The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Page 38
Then lack to beauty tragedy are used.
And there is no.
Lines from Across the Room
(FOR ANNE KEPLER)
Futile rhapsodies resound from hotly
blind to dank venetian blinds upon
whose verdant crevices blue scary
shadows bound and bound and grow
and then grow still. Yes it is not
yet daylight, no light creeps with
hesitance across the blind, my desk
is shadow, silence lies in the room:
Sleep half sleep half silence and
with reason portends new seasons,
nor shadow, nor substance; blind
fascination reduced to contemplation.
Then, praise for this golden surge
of energy! It is time to rise in
silence, raise the blind, and turn
again to poetry, away from sleep.
Prose Keys to American Poetry
You come into my life a little yellow
Around the gills and I offer you 41
Pills of indeterminate mixture but you
Will not swallow them you are like
The Sunflower: you are waiting for a
Madman! Now you are like a madam, I
lean over and gaze intently into your
Eyeballs for 32 hours whereupon you swoon
And say, “Perceval, you’re wonderful!”
“Everybody sucks nobody fucks” says John
Stanton in PROSE KEYS TO AMERICAN POETRY
Which I must admit is disconcerting in light of
My premature weaning! Because actually I was in love
With all of those Saturday Serials even if Charley Mackin
did beat me up every week for sixteen weeks
straight! I simply repressed it all!
Games
(FOR MARTIN COCHRAN)
Across the trolley tracks
deep in the cemetery
were the Jr. Marines.
“Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor
as
We did the Alamo”
Gregory, high
up on Porkchop hill,
sleepy, grumpy, dopey,
Oliver Hazard Perry, and
of man’s first disobedience and
the forbidden fruit
This too, and love,
three
“they’ll pick us off like sittin’ ducks”
his mouth tightened
He buckled on his gun, the one
Steve had left him
“Gather ye rosebuds,” he ordered.
Homage to Mayakofsky
The white poet with his book
And the ox-blood, do they agree?
With his throat which is beating,
Does he agree?
And the hands oh so plentiful,
And the architecture,
Symbols in his journals of summer?
The hands
Are words in the journal.
Wind giving presence to fragments.
In the book of his music the corners have straightened:
Torrents have faded down the bent frontier.
It Is a Big Red House
Voici la tête d’un chien
Il est à la fenêtre noire
For fire for warmth for hands for growth
So green and formal to the bone
Whose hands hold up whose head?
Wind fans the red fire and its flames burn hand bones
Is there room in the room that you room in?
Fire it, and hand me the bones, over the blue wind
That I receive fire, fire to pierce like the wind
So black, bête noire, in the burnt-by-fire plume
Canzone
A darksome tiger
dreams in “The Poems.”
No one put the tiger
In “The Poems.” A tiger
In a dream
Is still a tiger.
In “The Poems” where the Tiger
Is, dreams are alive.
We are alive
When a tiger
Leaves his cage
In “The Poems.” “The Poems” are not a cage.
We are not a cage
Nor a tiger
In a cage
Where a cage
Keeps “The Poems”
From “The Tiger”
Although we dream
A darksome dream
Of a cage.
“The Tiger” is a dream. Alive
We are alive.
“The Poems” are alive
In a cage
Where alive
Is more a dream than alive.
Like a tiger
Is alive
In a cage, this alive
Are “The Poems.”
We are “The Poems”
When we’re alive
But when we dream
Then we dream.
“The Poems” are not a dream.
“The Tiger” in “The Poems”
Is a dream
When “The Poems” are a dream.
Then “The Poems” are a cage
And a cage is not a dream.
So a Tiger’s not a dream
But a Tiger
Is not a Tiger
But a dream
In a cage. “The Poems”
Are not a dream of “The Poems.”
We dream up “The Poems”
In a dream
And “The Poems”
Contain a Tiger. “The Poems”
Are alive.
The tiger in “The Poems”
Except in “The Poems”
Is a cage
And will cage
Up “The Poems”
Unless we are the tiger
In “The Poems” dreamed up by “The Tiger.”
A darksome tiger
Dreams in his cage.
“The Poems” dream “The Poems.”
We have had this dream
And we are alive.
Grace After a Meal
FOR JOHN WIENERS
Out we go to get away from today’s
delicate pinpricks: awake and scheme
to pay the rent; the room is littered
with laundry, my desk turns
my stomach; in my stomach a white pill
turns to warmth; I stretch and begin
to flow; a door opens; the day
is warm, and we join hands
for a journey to courage in a loft.
A man signs a shovel, and
so he digs. I fear to become a crank,
alone in a dreary room, grinding out
poem after poem, confused, concerned,
annoyed.
But Edwin offers us
cookies, and coffee and beer and grace.
By his presence he offers us leads, and
his graciousness adds to our courage.
John,
we must not be afraid
to be civilised, meaning
Love.
It is 5:23 a.m., and the sun
is coming.
Notes
These notes are not intended to be exhaustive but rather to provide assistance in reading a poetry characterized by a profound density of reference and naming. The notes would ideally offer reading clues that would transfer from poem to poem, rather than supply definitions to fit capitalized nouns. References are so layered, embedded, and characteristic of both conscious and “subconscious” levels of thought that full explanation would not only be too lengthy—and too contrary to the purposes of poetry—but also impossible. We offer a quick glossary of the proper names used most frequently in the poems, but it’s useful to remember that one doesn’t really need to know: the poetry, in its various ways, takes care of the reader all by itself. These notes are also intended to demonstrate the wide range of formal methods used in the poems.
The Sonnets
&nb
sp; Both the “C” Press edition (New York, 1964) and the Grove Press edition (New York, 1967) of The Sonnets were composed of sixty-six sonnets. The United Artists edition of 1982 included six new sonnets, XXXIV, XXXV, LX, LXI, LXXVII, and LXXXI. The Penguin Poets edition of 2000 included seven more: XIV, XXII, XXV, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXIII, and LIX, fulfilling Ted’s instructions to me in late 1982, when the latter seven were finally judged ready. This leaves the following sonnets: XX, XXIV, LIV, LVIII, LXII, LXIII, LXIX, LXXIX, and LXXXVI. They are not strong enough to be published.
Joe Brainard was the cover artist for the “C” Press edition. A second cover illustration by him, intended for the Grove Press edition but not used by Grove, finally adorned the Penguin edition in 2000. Louise Hamlin was the artist for the front and back covers of the United Artists edition.
The Penguin edition for The Sonnets includes an introduction by me, as well as notes based on Ted’s annotations of an early typescript of the entire sequence. This typescript will be referred to from time to time in these notes.
NAMES IN THE SONNETS
Names—of friends, writers, artists—appear throughout The Sonnets and, to a lesser degree, all Ted’s work. One can almost always tell if the name refers to a “friend” or a “poet/artist” or both, or can gauge the formality/informality of the reference (a friend referred to by full name in a dedication is being treated differently from the same friend named familiarly in another poem). A name is a word like any other in poetry, and the use of names is an old literary tradition (Dante, Catullus). The reader has had her/his own friends and knows what a friend is in the mind; the reader can look up certain other names in the encyclopedia or on the Internet. Detailed annotation would be contrary to the spirit of the poems, which, though literary, is egalitarian and intimate. However, I would like to offer some examples of usage, focusing on five lines in Sonnet XXX which are particularly replete with names:
Dear Marge, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
Andy Butt was drunk in the Parthenon
Harum-scarum haze on the Pollock streets
This excitement to be all of night, Henry
Ah, Bernie, to think of you alone, suffering
Marge Kepler was a friend/girlfriend of Ted’s: this is rather obvious, she is “Marge,” she is “Dear Marge.” Andy Butt is a name that works like that of a character in a novel: he is a fiction, like a man in a rather bad novel, “drunk in the Parthenon” (though “Butt” and “Parthenon” conjure up certain associations). The “Pollock streets” suggests the lines of paint in Jackson Pollock’s great paintings. The reader doesn’t know for sure who “Henry” is, though one suspects him of being Henri Michaux, the French poet, who is often mentioned in these poems (see “Mess Occupations,” which is also Sonnet XXXIX “after Michaux”). The point is less that he might be Henri Michaux than that someone named Henry is being addressed; and more, that the word “Henry” works metrically. “To be all of night, Henry!” sounds just right, as “Dear Marge, hello” works clearly on a point of sentiment. “Ah, Bernie” feels like it refers to a friend, and does; the whole line is funny, because Bernie’s name—a real name—sounds antithetical to “suffering” (but all real people suffer).
By the repetition of names, a relational tension is built up over the course of the sequence, which is modeled very generally on Shakespeare’s sequence, with its love plot and its pitches of exaltation and viciousness. The reader experiences this tension through the lens of the poet’s mind in process, as the poet mulls over the past and present actions of himself and his friends and lovers.
A quotation from an interview by Tom Clark is clarifying (“Interview with Tom Clark,” Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan, ed. Scalapino and Ratcliffe [Bolinas and Oakland: Avenue B and O Books, 1991]). Speaking of The Sonnets, Ted says, “There is no such thing as a message and media in the abstract. I mean, they’re the same thing to the perfect extent. That is, surpassing McLuhan where he says the message is the media. No. When it all works right there’s no message, it’s only sort of the media. Which is fascinating because of just the words.” That words are, materially, words, somewhat as paint is paint, applies in varying degrees to all of Ted’s work.
SONNETS I–VI
I made a dating error in the Penguin edition, in regard to the dates of the inception of The Sonnets. I was following Ted’s annotations on the typescript of the sequence, and he appears to have misremembered. The genesis of the first six sonnets in November and December of 1962, not in early 1963, is confirmed by two sources: a handmade booklet called Rain Dance containing the six as a gift to Pat (Mitchell) Padgett for Christmas of 1962, and an entry in Ted’s journals (see from Journals, excerpts chosen by Larry Fagin, in Shiny, no. 9/10, 1999):
(1962)
20 Nov 5 5:15 a.m.
Wrote (?) (Made) five sonnets tonight, by taking one line from each of a group of poems, at random, going from first to last poem then back again until 12 lines, then making the final couplet from any 2 poems, in the group, one line at random from each. Wrote by ear, and automatically. Very interesting results.
Groups used
Sonnet #1—Six poems 1962
#2—Personal Poems
#3—Le Bateau Ivre
#4—My 14 Selected Poems
#5—My 10 Newest Poems
All this was partly inspired by reading about DADA but mostly inspired by my activities along the same line for the past 10 months (or since reading LOCUS SOLUS TWO & seeing the Assemblage Show & Working on Collages with Joe (see our Self-Portrait)
Now back to more Dada.
The sixth sonnet in Rain Dance is Sonnet VI, made from lines by Dick Gallup.
The above journal entry indicates the kind of compositional method used throughout The Sonnets, as well as the types of materials employed. Ted incorporated old and new work by himself, a translation of an Arthur Rimbaud poem, and lines by Dick Gallup into the first six sonnets. One sees that though Ted is using a method, he is also working by ear and that he is being influenced by Dada and by collage and assemblage, as practiced both by the original Dadaists and by his contemporary and friend Joe Brainard.
I Ted told me that the “he/his” in this poem is meant to be Ezra Pound, though the poem of Ted’s from which the opening lines are taken is called “Homage to Mayakovsky” (see Early Poems).
II “How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine”: “How much longer shall I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher” is the title and first line of a poem by John Ashbery in The Tennis Court Oath. The Tennis Court Oath, with its broken, phrasal texture, was a major influence on The Sonnets.
Poem in the Traditional Manner and Poem in the Modern Manner Not all of The Sonnets are sonnets, as these two sixteen-line poems prove. Here we are being shown what the two “manners” are that this sequence will mix and change. The point would also seem to be to keep the surface of the whole work various.
In “Poem in the Traditional Manner,” Dick Gallup is called “Richard Gallup” in an allusion to Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory.” The Asiatics (see also Sonnet XXV) was a novel by Frederick Prokosch, published in 1935.
In “Poem in the Modern Manner,” Huitzilopochtli refers to the Aztec god of war. Cos is the Greek island.
From a Secret Journal Also Sonnet IX. Ted’s note on the typescript says: “Made from Joe’s ‘Secret Journal’, a prose work by method. probably made earlier—62 or not? my best.” Joe is Joe Brainard. The “secret journal,” which remains unpublished, is actually called “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night.”
Penn Station “Gomangani,” according to Ted’s notes on the typescript, is “either White Ape (Tarzan) or Black Apes (The Apes) hence I forget—i.e. clarity is in the language not its precision.” That is, the word is taken from the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
XIV “Blake-blues” probably refers to Blind Blake, the blues guitarist (b. early 1890s, d. 1933) as much as to William Blake.
XV This is perha
ps the most famous of all the sonnets. It is obvious how this broken work can be put back together into its first version, Sonnet LIX, by reading first line, last line, second line, second-to-last line, etc. Sonnet LIX was omitted from the first two versions of the sequence and reinstated in the Penguin edition. One of the most interesting things about Sonnet XV is that it becomes stranger after you understand how to reassemble it: its disjunctive form seems to assert itself more and more strongly as the real one.
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.