The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (81 page)

Communism
This poem was constructed from a failed poem of mine during the
Easter Monday
period. In “An Interview with Ralph Hawkins” (in
Talking in Tranquility
), Ted, referring to the poems “Peking” and “Soviet Souvenir,” both in
Easter Monday
, states, “Marriage is like communism—ideally speaking—much more than it is capitalism or even socialism. I think it’s like communism, from whatever sense I have of communism. From each according to his means, to each according to his needs at best.”

Crossroads
See the poem “At Loma Linda” in
Easter Monday
.

Elysium
The dedication
“for Marion Farrier”
was added for
So Going Around Cities
. “Elysium” is heaven in classical mythology, but the reference here is from Shakespeare: “And what should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium” (
Twelfth Night, Or What You Will
, act 1, scene 2).

The poems in this section, all written in the late 70s, were first published in
So Going Around Cities
.

In the 51st State
In the seventh stanza there is the question of the word
brindle
, which is not considered a verb in the dictionary. “I’d still rather brindle” might mean that the speaker would still rather evince streaks or spots, as the word would imply, according to its usage as a noun (“brindle”) or an adjective (“brindled”). Perhaps Ted used the word in order not quite to make sense; this is a strange poem, opaque and clear, depressed and loving all at once (brindled?). The line “A woman rolls under the wheels in a book” refers to Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
.

Red Shift
This important “personal” poem was written according to method. “Red Shift” essentially follows an outline for a fill-in-the-blanks “New York School
poem,” as printed in a one-shot mimeo magazine
The Poets’ Home Companion
, edited by Carol Gallup. The form itself was devised by Linda O’Brien (Schjeldahl). The magazine was published in the late 60s, but Ted rediscovered it in the 70s and within it the parodic procedure for writing a poem such as one of his own personal poems. By following the parody, he rejuvenated the original form and created a brilliant, passionate work.

Around the Fire
The poem contains language from three different sources, as if there were three people speaking “around the fire.” The sources of words are interviews, poems, and speculations by Ed Dorn, me, and Ted. That is, Dorn’s and my words were already written down. Ted was more likely to draw on text than to “overhear,” though he sometimes did that too. The feminist last line of the poem is pure Berrigan.

Cranston Near the City Line
This poem was written using ideas derived from Kenneth Koch’s
I Never Told Anybody
, a book of suggestions for teaching poetry writing in nursing homes. Ted decided to combine several ideas for poems into a single poem, including the retrieval of an early memory using exact description, the telling of something that one had “never told anybody,” and the naming of colors of objects. When Ted performed the poem at readings, he sang the “She told me that she loved me” section.

Coda : Song
This poem was published under the title “Song” in
Clown War
16 (1977), ed. Bob Heman.

In Anselm Hollo’s Poems
Another of Ted’s delvings into the poetry / language of a friend and colleague.

Last Poem
Ted conceived of the “last poem” as a form: a poem that any poet might want to write. (See the note on “People Who Died,”
In the Early Morning Rain
.) The poem was written more than four years before his death, but people have a tendency to treat it as virtually Ted’s last poem and testament. It is far from his last poem; and it is quite funny, among its other qualities. Besides the words essentially from Creeley, from “frequent / Reification” through “and I dug him,” one
hears language echoing trashy spy novels, a poem from
Easter Monday
, the poem “Cranston Near the City Line,” and the initial voice-over for the soap opera
The Days of Our Lives
. “Last Poem” was originally published in the magazine
Inc. #3
, edited by John Daley, in which it is dated “13 Jan 79 / nyc.”

Published by Richard Aaron’s Am Here Books/Immediate Editions in 1982. The cover art was by Tom Clark.

Sonnet:
Homage to Ron
This poem is made up entirely of lines from Ron Padgett’s poetry, except for the last word, “No?” “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” uses a similar method, with the same poet’s material.

44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s
Written in November of 1978.

An UnSchneeman
In an interview I conducted with George Schneeman (published in
Waltzing Matilda
[New York: Kulchur, 1981]), George described his painting technique as the “unhandling” of paint. See also
Train Ride
, where Schneeman is referred to by Ted as “the bad painter,” in the “Let’s bitch our friends” passage. Schneeman was stating, in the interview, that his intention was not to compete with previous generations of perhaps obsessively virtuoso painters.

Part of My History
Ted lived for years without a telephone, until 1980 when his mother fell ill with cancer and the “red telephone” was installed. This is an “autobiographical” poem in which there are few facts and nothing’s transparent. The poet gradually finds himself stuck in a self and poem he knows too well—“a typical set / of Berrigan-thoughts,” until finally he thinks to make a phone call. The poem might be termed “anti-autobiographical.” The dedicatee, Lewis Warsh, is the author of a book called
Part of My History
.

The Morning Line
The first line is, more or less, by Steve Carey, also the dedicatee of the subsequent poem, “Velvet &.” Carey, who lived in the neighborhood,
often came over to recite a new line of poetry he’d thought up and was trying to extend into a whole poem. “Every man-jack boot-brain slack-jaw son of a chump” was that kind of line, the “morning line.”

Avec la Mécanique sous les Palmes
This is made up of lines by Pierre Reverdy.

Kerouac (continued)
“Kerouac” was made from an article about Jack Kerouac in the
New York Times
Sunday magazine.

That Poem George Found
The opening lines refer to a sonnet by Petrarch and will now recur in Ted’s poems; see, for example, “The Einstein Intersection” in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
.

DNA
A sonnet enclosed between two extra lines (
“: Ms. Sensitive Princess:”
and “Run a check on that, will you Watson?”), this poem is reminiscent of the more cryptic poems in
Easter Monday
, such as “Innocents Abroad” and “Incomplete Sonnet #254.” It is an analysis of the DNA of a poet.

Little American Poetry Festival
Written during the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam, in 1978, this poem intercuts work by Ted, Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman, and Lorenzo Thomas, that is, it’s supposed to
sound like
the festival.

After Peire Vidal, & Myself
See the introduction.

These poems, never before published in books, date roughly from between 1976 and 1981 and are reproduced from manuscript copies.

Normal Depth Exceeds Specified Value
A variant of the poem was published in
Clown War 16
under the title “In a Loud Restaurant.” The poem is dated “24 Sept 77” in our manuscript.

Winged Pessary
and
Do You Know Rene?
These two poems in a similar style date from around 1978. The “Rene” in the title of the second poem is poet, critic, and artist Rene Ricard; the poem is written as if spoken by him.

43
Dated “22 June 78 / nyc.”

A Spanish Tragedy
This poem was written in a notebook while someone else was speaking, presumably Larry Fagin. Ted may have asked Fagin to talk while he wrote. A dedication to Fagin, after the title, has been crossed out in the manuscript. The poem is dated “20 July 78 / Boulder.”

Ronka
The word “Ronka” refers to the folksinger Dave Van Ronk, recording artist and well-known Greenwich Village figure. A “ronka” would be a song such as Dave Van Ronk would sing. Although “Ronka” appears as one of the postcards shown in facsimile in the O Books edition of
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, it was never intended to be part of that series and was always kept in a folder with the other poems in this section of uncollected work. Ted had five hundred blank postcards to fill for the postcards project proper, as distinct from the book he was writing, and he often used poems from other books and folders for it. In manuscript “Ronka” is first dated “June 1978. nyc.”

My 5 Favorite Records
See the introduction.

Look Fred, You’re a Doctor, My Problem Is Something Like This:
The “Fred” in the title is Fred Yackulic, a psychiatrist; husband of my sister Margaret Notley, the musicologist. This poem was included in “An Interview with Tom Savage”
(Talking in Tranquility)
, which was conducted for the Columbia Oral History Archives. It belongs with the other autobiographical poems from the late 70s and early 80s, but is more literal than, for example, “Last Poem,” “Part of My History,” and “Another New Old Song.”

Compleynt to the Muse
This poem is dated “Nov 79/Nov 80” on our manuscript.

Coffee And
“One View/1960” is contained in the
Early Poems
section of the present volume, so Ted didn’t really tear it up. “Dogtown” is a reference to Olson’s
Maximus Poems
and to all that the word implies. The title itself is from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”: “and the Sagamore’s terrific ‘coffee and, Andy,’” meaning “with a cheese Danish.”

Three Little Words
Another “autobiographical” poem, this is written from the point of view of Lewis Warsh. It is dated 3/11/80 on the manuscript copy.

Round About Oscar
This is dated “17.IX.80.”

The By-Laws
This poem was made from a set of booklets written by George Schneeman as an aid to teaching English to foreigners. The “By-Laws” were those adopted by the Advisory Board of the Poetry Project in the late 70s.

Thin Breast Doom
Dated “2/80” in manuscript. The allusion is to “A Round of English” by Lew Welch, one of Ted’s favorite poems. In Welch’s poem there is the line “
Carved my initials on her thin breast bone,”
followed by the lines “Thin brass dome, beautiful! / How’d you ever think of a thin brass dome?” Those latter lines had been spoken, in real life, by Philip Whalen, mishearing Welch when he recited the initial line. Ted’s title, and dedication, with the change to “thin breast doom,” is thus a further “mishearing.”

Another New Old Song
This poem, dated “3/81” in manuscript, begins as fictional autobiography and gradually invokes Ted’s parents, particularly his mother.

This book was published by Leslie Scalapino’s O Books in 1988. The cover design of the original O Books edition, using facsimile postcards, was by Leslie Scalapino. The front cover incorporated the postcard “Windshield,” with its drawing by George Schneeman. The introduction was written by me.

See the introduction for an account of the postcards project. Poets who contributed phrases or lines to these poems (taking into account the poems in
the
Out-takes
as well) included Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Steve Carey, Greg Masters, Joanne Kyger, Steve Levine, Tom Pickard, Jeff Wright, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Harris Schiff, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Tom Carey, Ada Katz, and myself. Artists who provided images for the original five hundred postcards included George Schneeman, Dick Jerome, Rosemary Mayer, Shelley Kraut, Steve Levine, and myself. There were undoubtedly others.

Facsimile of Horoscope
Ted wanted the horoscope included as part of the book when published, but it was somehow overlooked in the publication of the O Books edition. It is printed here for the first time. One might view it as symbolic of fate, or as another kind of poet “DNA.” The “Secondary” chart was done according to Arab astrology. Ted was not precisely a believer, but he was interested in the symbolism of the zodiac, and at one time had thought a lot about his natal sign, Scorpio. See also the note to “Scorpion, Eagle, & Dove (A Love Poem),” in
Red Wagon
.

(You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid . . .)
The first sentence in the untitled second poem is an old show-biz saying found in one of George Burns’s autobiographies.