The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (77 page)

“Tambourine Life” was anthologized in
The Young American Poets
, ed. Paul Carroll, introduction by James Dickey (Chicago: Big Table Publishing Company, 1968). This was a highly influential anthology that crossed over into both mainstream and avant-garde territories, including poets like Ted, Ron Padgett, Tom Clark, and Anne Waldman, alongside poets like Mark Strand, Louise Gluck, James Tate, and Charles Simic. The publication of this twenty-eight-page poem in such a book made Ted famous, and “Tambourine Life” was his best-known poem for many years.

“(Tuli’s)”: Tuli Kupferberg, poet and musician, and member of the poetry-rock group The Fugs. The Fugs have maintained a continuous existence since the 60s, with some changes of personnel, but with Kupferberg and poet Ed Sanders remaining constant. At the time of the writing of “Tambourine Life,” Ted’s friend Lee Crabtree was also one of The Fugs. Ted wrote the lyrics for a Fugs song, called “I’m Doing All Right,” with music by Lee Crabtree and Vinny Leary. The song appeared on
The Fugs’ Second Album
.

“Thanks to Jack”: Jack Kerouac, but also anyone, as one would call anyone “Jack” (like “Bud”). The name Dick, primarily referring to Dick Gallup, is often used similarly but with the sexual nuance.

“Mr. Pierre Loti and his nameless dog”: reference to the well-known painting by Henri Rousseau of the French novelist and journalist Pierre Loti (1850–1923), dressed as a Turk, with his dog. Dick Gallup suggests (in a letter to me) that “Tambourine Life” opens with a view of Ted’s desk: “a quite elaborate affair with boxes of books and various pictures tacked up here and there. I’m pretty sure he had a copy of the Pierre Loti portrait by R. on the wall.”

“
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
”: probably refers to an image of Larry Rivers’s enormous (thirty-two-by-fourteen-foot) work titled
The History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky
(1965). In Ted’s copy of
So Going Around Cities
he has changed the date attached to these words from “circa 1967” to “circa 1965.” The Rivers work consists of paintings, photos, drawings, and objects and may have been an influence on “Tambourine Life.”

“The apples are red again in Chandler’s valley”: reference to Kenneth Patchen’s poem “The Lute in the Attic.” According to Ron Padgett (in a letter to me): “Ted and
I (and others in Tulsa) were infatuated with Patchen’s reading of it, to music provided by the Chamber Jazz Sextet, on a record called
Kenneth Patchen
, produced by Cadence Records in the late 1950s.”

“John-Cage-Animal-Cracker / Method of Composition”: Ted was greatly influenced by John Cage’s compositional theories and by his book
Silence
. Although chance methods aren’t at play in “Tambourine Life,” the poem has the feel of having been “composed” as much as “written,” and its white spaces are quick silences which create rhythms that can’t be anticipated. See the note on the book
Bean Spasms
for an account of Ted’s “An Interview with John Cage.”

“
LADY BRETT
”: Not really Lady Brett Ashley of Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, but Brett deBary (later an Asian Studies scholar), with whom Ted hitchhiked to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965.

“like the three pricks / Alice gave / Joe Gould”: The portraitist Alice Neel painted a nude of writer and Greenwich Village denizen Joe Gould, in which she endowed him with three penises. Ted wrote a short introduction to a portfolio, including the nude portrait of Gould and also a clothed portrait, which appeared in
Mother
no. 6 (1965). Around the same time Ted wrote an article on Neel’s work for
Art News
(published in January 1966).

“Jacques-Louis David”: Ted isn’t really referring to the nineteenth-century French painter, but to Ted’s baby son, David. The words “Jacques-Louis David” create a balance with the words “Mr. Jean-Paul Sartre.”

“Dancers / Buildings and / People in the Street”:
Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street
is the title of both an essay and a collection of essays by Edwin Denby. The words function syntactically as themselves but also refer to Denby’s title.

“Count Korzybski”: Alfred Habdank Korzybski (1879–1950) was a Polish American linguist, whose work Ted had read in 1960. Korzybski’s theories hinged on a complete separation between the word and the object it referred to. Ted believed in the theories but claimed that reading Korzybski’s books turned one into a crank: “Someone says to you ‘The plate fell,’ and you say ‘The plate didn’t fall, you dropped it.’ Then they hate you.”

“someone I love is dead”: Anne Kepler died during the composition of the poem. As described in the poem “People Who Died” in
In the Early Morning
Rain
, she was “killed by smoke-poisoning while playing the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist.”

Bean Spasms
This painterly, large-scale poem was first published in the collaborative book
Bean Spasms
. George Schneeman had given Ted a handmade book containing a few images, and Ted wrote the poem on the blank parts of the pages. In “An Interview with Barry Alpert,” Ted states, “It was an attempt to write a very heavy, palimpsest-like open poem, in which things would be coming up and down at you as well as flitting by very quickly on the page. It’s constantly dragging you back even though you are going forward very quickly. It goes around in a lot of circles, it’s really a labyrinth, but it’s not exhausting because it doesn’t really put anything heavy on you, say the way Pound’s
Cantos
do. It doesn’t act like you’re supposed to stop and go read about the Roman Empire in the sixth century, though there are a million literary references in it actually.”

Ron Padgett states (in a letter to me) that he wrote short parts of “Bean Spasms.”

Frank O’Hara’s Question from “Writers and Issues” by John Ashbery
This poem contains a misquotation from O’Hara’s poem “Biotherm”: O’Hara’s line, which would be the last line of Ted’s poem, is “I am guarding it from mess and measure,” not “mess and message.” In a personal copy of
Many Happy Returns
Ted changed “message” to “measure”; but he retained the word
message
in subsequent publications of the poem (it is the last section of “An Autobiography in Five Parts” in
In the Early Morning Rain
and is also reprinted in
So Going Around Cities
). Ted was interested in the fact that often when he “appropriated” a text he unconsciously changed it. He considered this tendency to be part of his creative process.

Things to Do in New York City
and
10 Things I Do Every Day
These poems mark the first appearance of the things-to-do form in Ted’s work. Ted was particularly interested in “10 Things I Do Every Day,” a short, formalistic poem which is a condensed presentation of a list (Gary Snyder’s “things to do” poems, which list things to do in various world locales, are longer and more casual in form). Ted later used the “list” as a framework for an expansive, discursive poem, opening the space
between “items” into a talking, pondering space. This is the technique, for example, of “Things to Do in Providence,” in
Red Wagon
.

In the Early Morning Rain
was published by Cape Goliard in 1970. Ted worked closely with the editor (and filmmaker) Barry Hall on this volume. The cover art and drawings were by George Schneeman.

Hello
Most of the text of this poem comes from a postcard (the kind you would find in gas stations); the poem introduces immediately an important strand of the book involving found material. The book itself is a collage of old and new styles, idiosyncratic textual surfaces, translation, collaboration, and a new, transparent lyrical manner. There are a number of open-field lyrics in this volume spinning off the style of “Tambourine Life,” which had created a new possibility for a shorter poem. The new style was first realized in
Many Happy Returns
, in such poems as the title poem and “Things to Do in New York (City).” Shorter poems in
In the Early Morning Rain
that further exploit the new style include “American Express,” “February Air,” “Grey Morning,” “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” and “Heroin.”

80th Congress
In the Early Morning Rain
contains three poems which are explicit collaborations with other poets. The book is, on one level, “about” community, as its dedication, “To my family & friends,” implies.

The Circle
This is the first of several short meditative poems that appear in the book. See also “It’s Important” and “Dial-A-Poem.”

5 New Sonnets:
A Poem
These sonnets are constructed of lines from
The Sonnets
but are not in any way part of the sequence. They are “new” sonnets.

Poem (Seven thousand feet over . . .)
First appeared in
A Lily for My Love
, an early chapbook of Ted’s. As the chapbook title indicates, this was very sentimental work, and Ted destroyed every copy he could find. He retained “Poem” however, adding the dedication to Bill Berkson because Berkson had said he liked the poem.
Ted left the dedication off in
So Going Around Cities
, but it seems to belong in
In the Early Morning Rain
, which is especially replete with dedications. “Poem” was originally printed under the title “Poem” in
The White Dove Review
2 (edited by Ron Padgett); the title was subsequently changed to “Grief” in
A Lily for My Love
and then back to “Poem.” The poem was written in 1958 under the influence of Kenneth Rexroth’s theory of “natural numbers,” which posits a short, syllabic line.

Ikonostasis
We have inserted the poem “Ikonostasis,” not originally published in
In the Early Morning Rain
, between “Presence” and “The Upper Arm.” Ted had found it difficult to choose between “Ikonostasis” and “Presence,” both obviously influenced by John Ashbery’s
The Tennis Court Oath
, but was certain a choice was necessary. That choice doesn’t seem to matter so much now. “Ikonostasis” was later published in
So Going Around Cities
.

The Upper Arm
The second-to-last line originally read “bows that spell” not “boughs that spell.” It is difficult for the tongue to gauge which pronunciation of “bows” to use when reading the poem aloud, so Ted changed the spelling to “boughs” for
So Going Around Cities
.

Corridors of Blood
Structured somewhat similarly to “Rusty Nails,” this poem employs language drawn from Simone de Beauvoir’s diaries. Ted admired de Beauvoir’s work—and her life lived—but was fascinated, in the case of this poem, by the flatness of the language of translation, how the diaries sounded after being translated from French to English.

Rusty Nails
Ted composed this work by taking lines from various books by other authors, then assigning to them, in a completely automatic fashion, titles from a list given him by Ron Padgett. In “An Interview with Barry Alpert,” he says “I meant “Rusty Nails” to be like a novel; each one of those things is a chapter.”

This sequence of poems, transliterated from Giuseppe Ungaretti’s
Vita di un uomo
, first appeared in
Bean Spasms
in a different order and with the omission of
“Tonight” and “Joy of Shipwrecks.” Two poems from the earlier version, “Long Time No See” and Que Sera Sera,” were discarded from this second version.

Life Among the Woods
First published in
Bean Spasms
, this prose work is a giddy mistranslation from a French grammar book for children.

In Three Parts
and
In 4 Parts
These two poems, influenced by John Giorno’s treatment of found materials, were first published in
Bean Spasms
.

This work, made entirely of found materials, was first published in Bill Berkson’s magazine/anthology
Best & Co
. in 1969. In that presentation, there were headings beneath the overall title corresponding to each of the five sections: “Childhood,” “Army Life,” “Dope Scene,” “Manners,” and “Poetry.” Ted omitted the headings from
In the Early Morning Rain
.

March 17th, 1970
Ted had become interested in the “occasional” poem. The occasion for this poem is St. Patrick’s Day; the poem addresses what that holiday might mean to an Irish American who both liked and disliked “Irish-American-ness.”

Epithalamion
First published in
Bean Spasms
.

Poop
First published in
Bean Spasms
.

February Air
The poem originally did not repeat the last line, “You’d Better Move On” (from a Rolling Stones song). The repetition was added in
So Going Around Cities
, in which this poem appears in the section called
Many Happy Returns
.

Black Power
Much of this poem is incorporated into the poem “Bean Spasms.”

The Ten Greatest Books of the Year (1967)
This list poem, which originally did not appear in
In the Early Morning Rain
, has been inserted before “The Ten
Greatest Books of the Year, 1968.” The poem was first published in
So Going Around Cities
.

interstices
and
bent
These are the first one-word poems published by Ted. The avowed influence is Aram Saroyan, whose book of minimal poems,
Aram Saroyan
, had been published in 1968.

The Great Genius
This poem originally read as follows: “The Great Genius is / A man who can do the / Average thing when everybody / Else is going crazy.” Ted rewrote the poem in his personal copy of the book, and we have used the rewritten version.

Poem for Philip Whalen
Ted made a handful of punctuational changes in this poem, in his personal copy of the book, all of which we have incorporated.