Customer Reviews

The Sonnets (Poets, Penguin)

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Although many critics and readers have crowned contemporaries John Ashbery or Frank O'Hara the champions of abstract expressionism in poetry, Berrigan's work is often dismissed because on the surface it is overtly stylistic. And while Ashbery speaks in riddles, Berrigan seems to know the worlds that surrounds each phrase and it's arrangement, (or lack thereof). his sonnets are an essential read for anyone interested in the richness, abandonment, and just plain wackiness that can be brought to life through language or even sounds.

This legendary book of New York school poetry finally appears complete. In previous editions there were mysteriously missing poems. Alice Notley, who was married to Berrigan, provides an illuminating introduction.

Although many critics and readers have crowned contemporaries John Ashbery or Frank O'Hara the champions of abstract expressionism in poetry, Berrigan's work is often dismissed because on the surface it is overtly stylistic. And while Ashbery speaks in riddles, Berrigan seems to know the worlds that surrounds each phrase and it's arrangement, (or lack thereof). his sonnets are an essential read for anyone interested in the richness, abandonment, and just plain wackiness that can be brought to life through language or even sounds.

Ted Berrigan's "The Sonnets" ultimately deals with the complexities of intimately placing seemingly disparate Things--objects from different times and climes--into one singular plane. His ars poetica deals with the deep implications of the poet's decisions. "Whatever is going to happen is already happening," Berrigan writes in Sonnet L.

This line reverberates in my ears and reminds me of these lines, written by my friend Joseph Griffin, and was published in Spring 2004 in "SCRY! A Nexus Of Politics & The Arts," a journal I edited during my undergraduate days:

everything that has ever happened
is still happening
and has always BEEN happening

and everything that will possibly happen
is happening now
and WAS happening millennia ago
--"Continuum"

As Alice Notley shrewdly points out in her introduction, another way to read Berrigan's line in Sonnet L (and Griffin 's succinct two stanzas), is: "If you aren't doing it now you won't ever do it." Which is to say, How will you make use of your Allotted Time?

Berrigan chooses to keep time ("It is 5:15 a.m. Dear Chris, hello.") and conjures his own brand of "rough magic" for the record, for posterity.