On several occasions of late – for example, when looking at the poetry of Ray DiPalma – I’ve suggested that the writing calls out for a “a honking huge selected or collected poems,” a book that shows not just a few gems or “anthology poems,” but which gives a sense of the scale of his or her life project, the arc of it, the depth. All too often when such a volume occurs, tho, it feels half done, or even done on the cheap. If a book of poems is an inherently problematic publishing venture, nothing is quite so risky as the big book thereof.
Which is why it is great to see it done right, when it is. Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems, when it first came out, set such a standard, tho in fact there were a number of poems that escaped & a revised edition would not be such a bad idea. Which, soon enough, we should have for the work of Jack Spicer, whose own Collected Books was itself a watershed collection. And which we now have, finally, for the work of Ted Berrigan.
It feels hard to suggest that a book of poetry that costs $49.95 is a must-have volume for every serious library, but The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is absolutely such a work, just as is Jackson Mac Low’s Doings, which costs 5¢ more. 2005 is the year in which the $50 book of poems became something other than a fine press project. The upside is that both of these are great books & a bargain at twice this price.
Some of the things that make the Berrigan wonderful are predictable – the completeness & editorial care given to texts is assured. Ted was unbelievably lucky to have so many good poets in his life, and having Alice Notley, Anselm & Edmund Berrigan as editors is a level of fortune that Ezra Pound & William Carlos Williams never got to have. Page after page, it really shows –for example, in the printing of Train Ride, a 43-page poem recounting just such a trip in 1971, where spatial configuration on the page is essential & the usual collected poems compromise of multiple poems per page jamming things together has to be abandoned. The editors here have followed Robin Blaser’s example with Spicer, to create a collected that is organized around the published books, here including black title pages for each section. Sections for unpublished work are included at different points throughout, with the “Early Uncollected” coming at the end, not the beginning, which makes great sense. As does starting the book with Ted’s classic The Sonnets.
The editorial notes at the end – such as a piece on the use of names in The Sonnets – are detailed & useful. In fact, I have only one editorial quibble with this project at all, the decision to withhold from publication nine sonnets from this sequence as “not strong enough to be published.” I really don’t care if Ted & the editors were right in their judgment – I see no reason to think that they wouldn’t be – I would love to see them in context & The Sonnets complete as written. Someday we are simply going to have to have a variorum edition of that book, just as we do with The Waste Land & Howl.
Ted’s greatest value as a poet – he has several – lies in his use of directness. Directness of address – “Dear Marge,” “Dear Chris” – directness of statement – “SLEEP,” “I go in & / sit down / at this desk” – directness of feeling – “It is important to keep old hat / in secret closet.” This may be something that Berrigan learned from Frank O’Hara, but I don’t think it’s quality that can be taught, if I can make that distinction. And it’s what O’Hara got out of Williams (traceable, I think, back ultimately to Whitman). It’s like a brush-stroke in painting, like having the lightest & most flexible of wrists to enable you to carry the paint from hither to yon effortlessly. If, as a reader, you get it, Berrigan’s work can be breathtakingly gorgeous page after page. But if you don’t – and I think this is possible also – it may sound just like an overweight druggie talking through cigarette smoke.
The test, to my ear, is that, for all of the Berrigan students & influencees in this world, nobody, but nobody, sounds anything like him. He’s virtually impossible to imitate, because the closer you come to the unguarded plain speech his work projects, the more you will sound like yourself, not him. It’s almost like a magic trick, but at the heart of it is an ear for the demotic & a sense of particularity that is absolutely rigorous. Rigor is the secret sauce in all of Berrigan’s work. Secret, because Berrigan’s stance of utter casualness appears to be its antithesis as do some of his lifestyle choices. But it’s no accident that so many of his students ended up as serious publishing writers – no other poet over the past half century comes close – and it’s absolutely consistent with his idea of poetry as a total life commitment. Case in point: a seminal work like Robert Creeley’s Pieces isn’t even possible without the prior example of Berrigan, which is especially interesting when you consider that Creeley’s other major literary influences – Williams, Zukofsky, Olson – all were known for their formal innovations and that Berrigan functionally is a generation younger than Creeley (albeit chronologically just nine years).
Notley, in her introduction, notes that Ted’s characterization as “second generation” anything suggests that the innovation has all taken place before he got there, a comment that made me think back to Jordan Davis’ attempt at a “nameless” history of the NY School in the new mag Vanitas. Part of what made the 2nd generation second was its loving embrace of the first, plus some key shared enthusiasms – painting, for one; France, for another – but part of what made it 2nd was that this new group of poets were in fact radically different from their predecessors – none more so than Berrigan. What a nameless history of that school would have to eventually articulate is just how completely different the poetry is from one gen to the next – and that fact that none of the first gen poets looked to Berrigan (unlike, say, their peer Creeley) where all of gen two did is an important part of this. I’ve always felt that we were (are) too close still to Ted’s presence to get a handle as yet to all that his work actually means for American poetry – it’s hard to fathom that he would be 70 now if he were still alive. The UC Press book is a huge help in this regard – it not only gives a far better sense of the whole terrain of Berrigan’s writing, but in giving us this great big brick of a book, it may even objectify the writing in some fashion, thus letting us get a sense of our own bearings. That probably is the next step in our coming terms with thisgiant talent who wrote poems, as we can now see, really for just 20 years.
