The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (76 page)

XVI
According to Ted’s notes on the typescript used for the Penguin edition, “ ‘The Going Down of the Morning Land’ is how Lauren Owen’s father translated ‘The Decline of the West’ to me in 1960 in Tulsa—slow was my word.” Thus “the slow going down of the morning land” refers to Oswald Spengler’s book
The Decline of the West
.

XIX
Mysterious Billy Smith was a welterweight boxer, whom Ted had read about in A. J. Liebling’s boxing classic,
The Sweet Science
. Liebling quotes boxing manager Jack Kearns on Smith: “He was always doing something mysterious. . . . Like he would step on your foot, and when you looked down, he would bite you in the ear.”

XXI
A rearrangement of the lines of “Penn Station,” which is also Sonnet XII.

XXIII
“The 15th day of November” is Ted’s birthday. “Between Oologah and Pawnee” (two towns in Oklahoma): an allusion to Apollinaire’s poem
“Annie,”
which contains the phrase
“Entre Mobile et Galveston
.” According to Ron Padgett in
Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan
(Great Barrington, Mass: The Figures, 1993), the phrase is also a reference to Woody Guthrie.

XXXI
This sonnet was influenced by Kenneth Koch’s poem “You Were Wearing,” which contains the line “I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.”

XXXVI
and
LXXVI
These two personal poems were printed again in
Many Happy Returns
. In the course of
The Sonnets
they are fragmented and later reconstituted, as many of the poems are—they are part of its total process. In
Many Happy Returns
they are simply poems in their original forms.

Uijongbu is a town in Korea where Ted was stationed during his military service at the end of the Korean War.

XXXVIII
General Benedict Arnold, famous as a traitor to the American side in the Revolutionary War, actually led the Continental Army, with Ethan Allen, to a victory at Fort Ticonderoga.

“A man signs a shovel / And so he digs”: these lines refer to one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, a snow shovel with the words “In Advance of the Broken Arm” written thereon.

XLI
Ira Hayes (1923–1955): Pima Indian war hero, one of the soldiers who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, as portrayed in a famous (staged) photograph. He later died of alcoholism and exposure on the Pima reservation.

XLVII
William Bonney is the real name of the outlaw Billy the Kid.

XLVIII
Francis Marion: Revolutionary War hero and specialist in guerrilla tactics, also known as the Swamp Fox.

LI
Gus Cannon (1883–1979): banjoist, jug player, and songwriter. He wrote the song “Walk Right In,” later quoted from in “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” in
In the Early Morning Rain
.

LII
“It is a human universe” refers to Charles Olson’s essay “Human Universe.” Richard White was a poet whom Ted knew in Tulsa and with whom he discussed Olson’s work.

LXI
Big Bill Broonzy (1893–1958): musician, one of the seminal figures of the Chicago blues.

LXX
Ted’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre,” quoted from throughout the book, is finally used in its entirety here.

LXXX
Louis Sullivan (1856–1924): major American architect. See also the poem “String of Pearls” in
Nothing for You
. The building referred to is probably the Bayard Building on Bleecker Street, in Manhattan.

LXXXI
Huddie Ledbetter: real name of the great folksinger Leadbelly (1885–1949). Lonnie Johnson (1894–1970): blues guitarist. Hans Hofmann (1880–1960): American
abstract expressionist, influential painter and teacher, originator of the theory of “push-pull.”

According to Ron Padgett (in a letter to me), Ted saw Lonnie Johnson “perform at Folk City in the early 1960s and was quite bowled over by him. There was a great moment when, near the end of a long set, Victoria Spivey leaped onto the bandstand wearing a tight white dress covered with dark rubber snakes and did several stunning numbers with Johnson.”

The manuscript source is a folder retained by Ted until his death. The sequence has never been published in a book until now.

The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
comprises poems first published over the course of two issues of
“C” (A Journal of Poetry)
. Volume 1, no. 8 (April 1964) contains
The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
as three poems: “Stop Stop Six” (the first poem of the sequence as finalized), “Then I’d Cry” (omitted from the final sequence), and “Fauna Time” (the third poem of the final sequence). The same issue contains, as a separate poem, “Reeling Midnight” (the second poem of the final sequence), dedicated “to Pierre Reverdy.” Volume 1, no. 9 (Summer Etc. 1964) contains
The Rest of the Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
, composed of “On His Own” (our fourth poem), “The Dance of the Broken Bomb” (fifth poem), “Putting Away” (seventh poem), “Owe” (sixth poem), and “We Are Jungles” (eighth poem).

These poems are transliterations from Pierre Reverdy’s
Quelques Poèmes
, which had previously inspired Ron Padgett’s own transliterative work,
Some Bombs
. As he says in “Interview with Barry Alpert” (in
Talking in Tranquility)
, Ted decided to duplicate Padgett’s process himself. Ted states: “Ron’s French is pretty good whereas my French is quite low, not very good at all. So when I went through and did the same thing Ron did, my poems are slower and heavier than Ron’s. They have a lot more direct highly conscious meaning relating to the specific circumstances I was in—which is all obscured in the versions themselves but you can get the feeling, the feeling is very heavy. They were very negative poems; I was very angry.”

In a letter to me, Padgett states that part 8, “We Are Jungles,” may have been influenced by an early poem by David Shapiro called “We Are Gentle.”

Padgett’s
Some Bombs
also inspired the following poem of Ted’s:

POEM IN HONOR OF SOME BOMBS
Ron Padgett a ton ses quelques poemes
a dix Pierre Reverdy a homage de “patsee”
et la distinction et erudition au cul de chaud
pour le “je ne sais pas” (shrug shrug). Et voila!
Ici est grotesque dans la albee de R K O tres beeg beeg
And les underwear des some jeunes filles a giant significance
pour Ronald et Edmund (je n’ai pas Doubts).

Also: fragMENT des Patsee de Christine egalite la “kill
Chrissie Beak

Making Teresa dans la nuit de bete noire et “It is a big
Red
House.” Homage a Blaise Cendrars mais no je ne read pas
Some Poems of his. So what. Vie doux la tant pis
et pix frank sur la table pour la sensible the pun
(pode bal) (see a pneu from Marchand baby whoop whoop

hobbyhorse!

Let us stay with what we know / quelle Ronald
est la fraisne toute hot and “way out west!” / that
Ted Berrigan mais jeune filles oui oui en flagrant delicto e’toil
dans la SONNETS: “mon grand reve une stabs dans mon Coeur

(blanks).”

/That Chrissie est a Patsee est a Chris est Beatrice est Sandra est

Kenneth est Frank est John / et Ronald et Ted throwing je t’aime a

tout la monde / Out.

Also published as
Situations
#7, New York City, 1998.

One may speculate as to why
Great Stories of the Chair
wasn’t published in a book. Perhaps it, like
The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
, was too “heavy” for both
Many Happy Returns
and
In the Early Morning Rain
. Ted preferred a purer air, and he may have seen “heaviness” and “anger” as a kind of sentimentality. There
was a point, a few years later, when Ted deliberately cultivated sentimentality (see such poems as “Peace” and “Grey Morning” in
In the Early Morning Rain
and
“
Things to Do in Providence” in
Red Wagon
), but the attempt was more to formalize feeling than to be dominated by it. As Ted often said, he was a formalist.

Mother Cabrini
Mother Cabrini (1850–1917), an American nun, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Sunset Motel
In the
Situations
chapbook, which reprints the sequence as published in
Angel Hair
4, the fourth poem is called “The Sunset Hotel.” Ted made a change from “Hotel” to “Motel” on a manuscript photocopied from
Angel Hair
4, and we have retained the change.

Klein’s, a New York City department store, was located at Union Square. The original reference—and much of the material in “The Sunset Motel”—is from the poem “For You,” written in the early 60s and first published in
Many Happy Returns
.

What’s the Racket
“Ode to the Confederate Dead” refers to Allen Tate’s poem. When young, Ted paid attention to poets such as Tate, William Empson, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Conrad Aiken, to whom he sent a copy of
The Sonnets
(and who replied critically but at some length). Ted first came to poetry through anthologies and also recordings of poets reading their work (he did a hilariously nasal imitation of Empson reading “Missing Dates”).

The Conscience of a Conservative
The title refers to Senator Barry Goldwater’s book by the same name, published in 1960. “Spuyten Duyvil” is a town outside New York.

Some Trips to Go On
“Clear the Range” refers to Ted’s novel
Clear the Range
(New York: Adventures in Poetry/Coach House South, 1977), probably in process at the time.

A Letter from Dick Gallup
“Furtive Days” is the title of a collaborative novel by Ted and Ron Padgett, an excerpt from which was published in
Bean Spasms
.

The first book publication of this poem was in
So Going Around Cities
.

Boke
is an early spelling of
book
. Joe Brainard published Ted’s poem “Living with Chris” (see
Many Happy Returns
), illustrated by himself, under his imprint, Boke Press.

As stated in the introduction, though Ted dates “A Boke” as being from 1966 in
So Going Around Cities
(with the epigraph “Poetry.”), it was first published in
Kulchur
in the autumn 1965 issue. This probably places its composition just previous to the period when “Tambourine Life” was written, that poem being dated “Oct. 1965–Jan. 1966.” Ted referred to “Tambourine Life” as his first long poem, but “A Boke,” which is thirteen pages long and a truly bizarre poem, feels like a long poem. It can be seen, on one level, as an abstract realization of the longer form. “Tambourine Life” was followed, within a few years, by long poems such as “Train Ride” and “Memorial Day” (written in collaboration with Anne Waldman), not to mention medium-length poems such as “Things to Do in Providence” and “Things to Do on Speed.”

“remember the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen?”: Though the balance of the poem is derived from an article by James Dickey in
The New Yorker
, this repeated line was borrowed from William Burroughs. According to Dick Gallup, in a letter to me, “We heard a recording of Burroughs saying the line in his sinister Midwestern drawl.”

Published by Ted Wilentz’s Corinth Books in 1969. We present the book in its entirety. The cover for the original edition of
Many Happy Returns
was by Joe Brainard.

Some of these poems were published as broadsides; “Living with Chris,” as previously noted, was published as a chapbook with illustrations by Joe Brainard (New York: Boke Press, 1968). For a description of all such publications in Ted’s oeuvre, as well as all editions of full-length books up to 1998, see
Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist
, ed. Aaron Fischer (New York: Granary Books, 1998).

Personal Poem #2
and
Personal Poem #9
“Personal Poem #2” is Sonnet LXXVI in
The Sonnets
, and “Personal Poem #9” is Sonnet XXXVI (
after Frank O’Hara
).
We’ve allowed them to be repeated since Ted is presenting a small “set” of four personal poems, and since these two poems are functional in Ted’s poetic universe as both sonnets and personal poems. The personal poem (as named) was invented by Frank O’Hara, who has only one poem called “Personal Poem” but makes reference to “my ‘I do this I do that’ / poems” in “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun).” Ted further systematized the form by adopting the phrase “personal poem” and using numbers, e.g., “Personal Poem #2.”

A Personal Memoir of Tulsa, Oklahoma / 1955–60
This poem was first published in
Bean Spasms
(New York: Kulchur Press, 1967), a volume of collaborations with Ron Padgett, illustrated by Joe Brainard. See note on the book
Bean Spasms
.

“Tambourine Life” is a major poem by any definition. Its inspiration was Ron Padgett’s “Tone Arm,” first published as a chapbook by Tom Clark’s Once Editions in 1966 and subsequently in the collection
Great Balls of Fire
(New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1969). “Tambourine Life” resembles “Tone Arm,” first of all, in being in numbered sections. Ted also copied Padgett’s device of naming different animals throughout the poem, which he referred to as “false continuity,” superficial in the sense of creating a surface of design and play. Otherwise, Ted’s poem feels opposite to “Tone Arm,” being open where “Tone Arm” is difficult. “Tambourine Life” was at first laid out according to the flush-left columnar convention that “Tone Arm” observes. It was after Ted had fifteen or sixteen pages that he began to open up the text, placing it all over the page in an open-field fashion. In “Interview with Barry Alper,” he refers to the look of the poem as being akin to that of a “graph or cardiogram.” And in “Interview with Tom Clark,” he refers to an influence by the painters Hans Hofmann and Joe Brainard on his open-field poetry of this period in the late 60s and early 70s: “In the open poems, I’m taking a cluster of about five words, not all on one line, and putting them up like blocks like Hans Hofmann. In fact that’s what I’m influenced by, that push. Joe Brainard I got it from more or less, but it’s that push-pull.” The obvious poetic influences for the
layout of “Tambourine Life” are Frank O’Hara’s long poem “Biotherm” and the work of Paul Blackburn.