The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  My Tibetan Rose This final poem in the sequence is dated “1 Sept. 77.” It was written after Ted read Lionel Davidson’s thriller The Rose of Tibet.

  Nothing for You

  Published by United Artists (Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer, editors) in 1977. The original front and back cover art for Nothing for You was by George Schneeman.

  Several poems that originally appeared in the book Nothing for You have been omitted from this section and appear elsewhere in this volume. “Poem” (“of morning, Iowa City, blue . . .”), which originally appeared after “Monolith,” has been omitted by the editors, since it appears previously in the section In the Early Morning Rain. “Method Action,” which originally appeared after “Mi Casa, Su Casa,” “A Little American Feedback,” which originally appeared after “New Personal Poem,” and “A Note from Yang Kuan,” which originally appeared after “Blue Targets,” have been omitted since they were finally included in Easter Monday.

  A number of the poems in Nothing for You were later reprinted in So Going Around Cities, with small changes. We have invariably honored the later changes.

  Valentine The opening sixteen pages of Nothing for You consist of poems written in the early 60s. Ted had continued to tinker with them over the years and was particularly obsessed with “Valentine,” “Hearts,” and “String of Pearls.” “Valentine,” as presented here, seems finally perfect, the result of almost twenty years of consideration of twelve lines. In “Valentine” an ellipsis that appeared in the last line in the United Artists publication of Nothing for You was removed for publication in So Going Around Cities (and here).

  Doubts In “Doubts” and in “He,” “For Annie Rooney,” “Saturday Afternoons on the Piazza,” “Prayer,” “Night Letter,” “Some Do Not,” “Autumn’s Day,” “Truth as History,” “Francis à Bientôt,” and “New Junket” may be found material that was used in The Sonnets. These poems, along with those in Early Poems, are source works for that sequence.

  Prayer, Night Letter, and The TV Story These three early poems printed in So Going Around Cities have been added to this “early poems” part of Nothing for You. To accommodate these additions more gracefully we have moved the poem “Saturday Afternoons on the Piazza,” originally appearing after “Francis à Bientôt,” to a position immediately after “For Annie Rooney.”

  Some Do Not Some Do Not is the title of the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s tetrology, Parade’s End. (“Ford Madox Ford is not a dream” is a recurring line in The Sonnets.)

  On the Level Everyday This poem originally appeared, in a different version, in Bean Spasms, under the title “The Level of Everyday.” The second version, rewritten for Nothing for You, seems superior to the first. It should be noted that Ted could not help playing with his poems, especially older, less famous ones whose identities were not yet frozen for his audience.

  Autumn’s Day Rather than being designated “after Rilke,” this translation/adaptation was originally attributed to “Rilke (trans. Ted Berrigan),” at the bottom of the poem, in Nothing for You.

  String of Pearls For its presentation in So Going Around Cities Ted removed some in-line spaces from the version originally appearing in Nothing for You.

  Francis à Bientôt See the note for “Telegram” in In the Early Morning Rain.

  Cento: A Note on Philosophy This poem did not include the dedication “for Pat Mitchell” in Nothing for You but did in So Going Around Cities. We have thus kept the dedication.

  New Junket “for Harry Fainlight”: In a moving obituary for Fainlight written for the Poetry Project Newsletter in 1982, Ted states, in regard to meeting Fainlight in 1963: “Harry & I met like two boys in a John Buchan novel; a Yank, with no connotations other than friend on that word, and a Brit, one who as it turned out had American citizenship by birth, but had grown up entirely in England and was Oxford London to the core. . . . We liked one another from the first, like they say, and spent long hours and nights in Ratner’s, comparing maps of the worlds of poetry.”

  From The Art of the Sonnet The Art of the Sonnet is a six-part collaborative work written with Tom Clark in New York in 1967. This version consists of numbers 1, 3, and 6; Ted has made changes in parts 3 and 6 in the manuscript copy we retain.

  Air Conditioning and Monolith These poems were both written in Iowa City circa 1968–1969. They are about Ted’s being in his office at the Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa.

  London and London Air These poems were both written during Ted’s first trip to England in the summer of 1969. “London Air” is dedicated to Robert Creeley, who was also in London at the time. This poem, and Creeley’s “In London,” mark the beginning of their friendship and cross-influence. In “London Air,” “My heart Your heart” is a quotation from Frank O’Hara’s “Poem” (to Donald M. Allen), transformed in the addition of the capital M and the capital Y. From the beginning of this poem Ted is playing with punctuation, emphasis, pronouns, and linguistic exactitude, in a manner reminiscent of Creeley’s but also of poems of his own like “Tambourine Life.”

  In Bed with Joan & Alex This was, like “London Air,” an important poem for Ted at the time of its writing, in this case the fall of 1969 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As in many of the poems of this period, Ted is alone in his room, and the subject is solitude and what’s “around.” Though this poem is built on sexual innuendo, it is founded on a room washed with light and color, containing two objects which remind the poet of two people who aren’t there. The first object is a shirt, resting on a chair, sewn for Ted by Joan Fagin, a designer and seamstress, at the time married to Larry Fagin; Joan and Larry Fagin had recently visited Ted in Ann Arbor (see “Ann Arbor Song,” In the Early Morning Rain). The second object is a painting of a Maine cottage by Alex Katz, a small study for a larger work. Ted’s poem takes the two objects/presences and sets them into motion in a sort of waltz: “Round & round & round we go,” in the words of a Neil Young song that was popular then.

  Sweet Vocations In the last line, “its” (in the version in Nothing for You) has been changed to “it’s” (as in the version in So Going Around Cities).

  Going to Chicago Like “Black & White Magic,” “Going to Chicago” was written on an airplane. When Ted salutes the poet John Sinclair, Sinclair is presumably below in Detroit as the plane passes overhead. Ted had read with Sinclair at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965. At the time of “Going to Chicago” (1969) Sinclair, a political activist, had just been sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of a joint of marijuana. The dedication to “Going to Chicago” originally read “for Donald Hall” in Nothing for You and was changed to “for Don Hall” in So Going Around Cities. Also the titles in part 2 were not italicized in Nothing for You.

  How We Live in the Jungle Stanza breaks which originally appeared in Nothing for You, after the line ending with “furniture” and the line ending with “a buzz on,” were removed for So Going Around Cities.

  Black & White Magic “Secret Clouds / I can’t get into you”: in these and the following lines Ted is embedding book titles into syntax, creating a new kind of metaphor. “Secret Clouds” is a story/poem by Harris Schiff, and Leaving Cheyenne is a novel by Larry McMurtry. The poem ends with an excerpt from Ted’s back cover copy for Anselm Hollo’s book Maya, published by Golliard/Grossman in 1970. Ted’s comment contains the following sentences: “By ‘civilized’ I mean genuinely civilized, that is, with no proportionate loss of spleen. The hits in the poems take place in your head when you read them, but the poems are not a head trip. The head speaks out of the heart to the head connected to the heart.”

  Three Poems: Going to Canada Originally, in Nothing for You, “Three Poems: Going to Canada” was called “Three Poems,” with the poems laid out on separate pages. In the first of those poems, “Itinerary,” a stanza break before the line “Go to Canada” was eliminated for So Going Around Cities.

  Galaxies The poem “Galaxies” was originally part of the disbanded Southampton Wi
nter sequence.

  Postmarked Grand Rapids The word pauses was not italicized in Nothing for You but was italicized in So Going Around Cities.

  Further Definitions (Waft) Ted is in dialogue with Michael Brownstein’s poem “Definitions,” which, laid out similarly to this one, defined certain words. Ted has taken Brownstein’s definitions of those words and defined them. Thus Brownstein’s definitions are on the left, and Ted’s definitions of the definitions are on the right.

  Kirsten Kirsten is Kirsten Creeley. “How you talk” was originally, in Nothing for You, “How she talks,” and “You are” was originally “She is.” These particularly crucial changes, again, were made for So Going Around Cities.

  He “He” contains material that was incorporated into “Chicago English Afternoon” in Easter Monday.

  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).

  In the 51st State

  IN THE 51ST STATE

  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.”

  THE MORNING LINE

  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.

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS

  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.
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br />   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.”