The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (4 page)
Read The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Online
Authors: Alice Notley
The postcard poem was a form dominated by the size of the card, though a relatively longer poem could be written on a card if Ted shrank his handwriting. Ted immediately used semi-collaboration as a way into the poems, inducing everyone he knew to write a line or draw an image on a postcard. He later eliminated the names of the “facilitators,” except for the occasional dedication. The poems are often epigrammatic, but are just as likely to be longer; they chronicle, not so explicitly, a difficult year—in terms of health, finances, relationships with friends. They are about the workings of a community, about poetry quarrels and poetry festivals, about cops on the corner and what music is being listened to, what is going on in the newspapers. Ted produced a couple hundred original poems; there are one hundred exactly in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, which I edited after his death, according to his instructions.
We also present here a separate section of the best of the out-takes from
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, thirty-three more “postcard poems,” many of which could easily have been included in the book. One suspects Ted of fetishizing the number one hundred; but approximately that number seems to be how many the mind is capable of considering in relation to one another. These additional thirty-three, hopefully, suggest a book of their own.
Though
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
contains many of Ted’s “forms,” his voice has changed. The necessity for concision, imposed by the size of the card, pushes tone of voice up against language up against form: “
HOLLYWOOD
/ paid Lillian Gish $800,000 to / disappear so lovely so pure like milk / seems but isn’t because of the fall-out / but it would have only cost me five & didn’t, so I did.” Many of the poems are monologues for the person who provided the phrase or image, or are in dialogue with him/her. Some work with texts of dead poets, Whitman and Lindsay for example, or with songs. There is a flexibility of tone throughout, which has emerged from the lengthier autobiographical poems of the late 70s and early 80s,
but must operate more quickly. This book is extraordinary without appearing to be: it doesn’t have “monument” written on it, but it isn’t like anything else.
Ted’s last poems are the fourteen poems—twenty-one pages—he wrote after the completion of
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
during the final six months of his life. It must be obvious by now that Ted did not slow down as a writer during his last years, and these poems are sharp and fulsome. They were kept together in a folder with a handwritten title page: “Poems/
/Ted Berrigan.” Some are short in the manner of
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, and there are several longer poems, including an abrasive “Stand-Up Comedy Routine,” made from a
Mad-Libs
form.
1
But Ted’s very last poem is a lovely six-page work, “This Will Be Her Shining Hour,” written in dialogue with myself and the voices in a Fred Astaire movie on TV. “ ‘Their lives are as fragile as
The Glass Menagerie
.’” That line near the end of Ted’s final poem refers to the people in the movie, the people in the poem, and the two of us as both people in the poem and ourselves, comparing them/us to Tennessee Williams’s play, to glass figures, to the enduringness of the play about fragile people. What does
lives
mean then?
Lives
seems to be “art,” and so one is left thinking about the strength of poetry.
Ted Berrigan’s poems are very
deliberate
. They have a graven quality as if they were drawn on the page, word by word. He often wrote in unlined notebooks with a black felt-tip pen, and one might also say they have a black-felt-tip-pen quality. You feel that no words have been crossed out and replaced.
I’m impressed by this graven-ness in
The Sonnets
and
Many Happy Returns
, in
Easter Monday
, but then, too, in most of the later work. It doesn’t go away if the feeling in the poem is more autobiographical or intimate, as in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
. The latter poems read as if written with the black felt-tip pen, on the postcard. They have a primary physical reality.
Two more things from this: first, a continuous interaction with art and artists gave Ted an active visual and tactile sense. He is often painting, or collaging, or drawing his way through a poem. On the other hand, he agreed with Jack Spicer’s notion of the
other
voice that dictates one’s poems, and his poems have a “dictated” quality, even the ones that are made from other people’s words. These two notions
aren’t incompatible. “Dictation” suggests aurality rather than plastic qualities, but there isn’t any reason why all the senses shouldn’t be working, and Ted had a very fine ear: “Their lives are as fragile as
The Glass Menagerie
.” Listen.
Ted’s poetry is remarkable for its range of tones of voice. He actively studied both “tone of voice” and “stance,” the range of attitudinal play in human discourse and the projection of character. Here Ted’s professed model was Frank O’Hara, but I often find Ted more mysterious and more intense in both tone and stance. Not having O’Hara’s education or “class,” Ted therefore couldn’t be as traditional. He couldn’t call on a tone of voice from another decade or century as if he owned it, even though he knew exactly what Whitmanesque or Johnsonian was. He had to reinvent it for himself, from his working-class background and University of Tulsa education and ceaseless self-education.
Ted is often characterized as “second-generation New York School.” That label, with its “second-generation,” seems to preclude innovation. Ted’s career as a poet, after his earliest, sentimental poems, begins in the innovation of
The Sonnets
. He invented its form, with its “black heart beside the fifteen pieces” and its “of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage,” if you take fifteen to be most likely fourteen and understand that his heart really is beside the poem not in it. These poems, designed to contain anything and to expand temporally, can do so because the form’s finiteness is emphasized. It could probably be argued that this form is the one he was most informed by afterward, even when he was being transparent and “sentimental”—when he had finally learned the uses and control of sentimentality, since he consistently explored the spaces between lines, and the spaces between phrases, within the poem as frame. He had also learned from his sonnet form how to find the congruences in supposedly random happenstance:
Can’t cut it (night)
in New York City
it’s alive
inside my tooth
on St. Mark’s Place
where exposed nerve
jangles
(“
FEBRUARY AIR
”)
This is verbal, environmental, and emotional happenstance, where the parts of the moment click in.
If you the reader are a poet, Ted’s poetry is full of resources: forms, techniques, stylistic practices—manners and mannerisms, ways of sounding like a person, ways of achieving exaltation. If you the reader are a reader (of poetry), Ted’s poetry is a gift. He is working hard to amuse—make you enjoy this taking up of your time; to “say,” what he knows, reasons, feels; and to be like you, at the same time acknowledging his (anyone’s) own secret: “I never told anyone what I knew. Which was that it wasn’t / for anyone else what it was for me” (“Cranston Near the City Line”).
We have, traditionally, the senses, but words are our sensors. We use them to feel our way across and through, up and down. Ted understood this as well as any poet I can think of. So much of his poetry is about the pleasure of movement across the page. He is saying, “This is what we do. This is living, taking its walk.” It is a very gentle message, that of the walk through time, laid alongside the message that all time is simultaneous. But, also,
No-mind
No messages
(Inside)
Thanksgiving 1969
(“
IN MY ROOM
”)
ALICE NOTLEY
PARIS
, 2004
1
.
Mad-Libs
, an offshoot of
Mad
magazine, contained fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice do-it-yourself versions of country songs, comedy routines, anecdotes, and so forth.
1934 | Born on November 15 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Margaret Dugan Berrigan and Edmund Joseph Berrigan, the oldest of four children, with Rick, Kathy, and Johnny to follow. His father, Ed, was chief maintenance engineer at the Ward Baking Company Plant, and his mother, Peggy, was a bookkeeper and cashier in the public schools lunch program. |
1952 | Graduated from La Salle Academy. |
1953 | Attended Providence College. In Ted’s own words he was educated in the “Catholic school system, first by the Sisters of Mercy, then at La Salle Academy with the Christian Brothers, and for one year under the Dominicans at Providence College.” |
1954 | Joined the army, spending sixteen months in Korea, stationed at Uijongbu, between 1954 and 1955. |
1955 | Was transferred to Tulsa, having attained the rank of sergeant (SP3) and having received a good conduct medal. Began studies at the University of Tulsa on the GI Bill. |
1957 | Discharged from active duty and placed in the reserves. |
1958 | Ted’s father, Ed Berrigan, died. |
1958–59 | Taught eighth grade at Madalene School in Tulsa. |
1959 | Met Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Joe Brainard. (Already knew David Bearden, Pat Mitchell, Marge Kepler, and others.) |
1960–61 | Wrote a postcard to Frank O’Hara, beginning their association. Moved to New York in the same time period as Pat Mitchell, Brainard, Gallup, and Padgett. Met O’Hara. |
1962 | Finished his master’s thesis, “The Problem of How to Live as Dealt with in Four Plays by George Bernard Shaw.” Upon receiving his MA from the University of Tulsa, he returned it with the note, “I am the master of no art.” Met Kenneth Koch during Koch’s office hours at Columbia. Took one semester of classical Greek at Columbia; earned money writing papers for Columbia students. Met and married Sandra Alper in New Orleans over the course of a weekend, traumatic difficulties ensuing with Sandy’s family. Began writing |
1963 | Finished |
1964 | The first edition of |
1965 | Intensive period of writing for |
1966 | Death of Frank O’Hara. Served on the advisory board of the Poetry Project. Taught the first writing workshop offered at the Project and continued to serve as a teacher off and on until 1979. This was his first poetry teaching post, though that same year he began an intermittent but ongoing participation in the Writers in the Schools Poetry Program. By or around this time had met George Schneeman, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Tom Clark, Bernadette Mayer, Peter Schjeldahl, Lewis MacAdams, John Godfrey, Donna Dennis, Larry Fagin, Aram Saroyan, Clark Coolidge, Bill Berkson, John Giorno. |
1967 | The Sonnets |
1968 | Left New York to take a writer-in-residence position at the University of Iowa, the Writers’ Workshop, from fall 1968 through spring 1969. Met Anselm Hollo, Gordon Brotherston, Merrill Gilfillan, and others. |
1969 | Separated from Sandy Alper Berrigan. |
1970 | Guillaume Apollinaire Ist Tot. Und Anderes |
1970–71 | Transitional period of moving from place to place with Alice Notley. Lived in Southampton, Long Island (in Larry Rivers’s garage), New York, Providence, and Bolinas. Bolinas at this time included in its community Lewis MacAdams, Joanne Kyger, Don Allen, Phil Whalen, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bill Berkson, et al. |
1972 | Married Alice Notley. Moved to Chicago and taught at Northeastern Illinois University, following Ed Dorn as Poet in Residence, from winter 1972 until spring 1973. Anselm Berrigan born. Met Bob Rosenthal, Rochelle Kraut, Hank Kanabus, Art Lange and many others, some of whom subsequently moved to New York. Began working on |
1973 | Moved to England and taught at the University of Essex (replacing Robert Lowell) from fall 1973 until spring 1974. Friends included Gordon Brotherston, Douglas Oliver, Pierre Joris, Tom Pickard, Wendy Mulford, John James, Allen Fisher, Dick Miller, Simon Pettet, Helena Hughes, Marion Farrier, etc. Several of these people subsequently moved |
1974 | Edmund Berrigan born. Moved back to Chicago and taught at Northeastern Illinois University from fall 1974 until spring 1975. |
1975 | Red Wagon |
1976 | Moved back to New York, ill with hepatitis. Health poor from now on. Extensive association with Harris Schiff, Steve Carey, Tom Carey, and Eileen Myles began. |
1977 | Received a CAPS Grant. |
1978 | Train Ride |
1979 | Received an NEA Grant. |
1980 | Taught spring and summer terms at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. |
1981 | In a Blue River |
1982 | The Morning Line |
1983 | Writing last poems. Becoming increasingly ill but continuing to function as much as possible. Conducted lengthy but unsuccessful interview with James Schuyler. Died on July 4 of complications from cirrhosis of the liver, which was most probably caused by the hepatitis C virus. Buried at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island, a military cemetery. |
1988 | A Certain Slant of Sunlight |
1991 | Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan |
1994 | Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan |
1997 | On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living |
1998 | Great Stories of the Chair |
2000 | The Sonnets |