The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  XXXVIII General Benedict Arnold, famous as a traitor to the American side in the Revolutionary War, actually led the Continental Army, with Ethan Allen, to a victory at Fort Ticonderoga.

  “A man signs a shovel / And so he digs”: these lines refer to one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, a snow shovel with the words “In Advance of the Broken Arm” written thereon.

  XLI Ira Hayes (1923–1955): Pima Indian war hero, one of the soldiers who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, as portrayed in a famous (staged) photograph. He later died of alcoholism and exposure on the Pima reservation.

  XLVII William Bonney is the real name of the outlaw Billy the Kid.

  XLVIII Francis Marion: Revolutionary War hero and specialist in guerrilla tactics, also known as the Swamp Fox.

  LI Gus Cannon (1883–1979): banjoist, jug player, and songwriter. He wrote the song “Walk Right In,” later quoted from in “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” in In the Early Morning Rain.

  LII “It is a human universe” refers to Charles Olson’s essay “Human Universe.” Richard White was a poet whom Ted knew in Tulsa and with whom he discussed Olson’s work.

  LXI Big Bill Broonzy (1893–1958): musician, one of the seminal figures of the Chicago blues.

  LXX Ted’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre,” quoted from throughout the book, is finally used in its entirety here.

  LXXX Louis Sullivan (1856–1924): major American architect. See also the poem “String of Pearls” in Nothing for You. The building referred to is probably the Bayard Building on Bleecker Street, in Manhattan.

  LXXXI Huddie Ledbetter: real name of the great folksinger Leadbelly (1885–1949). Lonnie Johnson (1894–1970): blues guitarist. Hans Hofmann (1880–1960): American abstract expressionist, influential painter and teacher, originator of the theory of “push-pull.”

  According to Ron Padgett (in a letter to me), Ted saw Lonnie Johnson “perform at Folk City in the early 1960s and was quite bowled over by him. There was a great moment when, near the end of a long set, Victoria Spivey leaped onto the bandstand wearing a tight white dress covered with dark rubber snakes and did several stunning numbers with Johnson.”

  Great Stories of the Chair

  THE SECRET LIFE OF FORD MADOX FORD

  The manuscript source is a folder retained by Ted until his death. The sequence has never been published in a book until now.

  The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford comprises poems first published over the course of two issues of “C” (A Journal of Poetry). Volume 1, no. 8 (April 1964) contains The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford as three poems: “Stop Stop Six” (the first poem of the sequence as finalized), “Then I’d Cry” (omitted from the final sequence), and “Fauna Time” (the third poem of the final sequence). The same issue contains, as a separate poem, “Reeling Midnight” (the second poem of the final sequence), dedicated “to Pierre Reverdy.” Volume 1, no. 9 (Summer Etc. 1964) contains The Rest of the Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford, composed of “On His Own” (our fourth poem), “The Dance of the Broken Bomb” (fifth poem), “Putting Away” (seventh poem), “Owe” (sixth poem), and “We Are Jungles” (eighth poem).

  These poems are transliterations from Pierre Reverdy’s Quelques Poèmes, which had previously inspired Ron Padgett’s own transliterative work, Some Bombs. As he says in “Interview with Barry Alpert” (in Talking in Tranquility), Ted decided to duplicate Padgett’s process himself. Ted states: “Ron’s French is pretty good whereas my French is quite low, not very good at all. So when I went through and did the same thing Ron did, my poems are slower and heavier than Ron’s. They have a lot more direct highly conscious meaning relating to the specific circumstances I was in—which is all obscured in the versions themselves but you can get the feeling, the feeling is very heavy. They were very negative poems; I was very angry.”

  In a letter to me, Padgett states that part 8, “We Are Jungles,” may have been influenced by an early poem by David Shapiro called “We Are Gentle.”

  Padgett’s Some Bombs also inspired the following poem of Ted’s:

  POEM IN HONOR OF SOME BOMBS

  Ron Padgett a ton ses quelques poemes

  a dix Pierre Reverdy a homage de “patsee”

  et la distinction et erudition au cul de chaud

  pour le “je ne sais pas” (shrug shrug). Et voila!

  Ici est grotesque dans la albee de R K O tres beeg beeg

  And les underwear des some jeunes filles a giant significance

  pour Ronald et Edmund (je n’ai pas Doubts).

  Also: fragMENT des Patsee de Christine egalite la “kill

  Chrissie Beak

  Making Teresa dans la nuit de bete noire et “It is a big Red

  House.” Homage a Blaise Cendrars mais no je ne read pas

  Some Poems of his. So what. Vie doux la tant pis

  et pix frank sur la table pour la sensible the pun

  (pode bal) (see a pneu from Marchand baby whoop whoop

  hobbyhorse!

  Let us stay with what we know / quelle Ronald

  est la fraisne toute hot and “way out west!” / that

  Ted Berrigan mais jeune filles oui oui en flagrant delicto e’toil

  dans la SONNETS: “mon grand reve une stabs dans mon Coeur

  (blanks).”

  /That Chrissie est a Patsee est a Chris est Beatrice est Sandra est

  Kenneth est Frank est John / et Ronald et Ted throwing je t’aime a

  tout la monde / Out.

  GREAT STORIES OF THE CHAIR

  Also published as Situations #7, New York City, 1998.

  One may speculate as to why Great Stories of the Chair wasn’t published in a book. Perhaps it, like The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford, was too “heavy” for both Many Happy Returns and In the Early Morning Rain. Ted preferred a purer air, and he may have seen “heaviness” and “anger” as a kind of sentimentality. There was a point, a few years later, when Ted deliberately cultivated sentimentality (see such poems as “Peace” and “Grey Morning” in In the Early Morning Rain and “Things to Do in Providence” in Red Wagon), but the attempt was more to formalize feeling than to be dominated by it. As Ted often said, he was a formalist.

  Mother Cabrini Mother Cabrini (1850–1917), an American nun, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  The Sunset Motel In the Situations chapbook, which reprints the sequence as published in Angel Hair 4, the fourth poem is called “The Sunset Hotel.” Ted made a change from “Hotel” to “Motel” on a manuscript photocopied from Angel Hair 4, and we have retained the change.

  Klein’s, a New York City department store, was located at Union Square. The original reference—and much of the material in “The Sunset Motel”—is from the poem “For You,” written in the early 60s and first published in Many Happy Returns.

  What’s the Racket “Ode to the Confederate Dead” refers to Allen Tate’s poem. When young, Ted paid attention to poets such as Tate, William Empson, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, and Conrad Aiken, to whom he sent a copy of The Sonnets (and who replied critically but at some length). Ted first came to poetry through anthologies and also recordings of poets reading their work (he did a hilariously nasal imitation of Empson reading “Missing Dates”).

  The Conscience of a Conservative The title refers to Senator Barry Goldwater’s book by the same name, published in 1960. “Spuyten Duyvil” is a town outside New York.

  Some Trips to Go On “Clear the Range” refers to Ted’s novel Clear the Range (New York: Adventures in Poetry/Coach House South, 1977), probably in process at the time.

  A Letter from Dick Gallup “Furtive Days” is the title of a collaborative novel by Ted and Ron Padgett, an excerpt from which was published in Bean Spasms.

  A BOKE

  The first book publication of this poem was in So Going Around Cities.

  Boke is an early spelling of book. Joe Brainard published Ted’s poem “Living with Chris”
(see Many Happy Returns), illustrated by himself, under his imprint, Boke Press.

  As stated in the introduction, though Ted dates “A Boke” as being from 1966 in So Going Around Cities (with the epigraph “Poetry.”), it was first published in Kulchur in the autumn 1965 issue. This probably places its composition just previous to the period when “Tambourine Life” was written, that poem being dated “Oct. 1965–Jan. 1966.” Ted referred to “Tambourine Life” as his first long poem, but “A Boke,” which is thirteen pages long and a truly bizarre poem, feels like a long poem. It can be seen, on one level, as an abstract realization of the longer form. “Tambourine Life” was followed, within a few years, by long poems such as “Train Ride” and “Memorial Day” (written in collaboration with Anne Waldman), not to mention medium-length poems such as “Things to Do in Providence” and “Things to Do on Speed.”

  “remember the fragrance of Grandma’s kitchen?”: Though the balance of the poem is derived from an article by James Dickey in The New Yorker, this repeated line was borrowed from William Burroughs. According to Dick Gallup, in a letter to me, “We heard a recording of Burroughs saying the line in his sinister Midwestern drawl.”

  Many Happy Returns

  Published by Ted Wilentz’s Corinth Books in 1969. We present the book in its entirety. The cover for the original edition of Many Happy Returns was by Joe Brainard.

  Some of these poems were published as broadsides; “Living with Chris,” as previously noted, was published as a chapbook with illustrations by Joe Brainard (New York: Boke Press, 1968). For a description of all such publications in Ted’s oeuvre, as well as all editions of full-length books up to 1998, see Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist, ed. Aaron Fischer (New York: Granary Books, 1998).

  Personal Poem #2 and Personal Poem #9 “Personal Poem #2” is Sonnet LXXVI in The Sonnets, and “Personal Poem #9” is Sonnet XXXVI (after Frank O’Hara). We’ve allowed them to be repeated since Ted is presenting a small “set” of four personal poems, and since these two poems are functional in Ted’s poetic universe as both sonnets and personal poems. The personal poem (as named) was invented by Frank O’Hara, who has only one poem called “Personal Poem” but makes reference to “my ‘I do this I do that’ / poems” in “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun).” Ted further systematized the form by adopting the phrase “personal poem” and using numbers, e.g., “Personal Poem #2.”

  A Personal Memoir of Tulsa, Oklahoma / 1955–60 This poem was first published in Bean Spasms (New York: Kulchur Press, 1967), a volume of collaborations with Ron Padgett, illustrated by Joe Brainard. See note on the book Bean Spasms.

  TAMBOURINE LIFE

  “Tambourine Life” is a major poem by any definition. Its inspiration was Ron Padgett’s “Tone Arm,” first published as a chapbook by Tom Clark’s Once Editions in 1966 and subsequently in the collection Great Balls of Fire (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1969). “Tambourine Life” resembles “Tone Arm,” first of all, in being in numbered sections. Ted also copied Padgett’s device of naming different animals throughout the poem, which he referred to as “false continuity,” superficial in the sense of creating a surface of design and play. Otherwise, Ted’s poem feels opposite to “Tone Arm,” being open where “Tone Arm” is difficult. “Tambourine Life” was at first laid out according to the flush-left columnar convention that “Tone Arm” observes. It was after Ted had fifteen or sixteen pages that he began to open up the text, placing it all over the page in an open-field fashion. In “Interview with Barry Alper,” he refers to the look of the poem as being akin to that of a “graph or cardiogram.” And in “Interview with Tom Clark,” he refers to an influence by the painters Hans Hofmann and Joe Brainard on his open-field poetry of this period in the late 60s and early 70s: “In the open poems, I’m taking a cluster of about five words, not all on one line, and putting them up like blocks like Hans Hofmann. In fact that’s what I’m influenced by, that push. Joe Brainard I got it from more or less, but it’s that push-pull.” The obvious poetic influences for the layout of “Tambourine Life” are Frank O’Hara’s long poem “Biotherm” and the work of Paul Blackburn.

  “Tambourine Life” was anthologized in The Young American Poets, ed. Paul Carroll, introduction by James Dickey (Chicago: Big Table Publishing Company, 1968). This was a highly influential anthology that crossed over into both mainstream and avant-garde territories, including poets like Ted, Ron Padgett, Tom Clark, and Anne Waldman, alongside poets like Mark Strand, Louise Gluck, James Tate, and Charles Simic. The publication of this twenty-eight-page poem in such a book made Ted famous, and “Tambourine Life” was his best-known poem for many years.

  “(Tuli’s)”: Tuli Kupferberg, poet and musician, and member of the poetry-rock group The Fugs. The Fugs have maintained a continuous existence since the 60s, with some changes of personnel, but with Kupferberg and poet Ed Sanders remaining constant. At the time of the writing of “Tambourine Life,” Ted’s friend Lee Crabtree was also one of The Fugs. Ted wrote the lyrics for a Fugs song, called “I’m Doing All Right,” with music by Lee Crabtree and Vinny Leary. The song appeared on The Fugs’ Second Album.

  “Thanks to Jack”: Jack Kerouac, but also anyone, as one would call anyone “Jack” (like “Bud”). The name Dick, primarily referring to Dick Gallup, is often used similarly but with the sexual nuance.

  “Mr. Pierre Loti and his nameless dog”: reference to the well-known painting by Henri Rousseau of the French novelist and journalist Pierre Loti (1850–1923), dressed as a Turk, with his dog. Dick Gallup suggests (in a letter to me) that “Tambourine Life” opens with a view of Ted’s desk: “a quite elaborate affair with boxes of books and various pictures tacked up here and there. I’m pretty sure he had a copy of the Pierre Loti portrait by R. on the wall.”

  “THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION”: probably refers to an image of Larry Rivers’s enormous (thirty-two-by-fourteen-foot) work titled The History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky (1965). In Ted’s copy of So Going Around Cities he has changed the date attached to these words from “circa 1967” to “circa 1965.” The Rivers work consists of paintings, photos, drawings, and objects and may have been an influence on “Tambourine Life.”

  “The apples are red again in Chandler’s valley”: reference to Kenneth Patchen’s poem “The Lute in the Attic.” According to Ron Padgett (in a letter to me): “Ted and I (and others in Tulsa) were infatuated with Patchen’s reading of it, to music provided by the Chamber Jazz Sextet, on a record called Kenneth Patchen, produced by Cadence Records in the late 1950s.”

  “John-Cage-Animal-Cracker / Method of Composition”: Ted was greatly influenced by John Cage’s compositional theories and by his book Silence. Although chance methods aren’t at play in “Tambourine Life,” the poem has the feel of having been “composed” as much as “written,” and its white spaces are quick silences which create rhythms that can’t be anticipated. See the note on the book Bean Spasms for an account of Ted’s “An Interview with John Cage.”

  “LADY BRETT”: Not really Lady Brett Ashley of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, but Brett deBary (later an Asian Studies scholar), with whom Ted hitchhiked to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965.

  “like the three pricks / Alice gave / Joe Gould”: The portraitist Alice Neel painted a nude of writer and Greenwich Village denizen Joe Gould, in which she endowed him with three penises. Ted wrote a short introduction to a portfolio, including the nude portrait of Gould and also a clothed portrait, which appeared in Mother no. 6 (1965). Around the same time Ted wrote an article on Neel’s work for Art News (published in January 1966).

  “Jacques-Louis David”: Ted isn’t really referring to the nineteenth-century French painter, but to Ted’s baby son, David. The words “Jacques-Louis David” create a balance with the words “Mr. Jean-Paul Sartre.”

  “Dancers / Buildings and / People in the Street”: Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street is the title of both an essay and a collection of essays by
Edwin Denby. The words function syntactically as themselves but also refer to Denby’s title.

  “Count Korzybski”: Alfred Habdank Korzybski (1879–1950) was a Polish American linguist, whose work Ted had read in 1960. Korzybski’s theories hinged on a complete separation between the word and the object it referred to. Ted believed in the theories but claimed that reading Korzybski’s books turned one into a crank: “Someone says to you ‘The plate fell,’ and you say ‘The plate didn’t fall, you dropped it.’ Then they hate you.”

  “someone I love is dead”: Anne Kepler died during the composition of the poem. As described in the poem “People Who Died” in In the Early Morning Rain, she was “killed by smoke-poisoning while playing the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist.”

  Bean Spasms This painterly, large-scale poem was first published in the collaborative book Bean Spasms. George Schneeman had given Ted a handmade book containing a few images, and Ted wrote the poem on the blank parts of the pages. In “An Interview with Barry Alpert,” Ted states, “It was an attempt to write a very heavy, palimpsest-like open poem, in which things would be coming up and down at you as well as flitting by very quickly on the page. It’s constantly dragging you back even though you are going forward very quickly. It goes around in a lot of circles, it’s really a labyrinth, but it’s not exhausting because it doesn’t really put anything heavy on you, say the way Pound’s Cantos do. It doesn’t act like you’re supposed to stop and go read about the Roman Empire in the sixth century, though there are a million literary references in it actually.”

  Ron Padgett states (in a letter to me) that he wrote short parts of “Bean Spasms.”

  Frank O’Hara’s Question from “Writers and Issues” by John Ashbery This poem contains a misquotation from O’Hara’s poem “Biotherm”: O’Hara’s line, which would be the last line of Ted’s poem, is “I am guarding it from mess and measure,” not “mess and message.” In a personal copy of Many Happy Returns Ted changed “message” to “measure”; but he retained the word message in subsequent publications of the poem (it is the last section of “An Autobiography in Five Parts” in In the Early Morning Rain and is also reprinted in So Going Around Cities). Ted was interested in the fact that often when he “appropriated” a text he unconsciously changed it. He considered this tendency to be part of his creative process.