The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read online

  The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

  The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

  EDITED BY ALICE NOTLEY

  with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan

  Introduction and Notes by Alice Notley

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California

  Credits and acknowledgments for the poems appear on page 729.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berrigan, Ted.

  [Poems. Selections]

  The collected poems of Ted Berrigan / edited by

  Alice Notley, with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund

  Berrigan.

  p. cm.

  “Introduction and notes by Alice Notley.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-520-23986-5 (alk. paper).

  I. Notley, Alice, 1945– II. Berrigan,

  Anselm. III. Berrigan, Edmund, 1974– IV. Title.

  PS3552.E74A17 2005

  811'.54—dc22 2005042259

  Printed and bound in Canada

  14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

  requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)

  (Permanence of Paper).

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges contributions

  to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund

  of the University of California Press Foundation;

  Kenward Elmslie, Z Press;

  Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo;

  Kenneth Koch Literary Estate;

  and other generous donors.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chronology

  The Sonnets

  Great Stories of the Chair

  The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford

  Great Stories of the Chair

  A Boke

  Many Happy Returns

  In the Early Morning Rain

  Train Ride

  Memorial Day by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman

  Short Poems

  In a Blue River

  Uncollected Short Poems

  Red Wagon

  Easter Monday

  Nothing for You

  In the 51st State

  In the 51st State

  The Morning Line

  Uncollected Poems

  A Certain Slant of Sunlight

  A Certain Slant of Sunlight: Out-takes

  Last Poems

  Early Uncollected Poems

  Notes

  Glossary of Names

  Credits

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers of the original editions of Ted Berrigan’s books of poetry. These books are cited and discussed throughout the apparatus of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, but I wish briefly to name the presses, again, here: “C” Press, Kulchur Press, Grove Press, Corinth Books, Cape Goliard Press, Aloes Books, Frontward Books, The Yellow Press, United Artists, Vehicle Editions, Blue Wind Press, Clown War, Little Light Books, Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, O Books, Penguin Books, and Situations.

  Ted’s poetry depended, for publication and the maintenance of an audience, on the many, many small presses and magazines which carried his work in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and also after his death. I would love to be able to list all of the magazines here, but that obviously isn’t possible: I don’t have the complete record, and the list would be pages long. One acknowledges the debt and hopes so much for the continued flourishing of that small-press enterprise.

  I would particularly like to thank Ron Padgett for his time and advice. Thanks, too, to Dick Gallup, Lorenz Gude, and Miles Champion for information and feedback. To George Schneeman, for his cover art; and to Lorenz, again, for his photograph. And for their various feats of recall and research, I would like to thank Bob Rosenthal, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Ed Sanders, and Anselm Hollo. Thanks as always to David Berrigan and Sarah Locke for being there. Also I wish to thank Laura Cerruti, Rachel Berchten, and the staff of the University of California Press, and Linda Norton, whose original support helped make the book possible.

  I am writing on behalf of my co-editors, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, as well as myself. The organization of the book by sections, the selection of the poems, the casting of them into place, the devising of the chronology and glossary, and an intense scrutiny of my introduction and notes, was a notably communal (family) project. We are all three very pleased for Ted.

  Introduction

  I heard Ted say more than once that his collected poems should be like a collected books. But he didn’t always work in sequences, and he wasn’t always consciously in the process of writing a book. He wrote many individual poems, and he sometimes seemed to write purely for fun. As for publication, publishers would approach him for a book without knowing exactly what he had, and sometimes it didn’t seem to him as if he had that much. If there was a sequence ready, or a book in a unified style like Many Happy Returns, certainly he published that. If he had a stack of dissimilar works or if he didn’t even know what he had, he still set about the process of constructing a “book.” He loved to make things out of pieces, often ones that didn’t fit together conventionally. A book was like a larger poem that could be as much “made” out of what was at hand, as “written” in a continuous way out of a driving idea.

  This volume is an attempt to be a collected books, but it can’t be that precisely and so isn’t called The Collected Books. Though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn’t produce a linear succession of discrete, tidy volumes. He perceived time as overlapping and circular; the past was always alive and relevant, and a particular poem might be as repeatable as an individual line or phrase was for him from the time of the composition of The Sonnets onward. How were we, the editors, to deal with repetitions of poems from book to book? Most especially what were we to do about the book-length sequence Easter Monday?

  Ted worked for years on Easter Monday, which he didn’t call finished until shortly before his death, when he finalized the selection and order. Meanwhile, during his lifetime, every one of the poems was published individually, in two chapbooks, A Feeling for Leaving and Carrying a Torch, and more significantly in the books Red Wagon and So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958–1979. Easter Monday has never been presented as a unified sequence until now; but placing its poems together considerably shortens the book Red Wagon. So we have shortened Red Wagon, and shorter it is still a book, and a good one. But dealing with Easter Monday showed us that we would have to construct this Collected Poems a little as if we were Ted and not just editors.

  Furthermore, there was a lot of uncollected work, including early poems, “short” poems, out-takes from the sequence A Certain Slant of Sunlight, a scattering of individual poems from the 70s and 80s, and a set of poems written during the last six months of his life and kept together in its own folder. We decided to organize most of this work into booklike sections. We’ve discussed ceaselessly what to omit, what isn’t “good enough” in the sense of not really holding up next to the others, because if this is a collected books, each poem should fill its own space within its own book or section. We are not Ted, but we tried to think like him; and there’s still room in the future for a slim volume of retrieved poems, as in Poems Retrieved of Frank O’Hara (a possibility Ted would have loved). In
the beginning I held out for every scrap of a poem, while Anselm and Edmund had a more selective sense. I gradually gave up on such works as “The 30 Most Common Names in the Manhattan Telephone Directory, 1979,” various small-scale “Things to Do” poems, occasional poems (practically anyone’s birthday in the late 60s), and the worst of Ted’s rather bad “early poems.” I retain tender feelings for all of these poems.

  With regard to the reprinting of a poem or two from book to book: it doesn’t make economical sense to repeat poems, so we have most often chosen to omit poems that have been printed in other sections. Thus, where there are omissions, I indicate in the notes where and what they are. Also, there existed a handful of poems which seemed to float near specific books, stylistically, but hadn’t been included in them. The relevant books were collections not sequences, and we have taken the liberty of placing these poems in the volumes they point to. Again I signal, in the notes, where this has been done; there are not enough of these poems to merit their own section, and in each case they fit gracefully where inserted. I don’t think Ted would mind, though more pristine editors than we are might squirm.

  If it sounds as if the rules of organization of this book work through exception, I can only say that Ted’s work creates the need for exception. His esthetics were fluid, and he was governed more by the impulse to make art than to be consistent. Thus the books or sections are presented in an order that reflects, mostly but not entirely, chronology of publication. In a Blue River is “out of order.” Though it was published in 1981, most of its poems were written in the early 70s, and it has been placed with other short poems from that time near books from that time. It was, in fact, in the late 60s and early 70s that Ted was most intensely interested in the short poem as a form.

  Finally, we have chosen to present fourteen early poems, which, along with certain poems in Nothing for You, help demonstrate where The Sonnets came from. These not-so-good poems contain a number of the repeated lines in The Sonnets; so the book concludes with the beginning, making a circle. One of Ted’s favorite concepts was that of a poem or book creating a circular shape whose ending pushes the reader back up into the work. And he always remained interested in his not-very-good poems, because they, too, reflected who he was. A circle is a unity, and oneself was/is always in process back there.

  Having explained our general editorial procedure I would now like to take the reader quickly through this volume’s sections, focusing on their contents and marking, as practicable in this space, Ted’s esthetic changes from book to book and through the years. I’ve organized this part of the introduction by decade, since Ted’s adult life and career seems to lend itself to this shape. In the 60s Ted was a young man and wrote his best-known work; in the 70s he became a more various poet, he entered a second marriage, and his health began to fail; in the early 80s he wrote his last work. He died young, at the age of forty-eight, on July 4, 1983. These poems span a creative period of roughly twenty years (not counting the earliest work), which isn’t a long time. It seems remarkable that there should be so many poems.

  The Sixties

  This collection begins with The Sonnets, Ted’s most famous book. It really is quite close to where Ted began, despite the fact that it is a classic. It is a young man’s book, the product of relentless self-education, and being partly constructed out of lines from “early poems,” often suggests the awkward intensity of inexperience. But it floats above that place as if observing it from the dead: “dear Berrigan. He died / Back to books. I read.”

  It is important to say once again that The Sonnets was written in New York, that Ted had arrived in New York via Providence and Tulsa; that Ted would leave New York for a while but then return to it; that he was always called a New York School poet, and that he mostly liked the attribution. The Sonnets, in fact, could reflect no other setting than that city. In these poems New York bricks and human density have become the interior walls of someone always reading and thinking. Outside-in.

  The Sonnets was written in the early 60s, most especially in 1963: that is, it seems to have been in 1963 that Ted realized he was generating a long sonnet sequence, though he had written some of the poems as early as 1961. Entries in his journals, dated November 16 and 20, 1962, record the composition of the first six sonnets out of lines from previous poems and from his translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre.” But there was a point, early in 1963, when he suddenly knew what he was doing: with Dadaist cut-up and Cageian chance methods, transforming not-so-good poems into an astonishing and original structure.

  The reader will come to notice that Ted returned to the strict form of The Sonnets several times, in his books, to make points about his life and the passage of time. The form is suited to detached self-scrutiny, using lines and phrases from past and present poems, reading material, and ongoing mind, in an order determined by numbers rather than syntax. The pieces of the self are allowed to separate and reform: one is not chronology but its parts and the real organism they create. Ted liked to say that poetry is numbers, and maybe everything is numbers. The sonnet form is “about” the number fourteen, but Ted’s sonnets use fourteen as a frame for the disassemblage of the number, making a real advance in the form and its relation to the psyche. To the extent that Ted broke and remade the form, it became possible to use it for more than argument. One could condense cognition into fourteen or so lines, if each piece, each segment of the fourteen, even each phrase in a line, meant enough.

  The Sonnets has been through four editions. There were originally eighty-eight sonnets, but in the first two editions (from “C” Press and Grove Press) he allowed only sixty-six; in the third edition (from United Artists) he added six more; and in the fourth edition (Penguin Books) I included seven more that he had authorized before his death in 1983. This collection conforms to the Penguin edition in including seventy-nine sonnets.

  After the composition of The Sonnets, Ted entered a period of further involvement with aleatory methods, cut-up, collage, and transliteration, overlappingly with the more direct poems of Many Happy Returns. We have placed three works written according to a “method” (a word he liked) in a single section called Great Stories of the Chair. They are the eight-poem sequence “The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford,” the sequence of prose paragraphs “Great Stories of the Chair,” and the long poem “A Boke.” All of Many Happy Returns is included in a separate section.

  On the manuscript of “The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford” Ted scrawled “1963? or 4?” The first version of the sequence was published in two issues of Ted’s magazine, “C” (A Journal of Poetry), in 1964. The eight poems are hilarious and ferocious. They are obviously transliterations, that is, translations via sound and thought association of works in a foreign language. The original texts are to be found in Pierre Reverdy’s Quelques Poèmes (see notes). Ted had previously written several transliterative poems: one example from The Sonnets is “Mess Occupations” (Sonnet XXXIX), with the note “after Henri Michaux.” There is an especially fluid, automatic quality to the lines of The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford, and an occasional vicious literalness: “Eat a potato she said you sober All-American.”

  Great Stories of the Chair reveals a new influence on Ted’s writing, that of the prose of William Burroughs, whom Ted did not read until after the composition of The Sonnets. Three of the “stories” were published in the journal Mother, in 1965, under the title Paragraphs. The entire sequence of twelve prose blocks was published in Angel Hair 4 (winter 1967/68). The cut-up methods of Burroughs and Brion Gysin do not seem essentially different from Dadaist procedures. However, applied to prose structures which coaxed plot out of words themselves, Burroughsian cut-up resulted in novels that are full-blown visions generated as much verbally as through the senses. Poetry originating from within words (not from within the poet per se) was already Ted’s practice. He always asserted that he thought in words, that he was usually either reading, writing, talking, thinking about/in words, or sleeping. Words were liter
ally his mind in process. And to cut up his own poems, for example, was not to do anything other than to think and feel. Great Stories of the Chair is blocks of thought and emotion—what else?

  Though “A Boke” is dated 1966 in So Going Around Cities, it was first published in the journal Kulchur in the autumn of 1965. It is a cut-up of an article by the poet James Dickey, first published in The New Yorker, about traveling around the United States giving poetry readings. “A Boke” is a send-up of mainstream humorlessness, but with an autobiographical air to it, and, as Ted once told me, intentionally drawn out to a point veering toward (not quite arriving at) boredom. Interspersed from time to time throughout “A Boke” is the line “Remember the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen?” which Ted lifted from Burroughs. Also included in the mix are references to the folk songs “John Henry” and “Nine-Pound Hammer.”

  It is the book Many Happy Returns, published by Corinth Books in 1969, that is Ted’s first major statement after The Sonnets. The poems included in the collection span a large part of the 60s, beginning with a poem from 1962, “Words for Love,” and ending with “Resolution,” written in 1968. The forms used include cut-up and collage but also the “personal poem,” as derived from Frank O’Hara’s work, the “things to do” poem based on the examples of Gary Snyder and Sei Shonogon, and the long poem, as well as what one might call simply the “poem” poem, Ted’s version of the emotionally direct, realistic shorter poem. There is a new open-field style in evidence, characterizing especially the great “Tambourine Life,” dated “Oct. 1965–Jan. 1966.” “Tambourine Life,” divided into seventy sections of varying length, is an opening of Ted’s voice; it sounds like him talking, though it also sounds “constructed,” in unexpected and witty ways. The poem contains much domestic detail, specific 60s references, philosophy presented lightly, and an under-current of tragedy. It is dedicated to Anne Kepler—the Anne of The Sonnets, who died in a fire set by an arsonist while Ted was writing the poem; the book itself is dedicated to Anne Kepler and to Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966.