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The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

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For anyone who cares about American poetry after WWII, Berrigan's Collected is a major event and a must-have book. Kudos to UC Press for publishing this, and for allowing it to be such a family affair, co-edited by Alice Notley and two of Berrigan's sons, Anselm and Edmund. Berrigan gave to US poetry a breezy, off-the-cuff sense of mastery that seemed to say a poem could be about anything--kids, Pepsi, friends, fights, pills, other books, 3 a.m. walks, and whatever else happens to the poet (or to any of us) through the course of a day. This collects all of Berrigan's books in the order published, a huge feat given the patchwork of small presses that put out his work during his lifetime. It's hard to think of Berrigan without thinking of his time--New York, the `60s and `70s, the tight, fractious poetry underground that he was so large a part of--and I wonder how well some of the poems hold up outside the magic circle of his personality and scene. But I'm not sure the individual poems were as important to Berrigan as the adventure of writing poetry, which comes through in this collection as an act of pure joy, & a special way of being alive.

It's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing imcomprehension of the why of the invisible world.

Plan your orgy around this book: it deserves it, as it's about 20 years over-due,
and blazes as one of the greatest works of poetry in the late 20 century (Ted one T Rex's boys-of-bliss & juicy pleasure principle, who crafted philosophy into a poem, a poem into a joke & formalism perversely, lovingly, that evolved into a hit-song).

"Let none regret my end who called me friend."

O but we do regret your end, Ted, savagely too early at 48, you
sprightly and singing despite dying slowly and elegantly, and we
all DO think we're your friends because almost no other poet since
Catullus speaks to us as clearly, beautifully and naturally as you do,
NO-ONE else makes us think we're right there with you, sweating in July,
nodding out at a boring reading, getting a hand-job across from CBGBs,
crying at 4 am when no-one else will hear, enjoing a Coke on a train or
the old lady's puckish smirk, waiting at midnight for a friend, lying to bill-collectors and job-interviewers, living as best and beatitudinally we can among all that slams as worst we can. Ted, you take us everywhere.

Ted Berrigan made honesty sing and often dance, while perfecting new forms of poetry that will be a lighthouse for generations in a nation refusing to pay poets
a living for their work. Ted's voice dances sometimes all over the page, his chaos
going where it wants to, a charm-buzzed, self-conscious shuffle that says "what the hell am I doing out here anyway, this is stupid, really, really stupid... ahhhh what the hell, so make a fool of yourself, only the real fools would think so and the greatly living would just jump in...too...AND TURN UP THAT ROCK N ROLL").

Ted Berrigan is the greatest poet of the later 20th Century for the same reason that EZRA POUND was the greatest poet of the early 20 Century: Berrigan's voice is true, direct, philosophical; yet unlike Pound, totally stripped of pomp.

This edition does the near impossible task of collecting Berrigan's sprawling poems, some popped out of literary journals printed in only 100 copies, others hiding in meth & dope-powder'd drawers in NYC, and it has poems long thought extinct, though never in Darwin's sense as this is the prime of the species, but only in some philistine-JP Morgan-like sense in which only cash-value has value. Berrigan is the Tragic Hero of American Poetry, raging like Thomas Paine, and the Comic Relief of American Poetry, mocking like Lenny Bruce. He's just Berrigan, and you'll only understand once you've admitted he just wrote what you already thought before you thought it, "PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE."

"Things To Do In Providence" will one day serve socio-psychoanalysts and archeologists as to how anyone could try to live in 20th century America
and still retain a soul and perhaps even a body.

All that's left for poets to do is write what happens, A. B.,

AFTER BERRIGAN