Read The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Online
Authors: Alice Notley
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
EDITED BY ALICE NOTLEY
with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan
Introduction and Notes by Alice Notley
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California
Credits and acknowledgments for the poems appear on
page 729
.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berrigan, Ted.
[Poems. Selections]
The collected poems of Ted Berrigan / edited by
Alice Notley, with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund
Berrigan.
p. cm.
“Introduction and notes by Alice Notley.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-23986-5 (alk. paper).
I. Notley, Alice, 1945– II. Berrigan,
Anselm. III. Berrigan, Edmund, 1974– IV. Title.
PS3552.E74A17 2005
811'.54—dc22 2005042259
Printed and bound in Canada
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(
Permanence of Paper
).
The publisher gratefully acknowledges contributions
to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund
of the University of California Press Foundation;
Kenward Elmslie, Z Press;
Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo;
Kenneth Koch Literary Estate;
and other generous donors.
The Secret Life of Ford Madox Ford
Memorial Day
by Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman
A Certain Slant of Sunlight: Out-takes
Index of Titles and First Lines
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers of the original editions of Ted Berrigan’s books of poetry. These books are cited and discussed throughout the apparatus of
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
, but I wish briefly to name the presses, again, here: “C” Press, Kulchur Press, Grove Press, Corinth Books, Cape Goliard Press, Aloes Books, Frontward Books, The Yellow Press, United Artists, Vehicle Editions, Blue Wind Press, Clown War, Little Light Books, Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, O Books, Penguin Books, and Situations.
Ted’s poetry depended, for publication and the maintenance of an audience, on the many, many small presses and magazines which carried his work in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and also after his death. I would love to be able to list all of the magazines here, but that obviously isn’t possible: I don’t have the complete record, and the list would be pages long. One acknowledges the debt and hopes so much for the continued flourishing of that small-press enterprise.
I would particularly like to thank Ron Padgett for his time and advice. Thanks, too, to Dick Gallup, Lorenz Gude, and Miles Champion for information and feedback. To George Schneeman, for his cover art; and to Lorenz, again, for his photograph. And for their various feats of recall and research, I would like to thank Bob Rosenthal, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Ed Sanders, and Anselm Hollo. Thanks as always to David Berrigan and Sarah Locke for being there. Also I wish to thank Laura Cerruti, Rachel Berchten, and the staff of the University of California Press, and Linda Norton, whose original support helped make the book possible.
I am writing on behalf of my co-editors, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, as well as myself. The organization of the book by sections, the selection of the poems, the casting of them into place, the devising of the chronology and glossary, and an intense scrutiny of my introduction and notes, was a notably communal (family) project. We are all three very pleased for Ted.
I heard Ted say more than once that his collected poems should be like a collected books. But he didn’t always work in sequences, and he wasn’t always consciously in the process of writing a book. He wrote many individual poems, and he sometimes seemed to write purely for fun. As for publication, publishers would approach him for a book without knowing exactly what he had, and sometimes it didn’t seem to him as if he had that much. If there was a sequence ready, or a book in a unified style like
Many Happy Returns
, certainly he published that. If he had a stack of dissimilar works or if he didn’t even know what he had, he still set about the process of constructing a “book.” He loved to make things out of pieces, often ones that didn’t fit together conventionally. A book was like a larger poem that could be as much “made” out of what was at hand, as “written” in a continuous way out of a driving idea.
This volume is an attempt to be a collected books, but it can’t be that precisely and so isn’t called
The Collected Books
. Though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn’t produce a linear succession of discrete, tidy volumes. He perceived time as overlapping and circular; the past was always alive and relevant, and a particular poem might be as repeatable as an individual line or phrase was for him from the time of the composition of
The Sonnets
onward. How were we, the editors, to deal with repetitions of poems from book to book? Most especially what were we to do about the book-length sequence
Easter Monday?
Ted worked for years on
Easter Monday
, which he didn’t call finished until shortly before his death, when he finalized the selection and order. Meanwhile,
during his lifetime, every one of the poems was published individually, in two chapbooks,
A Feeling for Leaving
and
Carrying a Torch
, and more significantly in the books
Red Wagon
and
So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958–1979. Easter Monday
has never been presented as a unified sequence until now; but placing its poems together considerably shortens the book
Red Wagon
. So we have shortened
Red Wagon
, and shorter it is still a book, and a good one. But dealing with
Easter Monday
showed us that we would have to construct this
Collected Poems
a little as if we were Ted and not just editors.
Furthermore, there was a lot of uncollected work, including early poems, “short” poems, out-takes from the sequence
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
, a scattering of individual poems from the 70s and 80s, and a set of poems written during the last six months of his life and kept together in its own folder. We decided to organize most of this work into booklike sections. We’ve discussed ceaselessly what to omit, what isn’t “good enough” in the sense of not really holding up next to the others, because if this
is
a collected books, each poem should fill its own space within its own book or section. We are not Ted, but we tried to think like him; and there’s still room in the future for a slim volume of retrieved poems, as in
Poems Retrieved
of Frank O’Hara (a possibility Ted would have loved). In the beginning I held out for every scrap of a poem, while Anselm and Edmund had a more selective sense. I gradually gave up on such works as “The 30 Most Common Names in the Manhattan Telephone Directory, 1979,” various small-scale “Things to Do” poems, occasional poems (practically anyone’s birthday in the late 60s), and the worst of Ted’s rather bad “early poems.” I retain tender feelings for all of these poems.
With regard to the reprinting of a poem or two from book to book: it doesn’t make economical sense to repeat poems, so we have most often chosen to omit poems that have been printed in other sections. Thus, where there are omissions, I indicate in the notes where and what they are. Also, there existed a handful of poems which seemed to float near specific books, stylistically, but hadn’t been included in them. The relevant books were collections not sequences, and we have taken the liberty of placing these poems in the volumes they point to. Again I signal, in the notes, where this has been done; there are not enough of these poems to merit their own section, and in each case they fit gracefully where inserted. I don’t think Ted would mind, though more pristine editors than we are might squirm.
If it sounds as if the rules of organization of this book work through exception, I can only say that Ted’s work creates the need for exception. His esthetics were fluid, and he was governed more by the impulse to make art than to be consistent. Thus the books or sections are presented in an order that reflects, mostly but not entirely, chronology of publication.
In a Blue River
is “out of order.” Though it was published in 1981, most of its poems were written in the early 70s, and it has been placed with other short poems from that time near books from that time. It was, in fact, in the late 60s and early 70s that Ted was most intensely interested in the short poem as a form.
Finally, we have chosen to present fourteen early poems, which, along with certain poems in
Nothing for You
, help demonstrate where
The Sonnets
came from. These not-so-good poems contain a number of the repeated lines in
The Sonnets;
so the book concludes with the beginning, making a circle. One of Ted’s favorite concepts was that of a poem or book creating a circular shape whose ending pushes the reader back up into the work. And he always remained interested in his not-very-good poems, because they, too, reflected who he was. A circle is a unity, and oneself was/is always in process back there.
Having explained our general editorial procedure I would now like to take the reader quickly through this volume’s sections, focusing on their contents and marking, as practicable in this space, Ted’s esthetic changes from book to book and through the years. I’ve organized this part of the introduction by decade, since Ted’s adult life and career seems to lend itself to this shape. In the 60s Ted was a young man and wrote his best-known work; in the 70s he became a more various poet, he entered a second marriage, and his health began to fail; in the early 80s he wrote his last work. He died young, at the age of forty-eight, on July 4, 1983. These poems span a creative period of roughly twenty years (not counting the earliest work), which isn’t a long time. It seems remarkable that there should be so many poems.