The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  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.

  A Certain Slant of Sunlight

  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.

  (With / daring / and / strength . . .) The untitled third poem of the sequence is the last part of the poem “In Three Parts” in In the Early Morning Rain, with the addition, at the end, of the lines “Just/like/me.”

  A Certain Slant of Sunlight Most of the sequence dates from 1982 and is arranged chronologically. However, the title poem was written in the spring of 1980, in Boulder, Colorado, using a word list I’d drawn up. The procedure with such a list was to employ one word per line in the order given, with the result being a poem of as many lines as there were words in the list (usually twelve). Ted took the list into a class he was teaching at Naropa and then did the assignment along with the class, employing the words as it occurred to him rather than according to grid.

  Salutation One should imagine each poem as if printed on a postcard. That is, imagine receiving a postcard with the poem “Salutation” on the “picture” side: “Listen, you cheap little liar . . .”

  The Einstein Intersection The title is that of a book by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. Two others of Delany’s titles are included in the body of the poem: Out of the Dead City and City of a Thousand Suns. The poem fetishizes titles, using capital letters to turn phrases familiar from literature or somewhere, into titlelike entities.

  Pinsk After Dark and Reds There are, throughout the sequence, small clusters of poems that involve initiating phrases by the same person. Both “Pinsk After Dark” and “Reds” contain some words by Allen Ginsberg and are “about” Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Other sets of poems, occurring sequentially in twos and threes, have to do with words (or images) by Eileen Myles, Joanne Kyger, Tom Pickard, George Schneeman, Jeff Wright, Greg Masters, Dick Jerome. However, not all the poems involving words or lines by a particular person are kept in sets—that would have been too rigid a procedure. Also, people came back and put words on further postcards: Ted’s friends became rather addicted to being part of this project.

  People Who Change Their Names This poem may be read as a sonnet, with the words STEVE CAREY: occurring at the ninth line, the point of change in a sonnet. The idea for the poem came from an autobiographical prose work of my own, titled Tell Me Again (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Am Here Books, Immediate Editions, 1981). In it I refer to a favorite category of mine from the Bible, “people who changed their names”—thus the title and first four lines of Ted’s poem.

  Caesar This is an extremely free translation of Catullus’s “Nil nimium studeo, Caesar,” which alludes to the persistent rumor, in ancient Rome, that Julius Caesar’s grandmother had been black.

  “Poets Tribute to Philip Guston” A memorial evening had been held for Guston, after his death in 1980, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. For his part of the evening, Ted staged a scandalous abstract expressionist–like event, in which he kept talking on and on way past his “allotted time,” goading the audience into booing him, and then finally reading a couple of poems—that is, doing what he was “supposed to.” Afterward no one was sure of whether or not he had been deliberately excessive: he had.

  Blue Herring The line “As if you hands were innocent” is correct; “you hands” is not a typo.

  St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie This poem is section 10, “Henry IV,” of “Corridors of Blood,” in In the Early Morning Rain.

  Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s In the 70s and 80s George Schneeman made ceramic dishware and vases decorated with chains of naked figures, engaged in sexual acts in a void: the second circle of Dante’s Inferno.

  Pandora’s Box: An Ode This poem is both synthetic and personal. The opening source is a text which presents a magnetic, magnanimous “he.” “I”—the speaker—is self-critical, idol-worshipping, loving, desperate, on the verge of becoming like the unnamed figure at the poem’s beginning who changed him into something like a Beat poet, when Pandora’s Box was opened.

  The School Windows Song Based on Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Factory Windows Song.” Ted discusses his poem, in relation to Lindsay’s, in “Workshops at the Jack Kerouac Conference” (On the Level, Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living, ed. Joel Lewis [Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997]). “I thought I could make, perhaps, something that was accurate and also was something more accurate—was as accurate now as his was then. Also it gave me a great take on how his was very accurate then.”

  Transition of Nothing Noted as Fascinating “Donald Allen, Donald Keene, Wm. ‘Ted’ deBary” had all been stationed together in Japan after World War II. Don Allen, distinguished editor and publisher, was Ted’s editor for the Grove Press edition of The Sonnets. Keene and deBary are well-known scholars of Japanese literature. This is, then, a sort of “orientalist” poem. DeBary’s daughter, Brett deBary, is the “Lady Brett” of “Tambourine Life.”

  Whoa Back Buck & Gee By Land! The title is a rendering from memory of a Leadbelly line, “Who, back, Buck, an’ gee, by de Lamb!” As sung on recordings, Leadbelly’s lyrics can be hard to make out, and Ted knew he’d never heard the line correctly. The poem is a little elegy for Thelonius Monk, who had recently died, but also for Auden and Leadbelly. The second line, “While whole days go by and later their years” is a re-rendering into the present tense of the first line of O’Hara’s poem “River.” “Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill” is from one of
Auden’s last poems, “A Lullaby.” The Erinyes are the Fates in Greek mythology. And “Women in the night who moan yr name” is from John Wieners’s “Act #2” in Ace of Pentacles: “He’s gone and taken / my morphine with him / Oh Johnny. Women in / the night moan yr. name.”

  Frances The “Frances” of this poem and of “Paris, Frances” is Anne Waldman’s mother, Frances Waldman, who became gravely ill and then died in 1982.

  I Dreamt I See Three Ladies in a Tree The three dedicatees of the poem, as well as Tom Pickard (see “Last Poem” and “Mutiny!”)—all British poets—were in New York in the spring of 1982 for a festival of British poetry.

  Last Poem (for Tom Pickard) Another version of a “last poem,” but as if spoken by one of the “Jarrow boys,” who marched from Jarrow to London in the English hunger marches of the 1930s. The poet Tom Pickard is the co-author, with Joanna Voit, of a history called Jarrow March.

  Mutiny! This poem concerns the British war in the Falkland Islands in the spring of 1982.

  Wantonesse The poem was written in conjunction with a photo of upstairs neighbor, Megan Williams. She was at that time a dress designer; the photo was of her back, showing off a deep V in a dress she’d made. Thus the last line of the poem, “Loving her back.” This is one example of the way Ted’s mind worked in relation to the images on the cards.

  Creature “Creature” is made of materials from my poems, especially the poem “When I Was Alive.”

  Providence This poem records the death of Ted’s mother in July 1982. Clark Coolidge’s “brown suit” was one Ted had previously borrowed for ceremonial occasions: Coolidge too was from Providence, and the suit was kept at his mother’s house. In “On Poems from ‘500 American Postcards’” (from On the Level Everyday), Ted comments, “Providence. There, your whole downtown part of the city is built across a bay, and about every fifteen years there’s . . . There are water marks all over town saying how high the water came at such and such time.”

  I Heard Brew Moore Say, One Day Brew Moore (1924–1973) was a jazz saxophonist influenced by Lester Young (see “String of Pearls,” in Nothing for You). His name is very suggestive. For stylistic clues to the poem, see Allen Ginsberg’s “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” first published in Plutonian Ode.

  Untitled (July 11, 1982) The untitled poem dated “July 11, 1982” and beginning “Dear Alice” was written entirely by me.

  The Way It Was in Wheeling A “Country Western” song, “The Way It Was in Wheeling” was written following a Mad-Libs form.

  My Autobiography This poem, again, concerns Megan Williams, whose partner, the artist Dick Jerome, had broken his leg. Megan told Ted the story outlined in the poem, which he transformed into a narrative from Dick’s point of view.

  Down on Mission From “On Poems from ‘500 American Postcards’”: “This is one of those poems where it might be difficult to sort out the references, and what each line means in reference to the story, if you were trying to do that, but if you are just interested in hearing it, it’s clear enough I think. . . . It’s a kind of doom-saying poem, but it’s also about . . . oh, cycles of personal growth, you, all your own sense of the legends you found yourself on, all crumble periodically.”

  In Your Fucking Utopias The poem begins with a line from Whitman’s poem “Respondez!” which is famous as Whitman’s “only” angry poem. Whitman’s line is very angry, and this is an angry poem too: one could only follow such a line in kind. “The Gandy-Dancers Ball,” not nearly as famous a song as “The Darktown Strutters Ball,” was a Frankie Laine hit in the 50s. The poem is about all exclusion as a kind of racism and money as the great American excluder.

  Tough Cookies These “Chinese fortunes” are inspired by Frank O’Hara’s poem “Lines for the Fortune Cookies.”

  Skeats and the Industrial Revolution The poem takes off from the etymology of the word god in Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary.

  Let No Willful Fate Misunderstand As Ted says in “On Poems from ‘500 American Postcards,’” the poem is “sprinkled with lines from Robert Frost.” However, “Night Tie” is the title of a collage made by Aram Saroyan and given to Ted, and this poem “sounds like” Saroyan in places, as if Ted’s father and Aram’s father (the writer William Saroyan) merge.

  To Sing the Song, That Is Fantastic Section 9 of O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” opens with the lines “Now in November, by Josephine Johnson. The Heroes, / by John Ashbery. Topper’s Roumanian Broilings. The Swimmer.” Ted performed this quite political poem in a reggae-chant manner, in imitation of the singer Yellowman.

  This Guy One of two poems written in the last year of Ted’s life (the other being “Robert (Lowell)” in the Last Poems section) that concern Ted’s literary relationship to Lowell. Though Lowell isn’t referred to by name, in this poem, he is “This Guy.”

  Give Them Back, Who Never Were A beautiful instance of the technique of identity merge, which Ted seems to have perfected in the book. It is as if every poet or person is the same one, and each one is and isn’t her/himself. For example, toward the end of this poem, “the fat kid from Oregon” would be Phil Whalen, who was really from Washington; “who grew up to be our only real poet” refers to something once said about John Ashbery; the “jaunty Jamaica, Queens stick-figure” is Lorenzo Thomas, who though “Negro” is not a “French Negro poet” (see Frank O’Hara’s “Ode to the French Negro Poets”) but translated some poems of the French Negro poets many years after O’Hara’s death.

  Christmas Card (for Barry and Carla) The dedicatees are poet Barrett Watten and experimental prose writer Carla Harryman. Third Factory (1926) is a book by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, highly influential in Language Poetry circles.

  A Certain Slant of Sunlight: Out-takes

  Ted kept two folders for the postcard project: a folder of poems to be included in the final book, and another folder of poems either not first-rate enough, or unfinished, or in some way repetitive. These out-takes are mostly a selection from the second folder. A number of the poems are dated in the manuscript, but as dates were not included in A Certain Slant of Sunlight, and Ted most often omitted dates in his books, we haven’t included them as part of the poems.

  Bardolino and Postcard 12/2/82 “Bardolino,” which is dated “2/82” in our manuscript, and “Postcard 12/2/82” fall within the same set and moment as “Pinsk After Dark” and “Reds” in A Certain Slant of Sunlight.

  New Poets of England & America Dated “17 Feb” in the manuscript. New Poets of England and America was a poetry anthology edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, with an introduction by Robert Frost (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1957).

  Get Away From Me You Little Fool An obvious interaction with the poetry of James Schuyler.

  4 Metaphysical Poems and Who Was Sylvia? Both poems involved the participation of Steve Carey. The former poem is dated “17 Feb 82” and the latter “20 Feb.”

  Anselm Though the poem called “Anselm” contains language by Anselm Hollo, it also refers to Anselm Berrigan. Ted invoked the two of them simultaneously more than once, the other notable instance being in the dedications to So Going Around Cities.

  Wednesday Evening Services Dated “20 Mar 82.”

  Head Lice Dated “24 Feb 82.”

  Little Travelogue Dated “6 Mar 82.”

  Sleeping Alone This poem was lost after Ted’s death, at least as text. He considered it integral to the sequence, and it should have appeared in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. We present a version reconstituted by us from a taped reading. For a slightly different reconstitution by an anonymous tape transcriber, see “Workshops at the Jack Kerouac Conference,” in On the Level Everyday.

  (Another has. . .) The poem was never typed up by Ted, existing only as a postcard—a gift to me—until this publication. The postcard, entirely of Ted’s design, has a baseball sticker affixed to it, with a photo of one of the Minnesota Twins of 1982: that is, a twin self to the poet. “Another” has arrived. Ron Padg
ett states (in a letter to me) that the initial lines of the poem are a “variant on the first line of a 1959 poem by David Bearden: ‘Another has come to the silver mirror.’” Bearden’s poem was published in The White Dove Review 5 (summer 1960).

  The Pope’s Nose This poem plays with Anne Waldman’s poem “Paul Eluard.”

  The LADY, JUST WHEN I THINK I KNOW . . . Dated “21 Mar 82.”

  Treason of the Clerks The poem is based on an explanation by Edmund Berrigan, then seven years old, of a drawing he’d made, probably on the postcard on which the poem was written. Treason of the Clerks is a book by the French writer Julien Benda: The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clerks, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington (New York: William Morrow, 1928). By its title, this poem would probably belong near “To Book-Keepers” in the main volume. It is dated “29 Mar” on the manuscript.

  All A-Glower Went My Love Riding Dated “10 Apr 82.” Along with “Fern,” it involved the participation of Bernadette Mayer.

  With Eileen in Locarno Dated “Easter. 1982. nyc.”

  Three Lost Years Grace Murphy (“Grace falls . . .”) and Peggy DeCoursey were friends of each other and Ted. The poem was written in Boulder in 1980.

  Butchie’s Tune, La Bohème, To a Young Painter, and Upside Down These four poems were all written in conjunction with Ada Katz. One of Alex Katz’s paintings is called “Upsidedown Ada.” “Butchie’s Tune” is dated “Mid Apr 82,” “To a Young Painter” is dated “5/3/82,” and “Upside Down” is dated “7 May 82.”

  Der Asra Ted and Gordon Brotherston’s translation of Heinrich Heine’s “Der Asra” was done during the Easter Monday period, in England. Ted loved this translation, which he sometimes included in poetry readings, and kept trying to find a place for it in his books; but it never seemed to belong alongside his other work.

  Fern Dated “18 May 82.” See the note for “All A-Glower Went My Love Riding.”