The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

by Alice Notley

  Untitled (Orange Black / BACK DEATH) This little poem refers to a collaborative collage by Ted and Joe Brainard, dominated by the colors orange and black and the words BACK DEATH. Ted was the possessor of the collage for many years, before passing it on to the late Michael Scholnick. A number of his poems are, or contain, considerations, descriptions, meditations on the artwork hanging on the walls surrounding him as he wrote. His art collection provided both environment (points of concrete reference) and iconic presences, and he was very deliberate about exploiting it in his poetry.

  Congratulations Lee Lally, poet Michael Lally’s wife, had just given birth to their son, Miles.

  Neal Cassady Talk An imitation of the speech of Neal Cassady, on whom the character Dean Moriarty, in Kerouac’s On the Road, was modeled. In the 60s Ted had briefly spent time with Cassady. The poem was written in the late 70s for the mimeo rag Caveman, a scandalous erratic publication with a complicated history, which satirized Lower East Side and Poetry Project activities and figures.

  Inflation The manuscript copy is dated “Apr 74.”

  Flying United This poem is used in its entirety as the last two lines of the poem “Chicago English Afternoon” in Easter Monday. In the latter the words are run together to make long lines, and part of their effect is to provide an “exit” from a complexly textured eighteen-line poem. This short, gracefully spaced poem uses the same words, taken from the bland language of public spaces, to create a spooky moment.

  The D.A. The manuscript copy of the poem is dated “5 Mar 82.” The Digger’s Game is a novel by George V. Higgins.

  Song The opening quotation is from Lew Welch’s “Chicago Poem” (Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950–1971 [Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1979]). One recognizes the line “bear with me” again in this poem.

  Red Wagon

  Red Wagon was published in Chicago by the Yellow Press, whose editors included Richard Friedman, Darlene Pearlstein, Art Lange, and Peter Kostaskis. The cover was by Rochelle Kraut.

  She A translation/adaptation from the French poet Paul Eluard.

  3 Pages This is a transcription of Ted’s words from a set of three black-and-white silkscreen collaborations with George Schneeman.

  Conversation “Conversation” is actually a collaboration by Ted and me and first appeared under my name in my book Phoebe Light (Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky, 1973). It was part of an unfinished project of imitations that would each be attributed to the imitated poet, in this case John Giorno. Ted’s contribution to the collaboration consisted of selecting and offering to me the two sentences to be Giorno-ized: Giorno had recently added an intense, formal repetition to his style. The sentences were remembered from a conversation Ted had once had with Frank O’Hara, in which O’Hara spoke admiringly of the first sentence of William Saroyan’s The Adventures of Wesley Jackson but misquoted the sentence. The actual “conversation” of the poem is between the two sentences (between O’Hara and Saroyan), though there is an implied conversation between O’Hara and Ted (and between Ted and me, as well as between us and John Giorno). The layout and line arrangement are entirely by me, and I unconsciously scored the poem for my voice.

  Sunday Morning This poem, referring by title to the lovely song by the Velvet Underground, is completely antithetical to that song’s spirit, being constructed out of rather vulgar language from postcards.

  Something Amazing Just Happened The long-lined exuberant style of this poem, and of “Farewell Address,” was never really repeated in Ted’s work.

  In the Wheel The Wheel was a coffee shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The poem plays on the Buddhist notion of the wheel of death and rebirth.

  Wind “Wind” was inspired by a small painting by Larry Rivers that hung on the wall of Bill Berkson’s East Tenth Street apartment in New York, circa 1970. The painting was abstract, with bright colors against a black background. Thus “the angels” which “emerge from the rivers” are the colors listed; and “rivers” refers both to the dark ground of the painting and to Larry Rivers himself.

  Things to Do on Speed This poem was constructed out of an article about speed and speed freaks that appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine in the summer of 1970. Ted and I were supposedly speed freaks, and he was struck by the chasm that lay between journalistic language and our—anyone’s—reality. He doctored, simplified, idiomized, and generally played with the text, converting it into his new favorite form, the longer “things to do” poem. His version is infinitely better than the magazine article, funnier and more condensed, humanizing, and pleasing to the ear.

  Farewell Address The poem was inspired by Ron Padgett’s “Homage to Max Jacob” in Great Balls of Fire.

  Three Sonnets and a Coda for Tom Clark This work is constructed out of lines and phrases from In the Early Morning Rain and was written at the time of that book’s publication in 1970. It is both a homage to the book and a meditation on the time and experience it covers.

  Wishes “Wishes,” as well as “I Used to Be but Now I Am,” are the first of a number of poems that Ted wrote following forms devised by Kenneth Koch for teaching poetry writing to children, students, old people, people in nursing homes, hospitals, etc. The source for these two list forms was Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams.

  Scorpion, Eagle & Dove (A Love Poem) The symbolism in the title, which is associated with the astrological sign Scorpio (the natal sign of all the people listed in the poem), is based on a reading of John Jocelyn’s Meditations on the Signs of the Zodiac. See also the poem “Scorpio” in this section, and the prefatory note to A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Astrology was famously a 60s preoccupation, but had also been important in French Surrealist circles. Ted had translated the “Scorpion” section of Miroir d’astrologie by Max Jacob and Claude Valence.

  Things to Do in Providence One of Ted’s most well-known poems, “Things to Do in Providence” was written in a notebook in 1970. Ted studied it for several months before typing it up, being in a slight quandary as to whether or not it was a poem, in that form. The “situation” in the poem is a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, where Ted’s mother, Peggy (Dugan) Berrigan, lived and where his grandmother, Alice Clifford, was dying in a nursing home. This poem is probably the apex of Ted’s experiments with open sentiment; sentiment later became more embedded, layered in. The poem is not “sentimental,” being formalistic (the “things to do” grid) and is infused with different kinds of language, quotidian event, and tones of voice. Lines from the poem toward the end, after “The heart stops briefly when someone dies,” are often quoted by both poets and non-poets.

  Frank O’Hara The six poems from “Frank O’Hara” through “Buddha on the Bounty” are best considered as belonging together, though they aren’t marked as a sequence in Red Wagon. Originally part of a disbanded sequence called Southampton Winter (along with the poem “Galaxies,” in Nothing for You), they tend to be more discursive than sonnets (though “Chinese Nightingale” and “Buddha on the Bounty” are each fourteen lines long). The source of material was largely Ted’s own words: poems by him and also lines and phrases drawn from a handmade book, which he had filled with as much writing as possible in order to cull lines from later. The poem “Frank O’Hara” contains lines from Ted’s translation of Jean Cocteau’s poem “La Mort de Guillaume Apollinaire.”

  I Used To Be but Now I Am A number of poems have been omitted from Red Wagon so that they could be included in Easter Monday. They consist of the following titles, which, in the order given, originally appeared after the poem “I Used To Be but Now I Am”: “Old-Fashioned Air,” “Chicago Morning,” “Newtown,” “The End,” “Chicago English Afternoon,” “From a List of Delusions of the Insane, What They Are Afraid Of,” “Late November,” “Quarter to Three,” “She (Not to be confused with she, a girl),” “Sister Moon,” “Four Gates to the City,” “L.G.T.T.H.,” “In Blood,” “Peking,” “Soviet Souvenir,” “So Going Around Cities,” and “Picnic.”

  There was a set of five of T
he Sonnets originally included in Red Wagon, after the poem “Picnic.” They were XXXIV, LXXXI, LXVII, LXV, LVI, and LXXVII, XXXIV and LXXVII being published then for the first time.

  The Complete Prelude The version which originally appeared in Red Wagon was titled “THE COMPLETE PRELUDE: Title Not Yet Fixed Upon.” The dedication in the earlier version read “for Clark,” and there were stanzas instead of numbered sections. The later version in So Going Around Cities had the dedication “for Clark Coolidge,” which we have retained with the addition of a further dedication, “& for my mother,” which he had added in his own copy of So Going Around Cities. Ted’s mother was conceived of as the woman in the lines in the third part “& shall continue evermore to make / & shall perform to exalt and to refine / Inspired, celestial presence ever pure / From all the sources of her former strength.”

  Easter Monday

  As explained in the introduction, the manuscript source is a folder which Ted worked with until shortly before his death. Though he had largely finished writing the individual poems in 1977, he didn’t achieve the final sequence until 1983.

  The first four poems originated in Chicago between 1972 and 1973. The subsequent twenty-one poems were written in England between 1973 and 1974. “So Going Around Cities” dates from Chicago, summer 1975. Most of the others were written in New York, except for “Boulder” and “Picnic,” which were originally written in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, when Ted was a guest teacher at the Naropa Institute. The final four poems date from 1977.

  According to a notebook kept in England, Ted had originally considered including the following poems in the sequence: the “Southampton Winter” series of poems (see note on “Frank O’Hara” in Red Wagon); “The Complete Prelude” (in Red Wagon); “Brigadoon,” “New Personal Poem,” “Baltic Stanzas,” “Other Contexts,” “Communism,” “The Green Sea,” and “Service at Upwey” (in Nothing for You). There are other titles listed, but those poems seem to have disappeared.

  Chicago Morning Dedicated to the painter Philip Guston, the poem invokes the industrial density of Chicago, and also the political feeling of the early 70s: “The president of the United States / And the Director of the FBI stand over / A dead mule.” From the sentence beginning “A huge camel” through “ ‘The Fop’s Tunic’” the poem more or less describes two drawings by Guston, which were printed in CHICAGO, a magazine I edited. Guston had by now made his celebrated style change, and his work was replete with Ku Klux Klan–like figures (“The Fop’s Tunic”). The manuscript copy of the poem is dated “Jan 1972 Chi.”

  The End From the line “He / Encourages criticism” through “beneath his spell” the reference is to Ezra Pound, who had recently died. These lines also contain material from Ted’s translation of Cocteau’s “La Mort de Guillaume Apollinaire.”

  Newtown “Wildly singing in the mountains with cancer of the spine” refers to Arthur Waley, the translator and Sinologist.

  Method Action The poem is atypically textured for the sequence, being like “Boulder” and “Picnic” in an open-field arrangement. It was written in Chicago and appeared in CHICAGO 5, no. 1 (Nov. 1972).

  Swinburne & Watts-Dunton This is the first of the poems in the sequence written in England, in this case in Putney, London. The title refers to Algernon Swinburne and Theodore Watts-Dunton, British poets and literary figures. Watts-Dunton took care of Swinburne when his health was poor (due to both epilepsy and excess) and restored him; the poet here seems to become both men.

  Old-fashioned Air Written in Battersea, London, and dedicated to the musician Lee Crabtree, “Old-Fashioned Air” is unique in the sequence in being in Ted’s personal, speaking voice. What the poem never says is that Lee Crabtree has just committed suicide in New York (summer of 1973). The poem is, rather, an address to a friend’s living presence.

  The Ancient Art of Wooing Written in Wivehoe, Essex, where the remainder of the British portion of the sequence was composed.

  At Loma Linda This poem is composed largely of language taken from British daytime television. However, Loma Linda is the hospital in California where my father, Albert Notley, had a medical checkup in 1973 or 1974 (he died in 1975). See “Crossroads,” in Nothing for You, for a different version of the poem.

  L. G. T. T. H. These letters stand for “Let’s Go to the Hop” (title of a popular song from the 50s) and refer to the Frank O’Hara poem “At the Old Place,” which contains, almost but not quite, the same set of initials: “Button’s buddy lips frame L G T TH O P?”—the letters in that case standing for “Let’s go to the Old Place.”

  From A List of the Delusions of the Insane, What They Are Afraid Of This sonnet is composed of lines from David Antin’s longer work, A List of the Delusions of the Insane What They Are Afraid of.

  She (Not to be confused with she, a girl) The poem is made from Ted’s much longer jacket copy written for Anne Waldman’s book Baby Breakdown.

  Innocents Abroad This is a notably obscure work, and many of the references are simply private. One sees that the word “(Change)” comes at the end of the eighth line, a point of change in the traditional sonnet. The poem is operating on a level of abstraction and reflection in which the sonnet form and personal experience become highly compressed together. There are no sentences, and few signals. The poem is dedicated to the British translator and scholar Gordon Brotherston.

  Sister Moon and An Orange Clock As Ted’s friends grew further away geographically, he talked to them by reading their poems and writing responses such as these. “Sister Moon” is an engagement with the work of Clark Coolidge, as the poem that follows it, “An Orange Clock,” is an engagement with the work of Tom Clark.

  Gainsborough Easter Monday is sometimes under the influence of the music of Bob Dylan. This is more a matter of tone and diction than of specific reference. You can hear it in poems like “Gainsborough” (and also in “The Joke & the Stars,” “Excursion & Visitation,” and “So Going Around Cities”).

  Four Gates to the City This poem is dated “1974” on the manuscript. It contains lines by Tom Clark, Ron Padgett, Martha and the Vandellas, and the French poet Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Ted and Gordon Brotherston had translated two of Gautier’s poems, “L’Art” and “Préface,” from Emaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos). The reference to Goethe’s “divan at Weimar” is from “L’Art.”

  In Blood The poem is composed largely of words from my poems, notably a sonnet sequence entitled Great Interiors, Wines & Spirits of the World. The closing line, however, is from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Cambridge”; in O’Hara’s poem the line refers to Boris Pasternak.

  So Going Around Cities This, the longest poem of the sequence, signals a return to the United States. It was written in Chicago, circa 1974–1975 and is dedicated, and addressed, to “Doug & Jan Oliver.” Douglas Oliver, the late British poet, was a student at the University of Essex where Ted taught from 1973 to 1974. He is one of the three dedicatees of the book So Going Around Cities. The title phrase (of both the poem and the book) is from the poem “Rivers and Mountains” by John Ashbery. The refrain of lines beginning with the words “I traded” owes a debt to the song “City Singer” by musician / songwriter Larry Estridge.

  Narragansett Park From this poem onward all the poems in the sequence were written in New York City at 101 St. Mark’s Place.

  A Note from Yang-Kuan We have made a handful of changes from texts as presented in So Going Around Cities, based on Ted’s final manuscript of the sequence. In “A Note from Yang-Kuan,” in the eighth line, a comma has been removed after the word “And.” In the same poem, in the twelfth line, the phrase “The poor” has been amended to “Tho poor.” “Yang-Kuan” is a place-name in a poem by the Chinese poet Wang Wei and also occurs in my poem “After Wang Wei.”

  Everybody Seemed So Laid Back in the Park Constructed from prose sentences by Bernadette Mayer.

  A Meeting at the Bridge We have made punctuation changes from the version in So Going Around Cities, cons
istent with Ted’s final manuscript copy. The changes are too complicated to describe, but they occur in the third stanza and last couplet.

  “I Remember” A sonnet composed of lines from Joe Brainard’s opus I Remember.

  To Himself After Giacomo Leopardi’s “A se stesso,” “To Himself” is the result of a lengthy process of translation involving several people. In the Easter Monday folder Ted has appended the following notes to the poem: “trans by Ted Berrigan from prose version by George Schneeman & poem version worked at by Berrigan & Engl. trans, poet, & Latin American specialist Gordon Brotherston.”

  Whitman in Black One of Ted’s most widely anthologized poems, this sonnet, inspired by the crime novelist Ross MacDonald, turns the, or a, poet into both a criminal and a detective, invoking Whitman for corroboration. The MacDonald source is On Crime Writing (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1973).

  Heloise Dated “27 Aug 77” in the final manuscript. Ted wrote “Heloise” after reading Helen Waddell’s novel Abelard.

  From the House Journal Dated “30 Aug 77” in the final manuscript, this poem is composed of lines beginning with the pronoun “I,” taken from the index of first lines and titles in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara.

  Visits from a Small Enigma Written using Jim Brodey’s words, this poem is dated “31 Aug 77” in the final manuscript.

  Revery Reverdy. That is, this poem uses language translated from the poetry of Pierre Reverdy.