The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  O, Sexual Reserve Dated “6/15/82.”

  One Day in the Afternoon of the World Dated “18 Aug 82.”

  Two Serious Ladies Dated “1 Sep 82.” The reference is to Jane Bowles’s great novel Two Serious Ladies.

  Down Moon River Dated “12 Oct 82. nyc.” “Charlie” is the late Charlie McGrath, a neighbor at 101 St. Mark’s Place.

  At 80 Langton Street (S.F.) Dated “1 Dec 83 NYC,” this poem was also one that Ted never typed up but left to exist only on a postcard. It was transcribed by Bill Berkson, to whom the Mikolowskis finally sent the card. The poem refers to a four-day residency by Ted, at the San Francisco arts center, 80 Langton Street, in 1981, where Hollo, Thomas, and Acker had held previous residencies. There was a clash between Ted and the Language Poets, thus the final word “Duck.” Bill Berkson chaired a panel during the residency.

  Last Poems

  The fourteen poems in Ted’s final folder of poems date from between December 7, 1982, and May 15, 1983. Ted had been a sporadic dater of poems, but each of these has a date affixed, or in the case of “Don Quixote & Sancho Panza,” contained in the poem. One cannot help but have the feeling he is counting down to his final moments. Ted died on July 4, 1983. The poems were first published together, under the title Last Poems, in Arshile No. 6, 1996.

  Robert (Lowell) See “This Guy” in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Ted was reading a biography of Lowell at the time of the composition of these two poems, and much of the language comes from material quoted from Lowell and others. The “we” in this poem is significant, including both Ted and Lowell, especially in the last line, which seems to sum up a lifetime. The last sentence is definitely Ted’s words.

  Today in New York City As with “The Way It Was in Wheeling,” both “Today in New York City” and “Stand-up Comedy Routine” were made using Mad-Libs forms. “Today in New York City” involves a set of forms, probably in multiple-choice format, for writing newspaper articles. The forms disappear into the text, which is laid out like a poem and embellishes considerably on the Mad-Libs diagram. In places where one would have been meant to make a single choice, Ted included several: e.g., “& is contemplating / The return of Billy, / Suicide, / 3-Mile Island, / Unleashing ‘The Hammer’,” etc. “The Hammer” refers to Sonnet VI in The Sonnets. The poem is dated “7 Dec 82.”

  The Short Poems Dated “23 Feb 83.”

  Something to Remember Dated “2 Mar 83.”

  To Jacques Roubaud Dated “11 Mar 83,” this poem is a note of condolence on the death of Roubaud’s wife. Ted had met French poet Roubaud at a poetry festival in Italy, in 1979, and they had become friendly.

  Villonnette Dated “29 Mar 83.”

  After Petrarch This poem, once again using Petrarch’s “labyrinth” lines, is dated “1 Apr. 83.”

  Old Armenian Proverb Dated “4/83.”

  Ambiguity Dated “7 Apr 83.”

  Stand-up Comedy Routine Dated “21 Apr. 83.” The Mad-Libs form is considerably embellished and drawn out. The show-biz names used in this poem were probably all contained in the form, except for that of “Sammy Davis, Senior,” which Ted changed from Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy Davis Jr.’s father was also an entertainer, and Ted remembered him quite clearly. The dedicatees, poets Bob Holman and Ed Friedman, were both heavily involved in performance; the dedication implies that either one of them might perform the poem. Ted once read a book composed of Lenny Bruce’s routines and had thought about the form of the “comedy routine” outside of the Mad-Libs format.

  Positively Fourth Street Dated “11 May 83.” The title is that of a Bob Dylan song.

  Down on Me Dated “13 May 83.” This title is from a song sung by Janis Joplin.

  Don Quixote & Sancho Panza This, Ted’s last sonnet, contains the date—“May, 1983”—in the body of the poem.

  This Will Be Her Shining Hour Dated “15 May 83,” Ted’s real “last poem” was written over the course of a couple of hours, late on a Saturday night. I was in one room watching the Fred Astaire movie, and Ted was in the other room listening to my voice and his own, and to the voices of the actors.

  Early Uncollected Poems

  Each of the fifteen poems in this section contains lines (or in the case of “Prose Keys to American Poetry,” the single word “Perceval”) that reappeared in The Sonnets. Along with some of the poems in Nothing for You, these are the earliest usages of these materials.

  What are you thinking . . . Dated “May 16th, 1962, Denver.”

  Lady Takes a Holiday Dated “8 June 62.”

  For Bernie There is another version of this poem with the same text but a different title, “The Awful Responsibility of History.”

  Homage to Beaumont Bruestle Bruestle was one of Ted’s professors at the University of Tulsa.

  Lines from Across the Room Dated “March 23, 1962.”

  Homage to Mayakofsky The poem leads straight into the world of The Sonnets. These lines referring to Mayakofsky became in Sonnet I a reference to Ezra Pound.

  Other Books of Poetry

  NOTE ON BEAN SPASMS

  Bean Spasms was published by Lita Hornick’s Kulchur Press in 1967. The title page qualifies the volume as “Collaborations by Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett / Illustrated & Drawings by Joe Brainard.” Brainard was also the subject, in the volume, of an interview by Ron and Pat Padgett.

  Much of the work in Bean Spasms consists of literal collaborations between Ted and Ron Padgett, in the form of poems, an exchange of letters (“Big Travel Dialogues”), an excerpt from the collaborative novel Furtive Days. However, the book also contains important poems by each poet as sole author. Authorship of all work in the volume is unattributed, left up in the air; when reading the book it is impossible to know without knowing already, e.g., that Ted is the author of the poem “Bean Spasms,” that Ted and Ron Padgett are the co-authors of the excerpt from Furtive Days, that Ron Padgett is the author of the poems “December” and “A Man Saw a Ball of Gold.”

  One of the more notorious pieces in the volume is “An Interview with John Cage,” which purports to be an interview with Cage but is completely fabricated by Ted, out of real interviews in contemporary journals with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and the French playwright Fernando Arrabal. The interview was first published in Peter Schjeldahl’s and Lewis Macadams’s magazine Mother. The interview was subsequently selected for inclusion in The National Literary Anthology as best interview of the year (1966), as judged by a panel including such figures as Susan Sontag and Robert Brustein. The interview had been taken at face value as an interview with Cage. After Ted’s informing George Plimpton, who was somehow involved in the awards, of the interview’s fabrication, Plimpton had to notify Cage. Cage asked if Ted were “for me or against me”; Plimpton assured Cage that Ted was for him, the interview having been made using methods of composition learned from Cage himself. Cage then declined his supposed share of the thousand-dollar award, on the grounds that he hadn’t been involved in the interview at all, not having spoken or written a word of it.

  As indicated in the introduction, Ted incorporated the poems by himself in Bean Spasms into subsequent books of his (as did Padgett).

  NOTE ON SO GOING AROUND CITIES

  So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1979, first published by George Mattingly’s Blue Wind Press in 1980, is a unique volume, which feels less like a “selected poems” than a new book constructed by Ted. The cover art is by Donna Dennis; but the book, which is quite large, makes generous use of drawings by George Schneeman in a manner reminiscent of In the Early Morning Rain. In this case there is a drawing for each section of the book, appearing after the section title.

  The sections in So Going Around Cities present poems in groups that have overlapping chronologies: for example, the section called Many Happy Returns (which does not strictly correspond to the Corinth Books edition) dated 1961–1968, is followed by A Boke, dated 1966, which is followed by a section called Waterloo Sunset, which is dated 1964–1968. With th
e exception of the section titled from The Sonnets, the Many Happy Returns section, and Memorial Day, the sections do not employ titles of previously published books. Ted was, in general, honoring chronology of composition rather than chronology of publication. He was also asserting the individual identities of the previously published books: they were too unique to be excerpted from in a systematic way; and so it was necessary was to construct a whole new entity. Each section of the book bears an epigraph on its title page, as the title page of the section called Not Dying has the epigraph “No joke!”

  Note on Selected Poems

  Aram Saroyan edited Selected Poems by Ted Berrigan, for the Penguin Poets Series (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). The only one of Ted’s books of poetry (until now) that Ted had no living or posthumous hand in, it covers gracefully and classically, within the limited space of a traditional “selected poems,” all of Ted’s major publications through A Certain Slant of Sunlight. It contains no previously unpublished work. There is an introduction by me.

  Glossary of Names

  Where no dates appear, the editor has not been able to locate the information.

  Donald Allen (1912–2004) Editor, anthologist, publisher; Ted’s editor at Grove Press for The Sonnets.

  Bruce Andrews (1948– ) Poet, critic; associated with Language Poetry movement.

  John Ashbery (1927– ) New York School poet, art critic, prose writer.

  Erje Ayden Turkish-born American novelist, memoirist.

  David Bearden Poet, friend of Ted’s in Tulsa.

  Bill Berkson (1939– ) Poet, art critic.

  Anselm Berrigan (1972– ) Son of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley.

  David Berrigan (“Jacques-Louis David”) (1963– ) Son of Ted and Sandy Berrigan.

  Edmund Berrigan (1974– ) Son of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley.

  Kate Berrigan (1965–1987) Daughter of Ted and Sandy Berrigan.

  Sandy Berrigan (1942– ) Formerly Sandra Alper. Ted’s first wife. Poet.

  Paul Blackburn (1926–1971) Poet, translator, archivist, founder of Le Metro reading series.

  Joe Brainard (1942–1994) Painter, cover artist and illustrator, collagist, assemblagist, writer. Collaborator with Ted on visual / literary works.

  Jim Brodey (1942–1993) Poet, music critic.

  Gordon Brotherston (1939– ) British translator, author, poet, Latin American scholar.

  Michael Brownstein (1943– ) Poet, novelist.

  Rudy Burckhardt (1914–1999) Swiss-born American filmmaker, photographer, painter.

  Reed Bye (1948– ) Poet, American Buddhist.

  Steve Carey (1945–1989) Poet, novelist. Brother of Tom Carey.

  Tom Carey (1951– ) Poet, novelist, musician, Franciscan (Episcopalian) brother and priest.

  Jim Carroll (1950– ) Poet, novelist, musician, songwriter.

  Joe Ceravolo (1934–1988) Poet.

  Tom Clark (1941– ) Poet, novelist, biographer, sports writer, editor.

  Martin Cochran Poet, friend of Ted’s in Tulsa.

  Andrei Codrescu (1946– ) Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, radio commentator.

  Jack Collom (1931– ) Poet, teacher, essayist, environmentalist.

  Clark Coolidge (1939– ) Poet, musician, editor.

  Lee Crabtree (1942–1973) Musician, member of the rock band The Fugs.

  Robert Creeley (1926–2005) Poet, prose writer, teacher, associated with the Black Mountain poets.

  Peggy DeCoursey (1944– ) Close friend of Ted’s in New York in the later period. Communications worker in advertising.

  Samuel R. “Chip” Delany (1942– ) Science fiction writer.

  Edwin Denby (1903–1983) Poet, dance critic, essayist.

  Donna Dennis (1942– ) Sculptor and painter.

  Ed Dorn (1929–1999) Poet, fiction writer, teacher.

  Kenward Elmslie (1929– ) Poet, performer, librettist.

  Joan Fagin (1948– ) Dress designer; former wife of Larry Fagin.

  Larry Fagin (1937– ) Poet, editor, publisher.

  Harry Fainlight (d.1982) British poet.

  Marion Farrier (1951– ) Friend of Ted’s at the University of Essex, England, and in New York. Publications manager. Wife of Steve Carey.

  Ed Foster (1944– ) Poet, critic, editor, publisher, teacher.

  Jane Freilicher (1924– ) Painter. Friend of New York School poets.

  Ed Friedman (1950– ) Poet, playwright, performer, arts administrator.

  Carol Gallup (Carol Clifford) (1942– ) A close friend of Ted’s in New York. Former wife of Dick Gallup. Poet.

  Dick Gallup (Richard Gallup) (1941– ) Poet, playwright.

  Merrill Gilfillan (1945– ) Poet, essayist.

  Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) Poet, prose writer, political activist, musician, teacher.

  John Giorno (1935– ) Poet, community activist.

  Lorenz Gude (1942– ) With his wife, Ellen Gude, published “C” (A Journal of Poetry) and “C” Books in the 60s. He also took early photographs of the Tulsa group and of Joe Brainard’s work.

  Ellen Gude (1942– ) Wife of Lorenz Gude and co-publisher of “C” (A Journal of Poetry) in the 60s. She provided the essential funding for “C,” having a good job in an employment agency.

  Barry Hall Printer, publisher, filmmaker.

  Jacky Hall First wife of Barry Hall.

  Donald Hall (1928– ) Poet, essayist, anthologist, teacher.

  David Henderson (ca. 1942– ) Poet, lyricist, biographer, a founder of the Umbra workshop.

  Anselm Hollo (1934– ) Finnish and American poet, translator (from Finnish, German, Swedish, Russian, and French), person of letters.

  Bob Holman (1948– ) Poet, playwright, director, actor, community animator.

  Helena Hughes (1951– ) Friend of Ted’s at the University of Essex and in New York. Poet. Caretaker, for some years, for James Schuyler.

  Dick Jerome Artist, upstairs neighbor of Ted’s in New York during the late 70s and early 80s.

  Henry (Hank) Kanabus (1949– ) Poet from Chicago, former student of Ed Dorn and Ted at Northeastern Illinois University.

  Ada Katz (1928– ) Wife of Alex Katz. She figures in many of his paintings.

  Alex Katz (1927– ) New York painter and visual artist (set designer, cover artist, printmaker, collaborator with poets, etc.).

  Anne Kepler Marge Kepler’s cousin, a flutist who came to New York around the same time as Ted, Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, Pat Mitchell, and Ron Padgett. Her death in 1965 is recorded both in “Tambourine Life” and in “People Who Died.”

  Marge Kepler (Margie) Friend, girlfriend, of Ted’s in Tulsa, who, according to his journals, changed his life dramatically.

  Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) Beat novelist and poet. Interviewed by Ted for the Paris Review in 1968.

  Kenneth Koch (Jay Kenneth Koch) (1925–2002) New York School poet, playwright, fiction and prose writer, teacher.

  Rochelle Kraut (1952– ) Poet, artist, singer. Married to Bob Rosenthal.

  Rosina Kühn (1940– ) Swiss painter.

  Tuli Kupferberg (1923– ) Poet, musician, songwriter, author, member of The Fugs.

  Joanne Kyger (1934– ) Poet, teacher.

  Michael Lally (1945– ) Poet, actor.

  Lewis MacAdams (1944– ) Poet, environmental activist.

  Bernadette Mayer (1945– ) Experimental poet and prose writer, editor, teacher of poets.

  Bernie Mitchell (1945–2003) Sister of Pat Padgett.

  Christine Murphy (Chris) The muselike “Chris” of The Sonnets, one of Ted’s students in 1958–1959 when he taught eighth grade at Madalene School in Tulsa. Not the “Chris” in the poem “Living with Chris,” who is Christina Gallup, the (then) baby daughter of Dick and Carol Gallup.

  Eileen Myles (1949– ) Poet and fiction writer.

  Jayne Nodland (1943– ) Photographer, artist, musician.

  Alice Notley (1945– ) Poet, editor, essayist; Ted’s second wife.

  Frank O’Hara (Francis Ru
ssell O’Hara) (1926–1966) New York School poet, art critic, Museum of Modern Art (New York) administrator and curator. Ted’s most avowed poetry hero.

  Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) British poet, novelist, editor, linguistic researcher.

  Peter Orlovsky (1933– ) Poet, companion of Allen Ginsberg.

  Lauren Owen (1941– ) Friend of Ted’s in Tulsa and New York.

  Pat Padgett (Patricia Mitchell) (1937– ) Lifelong friend of Ted’s in Tulsa and New York. Wife of Ron Padgett.

  Ron Padgett (1942– ) Poet, prose writer, memoirist, biographer, translator, editor. Frequent collaborator with Ted on poems and prose works. Co-author with Ted of the book Bean Spasms.

  Tom Pickard (1946– ) British poet and prose writer.

  Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) Painter and art critic.

  Tony Powers Friend of Ted’s in Tulsa.

  Tom Raworth (1938– ) British poet.

  Val Raworth (1936– ) Wife of Tom Raworth.

  Bob Rosenthal (1950– ) Poet, prose writer, secretary to Allen Ginsberg.

  Ed Sanders (1939– ) Poet, musician, journalist, novelist. Member of The Fugs.

  Aram Saroyan (1943– ) Poet, prose writer.

  Harris Schiff (1944– ) Poet. Collaborator with Ted on writing projects.

  Linda Schjeldahl (Linda O’Brien) (1942– ) Editor, writer; at one time married to Peter Schjeldahl.

  Peter Schjeldahl (1942– ) Poet, art critic.

  Elio Schneeman (1961–1997) Poet, son of George and Katie Schneeman.

  George Schneeman (1934– ) Painter, collagist, ceramicist, cover artist, illustrator, frequent collaborator with Ted on visual and literary projects.

  Katie Schneeman (1938– ) Close friend of Ted’s in New York. Married to George Schneeman; mother of Elio, Emilio, and Paul.

  James Schuyler (1923–1991) New York School poet, prose writer, art critic.

  Johnny Stanton (1943– ) Fiction writer.

  Lorenzo Thomas (1944– ) Panamanian-born African American poet, critic, essayist, teacher.