The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  Another larger poem in Many Happy Returns is the collaged (and visually collage-like) “Bean Spasms,” dated 1966. It was written in conjunction with images by George Schneeman and first published in the book Bean Spasms, a collaborative volume involving Ted, the poet Ron Padgett, and the artist Joe Brainard. Ted later incorporated into other books the work from Bean Spasms that was uniquely by himself.

  The Seventies

  The late 60s mark Ted’s departure from New York, and his work from the early 70s is replete with references from other locales. It is significant that Ted’s first book of the 70s, In the Early Morning Rain, was published by Cape Goliard, a British publisher.

  In the Early Morning Rain made lavish use of drawings (now lost) by George Schneeman to create spaciousness and to emphasize groupings. The book is a mix of work in older styles employing found materials, chance methods, transliteration, the form of The Sonnets, etc., and poems from the late 60s and 1970 in the new, open style of Many Happy Returns. In 1968 Ted had begun leading a migrant poetry teacher’s life and was spending time in Midwestern university towns like Iowa City and Ann Arbor. The light was different, he was making new friends, and he had begun to feel fated: to be addicted to drugs (pills, mostly speed) and perhaps to die early. The new poems elegize people who have recently died (Jack Kerouac, Rocky Marciano, Franny Winston, and others), allude to the war in Vietnam, celebrate specific evenings and occasions, and also celebrate the overcoming of emotional shakiness through the writing of poetry and through affection for others.

  The long poem Train Ride, written in 1971 but not published until 1978, is a lavish example of an affectionate poem for a friend: it is a “love poem” addressed to Joe Brainard, and is about love, sex, and friendship. The poem speaks to Joe throughout, informally, frankly, a little in Joe’s own style, and includes mock complaints about Ted’s and Joe’s mutual friends, about Joe himself, and a projected complaint, too, about Ted. The poem was written on a single day, February 18, during the course of a literal train ride between New York and Providence; it filled a rather large notebook. I remember Ted returning from the trip with the poem, slightly confused by the fact that it really was everything he wanted to say to Joe but also probably really a poem. This ambiguity, an unsure edge between life and art (not like Rauschenberg’s “gap” but much more razorlike, something that might hurt you in its reality) kept Ted from publishing it for some years.

  “Memorial Day,” written around the same time in collaboration with Anne Waldman, is a long poem in a similar voice, though the voice is Ted’s and Anne’s fused. The voice is open, plain speaking, and flexible. It can take on everything a conversation can; and though the poem has a back-and-forth movement in it, it also feels unified and inspired in the way that two people talking sometimes become one thing, the conversation. The poem was written to be performed at a reading at the Poetry Project (St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bouwerie, New York) on May 5, 1971, and Ted and Anne worked on it for several months. Since Memorial Day falls in May and is potentially rich in its association with death and sacrifice/heroism, it was decided in advance that Memorial Day would be the title and subject of the work. The two poets were living in separate towns on Long Island and wrote separately, in asterisk-headed sections, giving or sending their work to each other from time to time for response, but there was no chronological ordering going on. At some point Ted wrote all of what would be the last section, and then Anne arranged the material. Ted always considered it to be the most successful literary collaboration he had participated in, in view of its seriousness and depth.

  Meanwhile, and in deliberate counterpoint to such longer structures, Ted was writing many short poems. He often cited as formal influences the work of Giuseppe Ungaretti (the sequence “Life of a Man” in In the Early Morning Rain consists of transliterations of Ungaretti’s work), and Aram Saroyan’s poems, particularly the one-word poems. The section we have called Short Poems is divided into two parts. In a Blue River contains most of the chapbook of that name, published in 1981 by Susan Cataldo’s Little Light Books. Uncollected Short Poems consists of a handful of poems first published in So Going Around Cities, as well as many uncollected short poems. Most of the poems included in Short Poems were written in the late 60s and, especially, the early 70s.

  The short poem obviously involves more thought process than writing/reading process, if one can split the two. A short poem is peculiarly naked, whether it’s a weighty short poem or a lighter short poem. It often seemed to take years for Ted to decide that a particular one was good enough to be published. And it’s not surprising that In a Blue River is a later publication. A successful short poem may be capable of projecting new meanings on successive readings, but in a monolithic way, as if a new room has opened out, rather than in the overall, textured way that a longer poem can light up in a mesh of changeable meanings. For example, it may take the reader some time to connect the title “Larceny,” in the poem which reads “The / opposite / of / petty / is GRAND,” with the crimes of grand and petty larceny. One may be content with the observation that the opposite of petty is grand, a meditation on that. On the other hand a poem like “Laments,” which both praises and judges Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is awesome on the level of judgment: “you did it wrong.” The fact of judgment, and also this particular judgment—is it only of their deaths? their lifestyles?—constantly opens up more thoughtful space.

  Red Wagon, published by the Yellow Press in 1976, is possibly the volume of Ted’s that least shows his book-constructor’s touch: it is more purely a “collection,” assembled while he was ill with hepatitis. The poems, however, are solid, and many are among his best. By the time of the publication of Red Wagon Ted had taught at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa, Iowa City; at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; at Yale; at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago; and at the University of Essex in England. In 1976 he moved back to New York, where he would spend his remaining eight years. Red Wagon includes work written in many cities and two countries. It contains important shorter poems (such as “In the Wheel”), a number of open-field poems (for example, the popular “Things to Do in Providence”) and sprawling long-lined poems (“Something Amazing Just Happened”).

  Partway through Red Wagon, variety of form cedes to a denser, more slablike entity, beginning with the poem “Frank O’Hara” and the five poems succeeding it, the remnants of a disbanded sequence called “Southampton Winter.” In the original Red Wagon, poems from Easter Monday (still in the process of composition) rounded out the book for the most part, as well as a group of five sonnets. These were, in fact, five of The Sonnets, three previously published and two seeing print for the first time. Our version of Red Wagon omits the Easter Monday poems and the group of sonnets. It ends with “The Complete Prelude,” a poem made from words and phrases of Wordsworth’s poem. The use of another poet’s work as a word source had always been a favorite method of Ted’s (see, for example, “Sonnet VI,” made from a poem by his friend, the poet Dick Gallup.) This method could result in a kind of book review, or a dialogue with a poet’s style, or could be used to delve into Ted’s own consciousness. Here it is also a way to employ the now-forbidden language of English Romantic Poetry, which being part of the poet’s education is part of himself.

  If “Southampton Winter” had dissolved as a conception, poems such as “Chicago Morning” and “Newtown,” written in Chicago in 1972 and resembling the “Southampton Winter” poems, became the basis for Easter Monday. The sequence was not really conceived until Ted’s arrival in England in 1973. At both Northeastern Illinois University and the University of Essex Ted took teaching positions that had been held by Ed Dorn, who, like Ted, had recently entered into a second marriage and fathered two more children. Ted became interested in the concept of the second act, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now clichéd statement, “There are no second acts in American life.” Easter Monday, dedicated to Ed Dorn and named for Willem de Kooning’s beautifu
l painting as well as for the day after the day of rebirth, is meant to address the possibility of the second act. Ted had hoped for fifty poems, inspired by the artist George Schneeman’s notion that once he’d started a project, a set of collages, say, he might as well do fifty. Ted ended up with forty-six.

  Ted kept Easter Monday in a folder on the cover of which is inscribed EASTER MONDAY/Poems (1972–1977). The poems were written in Chicago, London, Wivenhoe, New York, and Boulder; many are sonnets, most have an impasto texture—thick abstract expressionistic paint—and many of them are composed of other people’s words. “From the House Journals,” for example, is made from the first lines index to the Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara; “In Blood” is a selection of lines from a sequence of mine; and “The Ancient Art of Wooing” is made from a poem of mine I’d given up on, which was itself made out of a magazine article. A poem like the latter is a little like a palimpsest and a little like urban erosion. But the poems speak to and with the words of people Ted cared about or was interactive with. A few of the poems, on the other hand, are direct addresses to friends, delivered in an almost courtly manner. The sequence is very much about “not dying,” in William Saroyan’s phrase, not giving in to deathy forces. Ted didn’t declare the sequence finished until shortly before he died in 1983, when he made the final decisions for it. There are a handful of Easter Monday out-takes to be found in Nothing for You and So Going Around Cities.

  It should be noted that Ted was always open to chapbook and broadside publication. In a Blue River and The Morning Line are in fact chapbooks, and, as I’ve indicated, parts of Easter Monday were first published in chapbooks. A mimeographed stapled book with the singularly lovely title A Feeling for Leaving (Frontward Books, 1975) contains twenty-two of the poems. Another nine were published in 1980 as Clown War 22 (edited by Bob Heman) under the title Carrying a Torch.

  By the time Nothing for You was published, in 1977, Ted’s and my sons, Anselm and Edmund (my co-editors of this edition), were five and three years old. Ted had two other children, David and Kate, from his marriage to Sandy Alper Berrigan. He had always delighted in being with his kids, and there are references to all of them throughout his work. The title Nothing for You comes from a word game Anselm and Edmund had made up, which went something like: “No cookies, no candy, no soda. Nothing, nothing for you.” This was a great joke, a chant accompanied by laughter. Ted had been asked by Lewis Warsh for a book for Angel Hair Books, but it was one of those times when he felt he had nothing. So he conjured a manuscript out of piles of rejects and old poems and gleefully named it after our sons’ chant.

  As he constructed the book, the concept of using rejects, supposedly second-class works, became interesting to him. A world was being created out of poems that did belong together, having been written in the process of discovering forms rather than perfecting them. Nothing for You actually has something for everyone and was much appreciated, at least by Ted’s circle, when it came out. It begins with some twenty poems from the early to late-ish 60s, mostly very old works which had been tinkered with over the years until exactly right. Then there are a number of poems from the late 60s and early 70s that he was very excited by at the time of composition but abandoned when he got something that seemed superior. I remember how much he loved having written “In Bed with Joan & Alex” in 1969; but later it felt as if he’d dropped it in favor of poems like “Things to Do in Providence.” Finally there are more recent poems, such as the rejects from Easter Monday, interspersed with poems about people: Paul Blackburn, Tom Clark, Kirsten Creeley, Sandy Berrigan.

  Into the Eighties

  Ted’s first publication in the 80s was So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1979. Appearing midway through 1980, it was a generous selection of poems, honoring, to some degree, the primacy of Ted’s books as artistic shapes. There are scaled-down selections from The Sonnets and Easter Monday, and a section called Many Happy Returns, which is slightly different from the book itself. Collections like In the Early Morning Rain and Red Wagon are broken up into new kinds of groups, small sections reflecting the chronology of Ted’s life.

  For this volume, we have created a section called In the 51st State corresponding to the period of the late 70s through circa 1981. It is composed of a subsection, also called In the 51st State, containing twelve poems first published in So Going Around Cities; the chapbook The Morning Line, published by Am Here Books in 1981; and uncollected poems of roughly the same time period.

  For Ted the “51st State” was New York City; the poem “In the 51st State,” dedicated to Ted’s daughter Kate, ends with the lines: “Bon voyage, little ones. / Follow me down / Through the locks. There is no key.” Thus this is also a new and puzzling “state” that Ted has entered, one of feeling older, irrelevant, and failing in health. And yet, in the same poem, after he writes “Au revoir,” he counters with the parenthetical lines “(I wouldn’t translate that / as ‘Goodbye’ if I were you).” Ted is in the process of “not dying,” though he’s only a few years from his death.

  The new element in the poems of this section is a longer line combined with discursiveness and apparent autobiography, though Ted continues to use other people’s voices and autobiographical facts as well as his own. In “Last Poem,” “I once had the honor of meeting Beckett and I dug him” is a quotation from Robert Creeley and in no way corresponds to anything that happened to Ted, except emotionally. There is always a “Beckett” in one’s anecdotes. The practice of incorporating the lives of others into his is evident throughout Ted’s previous work: in the use of others’ poems and prose in cut-ups, in such “found” works as “Autobiography in 5 Parts,” in the weave of voices in Easter Monday. These techniques are an assertion that he is part of everything and everyone around him, that his reading and his interaction with others do literally become him, and that all words are free and usable. As Tom Clark once said to him, “Who owns words?”

  The poems from So Going Around Cities—which make up the first part of In the 51st State—include several works that became favorite performance pieces of Ted’s near the end of his life: “Cranston Near the City Line,” “Last Poem,” and especially, “Red Shift.” So-called Performance Poetry had been in the air for a while, and Ted picked up from it the possibility of extending his performing voice and, consequently, his writing voice. “Red Shift” wasn’t written to be performed in a splashy way, but over the course of a year or two, he developed a set of vocal changes for it, a deliberate tremolo and a slowing down of the long lines, which seemed to stretch the poem far into time and space, allowing him to express the poem’s angry urgency. On the other hand, a slightly later poem like “After Peire Vidal, & Myself,” in The Morning Line, was written precisely with performance in mind. It was declaimed publicly, in mock-troubadour fashion, to answer his friend Rochelle Kraut, who, briefly mad at him, was reading Catullus-like poems “against” him around the Lower East Side.

  The Morning Line was a flat, stapled, mimeographed chapbook of twenty-two poems in a number of forms. “Sonnet: Homage to Ron” is made up of words by Ron Padgett; “44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s” is a sentimental birthday poem for Ted himself containing a dream; “Avec la Mécanique sous les Palmes” is entirely in French; “Kerouac / (continued),” is deft maneuvers with found material; “D N A” is like the poems in Easter Monday; and so on. The title The Morning Line refers to betting on horses—which poem, which style shall we choose?—and to a song from the musical comedy Guys and Dolls: “I’ve got a horse right here / His name is Paul Revere . . .”

  The Uncollected Poems of this section demonstrate a continuation, even further development, of Ted’s preferred and reliable forms. One discerns the arrival of the Language Poets in the poem “ISOLATE,” as Ted uses Bruce Andrews’s words to review Andrews’s book Film Noir for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. The “Ten Greatest Books” form (see the two examples in In The Early Morning Rain) reappears in the poem “My 5 Favorite Records.” For the
“Ten Greatest Books” poems, Ted had named books he was actually reading or could see in his room (they tended to be the greatest books of that exact moment), but “My 5 Favorite Records” was a response to a request for a list (not for a poem) from Dennis Cooper, editor of Little Caesar magazine. Ted then asked Art Lange, editor of the jazz magazine Downbeat and music critic for the Chicago Reader, to make a list of what ought to be Ted’s five favorite records. The result is quite Byzantine; Ted was extremely amused by this work, but public readings of it produced some bafflement in the audience.

  The poem “Rouge,” on the other hand, is a particularly successful version of what one might call the “linguistic poem,” a form with Creeleyesque overtones that Ted had been working on for some years. In the linguistic poem he defines and works out with small words: it, this, and that in this case, but also the word know. I seem to remember giving him the title of the poem, which serves to negate any pedantry. Finally, one is delighted by certain poems that Ted was unable to publish due to the brevity of his remaining years: “Compleynt to the Muse” and “Thin Breast Doom,” with their allusions to Phil Whalen’s manner, the several autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical poems, and the list poem “Memories Are Made of This.”

  Ted’s final book (though these are not his final poems) was A Certain Slant of Sunlight, which occupied him for all of 1982. This sequence of poems was written on individual postcards, 4 inches by 7 inches, sent to him by Ken and Anne Mikolowski of the Alternative Press. There were five hundred cards to work with, one side left blank for a poem and/or image, and the other side incorporating space for a message and address. Postcard by Ted Berrigan was printed at the top of the message space, and running sideways, The Alternative Press Grindstone City. Many other artists and writers participated in the Mikolowskis’ project, producing original art or text for the blank sides of their own five hundred postcards; the finished cards were always sent out singly, along with other Alternative Press items—broadsides, bumper stickers, etc.—in the Press’s standard free packets. Ted, so far as I know, was the only participant who turned the postcards into a full-scale writing project and then a book.