One of the telling differences between the Poetry Project Newsletter (PPN) &, say, Poets and Writers, is that the latter, relatively slick journal, only occasionally will have an article of great pertinence to poets & is often best read for its continual reminders that poetry & the trade publishing industry have nothing intelligible to do with one another, while the PPN invariably has a few gems in every issue. Indeed, it’s well worth the while of a young poet in Boise or Missoula to belong to the Poetry Project just because you can get the newsletter five times a year. The current issue is no exception, having in its pages what is easily the best review I’ve seen to date of Ted Berrigan’s Collected, written by Joel Lewis. I asked Joel if I could reprint it here, just to remind what you’re missing if you don’t get the Newsletter, & he and current PPN editor Brendan Lorber agreed. Obviously the name Berrigan is one to conjure with around St. Marks, both past & present, but in many ways a review like this strikes me as demonstrating all the ways in which poetry understood as community strengthens & illuminates the work. It’s not an accident that in Jordan Davis’ “nameless history” of the New York School Ted Berrigan is the key to the Second Generation, nor that the Fourth Generation is described as “one, more or less: Joel Lewis (and he chose to remain in
TED BERRIGAN
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN
University of California Press / 2005
Nola Burger, the designer of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan should get some sort of award for designing the most friendly-looking 750 page book I’ve ever seen. Most of the collected poems on my shelves have the taint of the library about them— a good example of this phenomenon being The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn; which, while being a fine example of diligent and scholarly editing, seems to entomb Blackburn in a crowded and sober format that is at odds with the poet’s wit and offhand brilliance.
What does account for the mysterious concept of a poet’s “reputation?” Harold Bloom may think it’s the task of the scholar and critic, but this might simply be an academic’s attempt to claim a stake much greater than their actual role. In the end, it is poets reading other poets and then participating in the underground economy of talking and writing that establishes a poet’s position within the active literary culture. Poets as diverse as Neidecker, Bronk, Oppen, Guest, Zukofsky and Schuyler owe their reputations to poets, often a single poet, who cared enough about the work to advocate, edit, publish and polemicize. The scholars who later arrive are akin to colonialists who civilize the landscapes that explorers cut trails through.
Ted Berrigan was one of those poets who fought for the “lives” of poets he cared about. He cajoled poems from the ever-reticent Edwin Denby and devoted an entire issue of “C” magazine to his work. In conversation and in the classroom, he advocated for poets as diverse as Philip Whalen, Tom Raworth, Joe Ceravolo and F.T. Prince.
In Berrigan’s lifetime, there were no critics or scholars I’m aware of that wrote about him in either a favorable or critical manner. John Ashbery’s positive review of The Sonnets appears to have been suppressed by The New York Times Book Review. His important collection So Going Around Cities was ignored by that same Book Review. Berrigan’s exclusion from the failed revision of the New American Poetry, The Postmoderns created something of a scandal at the time among poets.
The continuity of Berrigan’s work for the last 23 years has been the work of family, friends and a new generation of poets who came upon the work and found in it a voice that connected to the current moment. Late work was published by Leslie Scalapino’s O Press. Ed Foster’s Talisman House published a collection of talks. Anne Waldman put together the homage Nice To See You. Useful memoirs were written by Tom Clark and Ron Padgett, and Aram Saroyan edited a Selected Poems which made Berrigan’s work available again to a new generation of writers.
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, which is the culmination of that process of keeping Berrigan’s work available, is a terrific achievement. Edited by his widow, the remarkable poet Alice Notley, in collaboration with their poet sons Anselm and Edmund, the book aims to be both writerly and readerly and manages both tasks rather nicely. The ins and outs of Berrigan’s publishing career are deftly handled and the scholarly apparatus sheds fascinating information for even this longtime reader of the poet.
Notley made a wise choice in organizing this collection as “sort of” Collected Books. As the editor notes: “though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn’t produce a linear succession of discrete tidy volumes.” As anyone who attended his readings were aware, he was just as likely to read a poem written a week before as he was a poem written in the early 60s. The sobering thought is that, despite the book’s heft, we are dealing with a writing career that existed for only 25 years, as opposed to the half-century of poetry contained in Kenneth Koch’s recent collected opus.
There is a hefty amount of uncollected and fugitive pieces collected, plus a few earlier pieces that help set the stage for his master poem The Sonnets. The “major” inclusion in this volume is Easter Monday, a sequence which Berrigan finalized shortly before his death. Although most of the poems had already appeared in print and are familiar to readers of his work, Berrigan saw this sequence as a major statement. In a reading I attended at an Alice Notley workshop in 1980, he noted that the title alluded to his marriage to Alice Notley and the start of a new family — I recall him saying something about “what happens the day after the resurrection?” A bigger-picture question that Berrigan preferred over the issue of what’s with a glowing, formerly dead guy who probably had a thing against drug use and modern art.
Many of Ted’s old friends who attended the packed reading celebrating the collected’s publication were touched by the crowd of younger people who were in attendance. Perhaps young writers can identify with lines like: “It was gloomy being broke today, and baffled / in love. Love, why do you always take my heart away?” (“For You”). Or maybe it’s the insouciance and audacity of poems like “Ass-face” (“This is the only language you understand, Ass-Face!”) that offer up a dose of courage syrup to writers wondering can I say that?
In a larger sense, the genius and appeal of Berrigan’s work is a supreme example in poetry of what film critic/artist Manny Farber calls “Termite Art” in his 1962 essay White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art. You’re probably all too familiar with White Elephant Art: Steven Spielberg films, Meryl Streep, Bruce Springsteen, i.e., “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition.” You know, Great Art.
Sadly, a lot of American poetry is a herd of White Elephants. Much of what Ron Silliman calls the “School of Quietude.” Big shiny edifices like James Merrill’s “The Changing Lights At Sandover.”
According to Farber, “Good work usually arises usually arises where the creators... seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”
Berrigan, through his often gleeful use of assemblage, writing games, samplings, mash-ups, rewrites, borrowings (from both the Greats of the Past and the Poet Down The Block), imitations and juice from his own personal verse factory became an American original. Despite shallow readings by critics like Marjorie Perloff who dismissed him as a faux Frank O’ Hara, there are elements of Berrigan’s art that transcend his masters. His undramatic use of the quotidian is unprecedented in American poetry. What infuriated his more socially conservative readers about the mention of “pills” and “give yourself the needle” was the casual, unapologetic, non-confessional maner in which these statements were uttered.
Berrigan’s friendly tone, and an intentional and strategic use of sentimentality, distinguishes him from mentors like O’Hara, Schuyler and Whalen, who always have a touch of elitism and “the smartest kid in the class” about their works. Berrigan was a poet of the working-class and, particularly, of working-class communities. He was class-conscious, but not in the sense of a socialist poet like Thomas McGrath. With a dual sense of irony and reality, he sometimes described himself as a smalltime capitalist entrepreneur, with poetry as his stock in trade. On other occasions he’d declare: “I’d love to sell out, the trouble is—I have nothing to sell.”
So, the standard Berrigan is here—from a high class university press (no less) that also houses fellow travelers Olson and Creeley—not bad for a poet whose first and last publication were mimeo books. “Everything turns into writing” Berrigan repeated over and over in The Sonnets. And in 634 pages of poetry, that phrase in realized in every possible permutation. Berrigan’s work precisely realizes Kenneth Burke’s definition of literature: “Equipment for living.”
Joel Lewis is New Jersey’s Unofficial Poetry Goodwill Ambassador. His most recent book is The Tasks Of The Youth Leagues.
