Rereading “Bean Spasms” in The Angel Hair Anthology does so many different things for me:

• Reminds me of what a great poet Berrigan was, something that for me can slip when not recalling the range, depth & delicacy his work was able to reach all at the same time
• Makes me realize yet again that it was this poem & not “The Sonnets” that truly made Ted into a New York poet, rather than, say, merely a brilliant Providence Army vet who got to Manhattan by way of Tulsa
• Causes me to note how Part 3, with 13 lines, is in its own way a variation of a sonnet – “you string a sonnet around yr fat gut” he says only two lines in the section that is labeled “4,” Berrigan actually playing in the poem with the role of subsection headings. Later he will say, midline (and with no stanza break on either side), “Right Here. That’s Part 5”
• Makes me remember how, reading Louis Cabri’s The Mood Embosser (Coach House, 2001) last summer, which is really a fine first book, at times made me think “this is what Ted Berrigan would be like with politics,” but that, now confronting Berrigan directly, seeing how the great range of reference inherent in Ted’s best work could not/would not restrict itself to a domain such as the political & that it is precisely how the social, the intimate & the purely fanciful interact that made Ted Ted
• Reminds me yet again of what an important an influence Berrigan has been for so many of my favorite poets – Kit Robinson, Bob Perelman & Alan Bernheimer in my own generation, Cabris more recently – and why this is a good thing
• Which in turn reminds me that, betwixt the poets of the Allen anthology & my own cohort, there were really two significant strains of innovation in poetry: the “second generation NY school,” around Ted, Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Gallup et al and the poets around Caterpillar, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, David Antin

One of the most memorable moments co-curating the Grand Piano poetry series in San Francisco with Tom Mandel in the mid-1970s was the evening we hosted Ted Berrigan and SF-expatriate George Stanley. I recall counting the audience at significantly over 100, well beyond what that little room could hold comfortably, and how both poets were masterful that evening. But what may have been strangest about the event was the degree to which each poet brought half of the audience to the reading and how very few of the audience members had any idea just who the other poet happened to be. It was a meeting of very different, though essentially simpatico, tribes.

Afterwards, the scene divided literally into two parties that could have been characterized as straight/gay or NY/SF, although there were exceptions to all such axes of division. At the Berrigan’s affair south of Market, some epigone made a point of telling Ted just how much better he had been than “that other poet.” Ted stopped that person – I’m not naming names because the miscreant has been edited from the memory card – instantly and went into a terrific impromptu lecture on what an excellent poet George Stanley was and how important it was to fully understand the San Francisco renaissance, including its own second generation and the Vancouver diaspora that followed the death of Jack Spicer.