called
Not Dying
has the epigraph “No joke!”