The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read online

  Who I Am and What I Think

  There is no transition from a gesture to a cry or a sound. (same thing). Gestures: Who killed Cock Robin? The End. A particular buttressing of the body. No Smoking In This Room. All the senses interpenetrate. This spectacle is no more than we can assimilate. Nothing is left to do. For example, the war between men and women. Here is a whole collection of ritual. In fact everything is calculated with an enchanting mathematical meticulousness. Senses crackling everywhere resounding as if from an immense dripping rainforest. The day’s emotion and turmoil is present in the dusty grassy ground. Tied naked to a huge oak. The sort of theatrical language foreign to every tongue. To track the beats down. There is a sensual delight the braincells take. Thank you Brett. Clothed in strangest dress. To learn to keep quiet when another man’s prisoner. Complaints in the night. The kind of irritation caused by the impossibility of finding thread. The plastic requirements of this stage: food clothing shelter sex drugs jail. Ear to the ground. as if through channels hollowed out in the mind itself. Pages in Berlitz. No one here but me. Queer dawns voices a thousand eyes complaints in the night. To know to know everything. My eyes are tired. (the echo). (Jesse James).

  A Letter from Dick Gallup

  Woke up this morning you were other people in absentia lovely fashions On my mind. Take a good look. Shit little turd balls! I’ve got troubles: You have been sentenced to death sketches I havent explained actually I have Been many days writing the same work, waiting, no one there, The Ancient City all around you, thru August, nightmares, put them into a box, Anger gives me nausea and I said shee-it! went home resplendent with defeat. Baby-things. Future issues many thanks for them last night The Thing A great movie: Hit The Trail. Utterly exhausted by maniacs including Yours truly not to mention shifts, day shift night shift etc. took it to Cut City and one Ted reading in California She having gone back to Tappan (to picket Ben Jonson). How’s the chickens, the ducks, the old old ass? Please keep in touch Just figured out I cant stand writing in this box words dismantled to keep together and there are other problems and they come together at my mind. Furtive Days. It gets you down and out you go Dont read this part you both Nearly get killed on the freeway. Remember? How long do you think you’ll Be? That old praise (up the butt!) not likely put the books back nights Flight 9 American Air Lines best to use your own name. You have been sentenced to Death.

  A BOKE

  FOR DICK GALLUP

  You’re listening to a man who in 1964 unknowingly

  breathed in a small quantity of

  LSD powder, remember the fragrance of Grandma’s

  Kitchen?—and at a college he reads, sleeps.

  The next morning he

  takes a walk around the campus

  with a young student who is

  ordinarily mild-mannered and agreeable

  and secretly thinks of himself

  as rather colorless and uninteresting.

  He has written poems for years,

  odd sensation indeed, only partly alleviated

  when he learns that he is next door to

  the bashed-out windows, is now

  engaged in beating in the

  top of a car with the inaccurate

  ones relieving him. He learns to

  time his words and lines to the

  hammer-strokes, and before long

  he is giving something. And the

  grave, slightly puzzled sympathetic

  faces take on expressions he is

  grateful for.

  The head picks up. He is taken

  to a room in one of the girls’

  dormitories, which gives him

  a local airline. This is a

  girls’ college, also

  far off in the country. He finds

  this out by the use of drugs outside

  medical auspices. He and his

  followers seem to feel

  that the end justifies the means, but

  they have no flair (!), and at that moment

  the image of his great predecessor,

  the only predecessor, Laurence Sterne,

  and everything that came into his

  head insulted somebody—merciful

  heavens, who on earth was it?—and

  what the hell, he thinks, this may be

  a major technical breakthrough for me.

  In that company he thinks he hears a bearded

  fellow mutter something discontented about

  “a lack of fire” or was he a

  singer, an American poet? When at last

  he reaches the station he discovers

  he is too early by 20 minutes

  blazes up humiliatingly in the front

  of his brain. The result of this was

  that he deliberately drank twice as

  there are few lights on the campus, remember

  Grandma’s kitchen?, and he is uncertain about the

  instructions designed to get him into

  Literary Vaudeville. At the outset of the

  trip he had thought that

  the songs themselves would be enough

  so had a terrible hangover the next day.

  Yet he has in some obscure way

  been a good deal better satisfied with

  powerful vagueness. Poetry. A car

  stops. It is driven

  by a student at the college

  he is going to, and, ever cognizant

  of his bodiless staring audience, and of

  the skull beneath his own skin

  he has taken to doing some curious

  things. For example he has acquired a

  guitar, which he carries about with

  Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas; he has

  had nothing to complain of as to

  the size and response of his audience on

  this tour—set up by the editor of a venerable

  poetry magazine—has dinner

  with them, recounts some of his

  adventures. Everyone from the schools.

  But he is still bothered by the

  difference and the inevitability of

  death. He has tried for years to

  formulate his relationship to these

  things and to say something about

  how to get to bus and train stations

  and airports. He keeps opening

  his eyes in his sleep—for what he

  has become on this trip bears but little relation

  to the self he left

  at home in the mind, say, of his wife.

  He is, in fact, in the middle of

  a tour of readings. So far, considering,

  he is not looking forward to acquiring

  the courage to get drunk before

  readings. He is exhausted and exalted

  as he has never been, and now, standing

  here, these affairs may be mandatory (in

  some cases.) Then too many of the schools

  like this one, though far back, seemed pleased by

  the way things have gone; there have

  even been some letters of appreciation,

  female voices. There are many

  furtive amused glances at him and

  he replies in kind but because he liked

  to write them, but he has never thought

  of them as participating in

  a public act, a kind

  appeal to girls, and he even

  entertains the idea of sneaking

  back to his room and dashing

  hard on his nerves. He might live

  more vividly in this condition

  but he cannot write in it.

  He is happy and grinning; he feels

  resourceful, foolish, and

  lucky. “America,” he says aloud

  about this. He takes out his two

  volumes of poetry, and his

  manuscript for a third book,

  his Memento Mori, the great themes

/>   of poetry hit him squarely: the

  possibility of love in

  these students just coming from

  the auditorium sees him approaching

  with his ragged books

  in the center of a new reality—in

  this case a cold sleepless room—

  he looks at these things from the last

  girl’s unexpected kiss, the student

  with the nine pound hammer—he

  rearranges his evening’s program

  around the themes of love and

  death, dangerous to the psychological

  stability he expects of himself.

  He has several misadventures to

  lance between what is on the

  page, put there by him at odd

  beyond-himself moments, and . . .

  and the faces. In the middle

  guise of fiction, he becomes fascinatingly

  alive, living up to the

  “giving-them-what-they-want,” or might

  be expected to feel entitled to

  from a poet, beside himself, who

  has drunk very much at six or eight

  schools before that one part.

  Intensity, he murmurs, where have

  you been all my life.

  He settles down for a sleep

  with a young professor who

  writes poems and is enthusiastic

  and companionable. He

  reads, has a drink at an untidy

  bundle of railroads, bus, and airline schedules

  marked with a red pencil and

  various notes to himself. That

  such nervous excitement, such

  over-responsiveness to people

  is probably the poet’s sole

  evening repast, and if he

  tasted of a wild boar or a stag

  which he had roasted in the

  cold light coming in from the chapel

  tower across the campus, well, remember

  the fragrance? There is

  only one bus out of town,

  he reaches for it, rock-and-roll

  music bursts in his face. Rather than

  fool with trying to shut it off he pulls

  out his manuscripts. One whispers to

  another. Though he is a little

  afraid to, he admits who he is,

  alone in a room with his skull.

  In this reading, for once in his

  life, he feels a correct balance

  in his Hamlet, lost somewhere in

  the snows of Northern Wisconsin:

  he is, eternal strangeness!, a wandering

  pose, full of life through thick

  glasses. He finishes, stands

  glaring for a moment in another

  world with fatigue, one who has spent the most

  satisfying part of a long tripping

  movement that is not really for him, no, it is

  for an exhausted hammerer, or for a new

  arrival home and he is more

  than a little glad of that: they are

  wearing out the plug, feeling that he

  has had his revenge. He turns on

  the light and dresses, not quite able

  to stall, asks suddenly, “May I

  kiss you?” She agrees without thinking and

  she does so with a distinct sense of

  quitting while he is ahead. The

  applause is long and loud, as if he were

  a Beatle. He reaches a stage,

  mounts, looks at the last of all clocks,

  and leaves. It is 5:15 a.m. It is

  time. He gets up out of bed and stumbles just

  as he steps down from the stage into a

  wave of feathery sweatered girls, a memorable

  thing. No doubt. He gives the best reading of his

  life, one that will shortly thereafter

  have entered a twilight state characterized

  by fantastic imagery. He subs a condition

  of character and environment in order to

  produce alternative modes of behavior.

  He sits down, closes his eyes. Time is

  annihilated; the bus driver stumbles

  aboard, opens a door to a bridge. Finally

  someone stops him, a farmer, and takes him 20

  miles down the road. The farmer turns off

  the highway, one is much interested in his

  being there walking across the campus.

  He hears a loud gust of many grunts, a crowd

  of muffled students cheers him on; it

  is fun in the country and there is

  nothing to do. Still he is pleasantly

  gratified at the turnouts and at the time,

  picks up his bags and manuscripts and

  his symbolic white guitar, and goes out

  into the white darkness.

  What is his life like? Where will he die?

  Who is this nun giving him a calm

  sense of proportion? and who leaves him; and

  this time he is really in a

  deserted landscape with dead corn in the

  building and no one knows him—

  “Come home.” And who is that thin

  serious boy with the crewcut?

  In a station wagon they drive together

  40 miles into the rainforests. He is

  given a room in a cavern, and

  gifts; disturbing gifts, perhaps inept

  inadequate gifts, but gifts just the

  same. He feels that he is overcome.

  He is middle-aged, beginning to lose

  teeth and hair. He is lishing them

  in his mind, down steps.

  The next morning he catches a strange

  madness; took hold of him first at the

  reading when he discovered that

  everything he said was being noted and

  commented upon. Too, it is a midwinter

  night in the midwest, and a man is

  lying alone in a sterling ardor.

  The next place is a branch of a state

  of mind located in the fields in an

  inept scarecrow’s life. A few big birds

  puff and hunch on the telephone wires;

  a strange room. On the dresser beside

  the complicated clock-radio that

  is supposed to wake him on time, there is

  an industrial district of a large city.

  There he is to be met at the bus station

  though it is plain that there is no other

  human being in those streets. In a bar,

  (ah yes, he needs a drink badly), on

  the stairs of a bus, he collapses.

  When he wakes up the bus is in

  the terminal of the next city. He gets

  a small dose, about one-thousandth

  the size of an aspirin, and the notoriety

  is definitely agreeable and

  he does his best to try to live up to it.

  What in fact is his problem? A friend

  will drive him to the next

  engagement which is

  his last. They start out and he pays

  and gets out, scarcely knowing what he is

  doing but feeling a little better

  standing on the hood of a 1953 Buick

  with a John Henry type hammer

  in his hands, they having a kind of

  metric as he adjusts his delivery more and

  more to the inevitable banging. Presumes

  there is nothing unscientific in

  his desire to change the best

  proportions of strength and beauty. His

  tastes were modest, a piece of bread,

  a draught of water, and you were

  often sent to drive him out of his

  college. “I couldn’t believe you’d

  be the one I was looking for,” the poet

  says in another city, where
he has

  a friend he can stay with a day or two.

  He flies in watching the lights of the

  city, and in a phrase the losses endured

  by everyone every day—the negation of

  possibility that occurs each time

  we pass anyone’s house.

  He eats dinner with the writing and the

  phrases stay with him when he wakes.

  He notes them down and moves on to the

  next stop via the bus station. Crossing

  the campus on the one path he

  knows he keeps reminding himself of

  what he is doing. It is ominous that

  the only other large institution in

  the town is

  the state insane asylum. In all, it

  is a strangely good occasion.

  He leaves that night, paces back and forth.

  There is a skull on his table and suddenly

  at the sight of it he starts reading.

  From the airless close-packed winter bus

  station he tries to call his contact at

  the noon reading. The tour is to take place that

  day and he has four hours to go 40 miles. The

  tenuous noise of revolutions and

  student demonstrations combine with assembly

  lines that will annihilate the miles,

  he becoming then an older and more

  dependable self, and yet, remembering.

  Perhaps though some recent poems about

  his children will do the trick. He reads

  these quietly and has

  inevitable parties given after his

  readings, he plays one or two songs,

  and then scuttles back into his corner,

  realizing now that role-playing is

  shameful beside the feelings he

  has experienced. Now he has the sensation

  that he must calm down and work.

  But on the aircraft aimed at last at

  his home, he feels also

  interested in Yeats’ occult preoccupations,

  a curious object to discuss

  in good health, far from the poems themselves.

  “Just be yourself,” he told himself