The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read Online Free PDF Page A

say they have a black-felt-tip-pen quality. You feel that no words have been crossed out and replaced.
    I’m impressed by this graven-ness in
The Sonnets
and
Many Happy Returns
, in
Easter Monday
, but then, too, in most of the later work. It doesn’t go away if the feeling in the poem is more autobiographical or intimate, as in
A Certain Slant of Sunlight
. The latter poems read as if written with the black felt-tip pen, on the postcard. They have a primary physical reality.
    Two more things from this: first, a continuous interaction with art and artists gave Ted an active visual and tactile sense. He is often painting, or collaging, or drawing his way through a poem. On the other hand, he agreed with Jack Spicer’s notion of the
other
voice that dictates one’s poems, and his poems have a “dictated” quality, even the ones that are made from other people’s words. These two notionsaren’t incompatible. “Dictation” suggests aurality rather than plastic qualities, but there isn’t any reason why all the senses shouldn’t be working, and Ted had a very fine ear: “Their lives are as fragile as
The Glass Menagerie
.” Listen.
    Ted’s poetry is remarkable for its range of tones of voice. He actively studied both “tone of voice” and “stance,” the range of attitudinal play in human discourse and the projection of character. Here Ted’s professed model was Frank O’Hara, but I often find Ted more mysterious and more intense in both tone and stance. Not having O’Hara’s education or “class,” Ted therefore couldn’t be as traditional. He couldn’t call on a tone of voice from another decade or century as if he owned it, even though he knew exactly what Whitmanesque or Johnsonian was. He had to reinvent it for himself, from his working-class background and University of Tulsa education and ceaseless self-education.
    Ted is often characterized as “second-generation New York School.” That label, with its “second-generation,” seems to preclude innovation. Ted’s career as a poet, after his earliest, sentimental poems, begins in the innovation of
The Sonnets
. He invented its form, with its “black heart beside the fifteen pieces” and its “of glass in Joe Brainard’s collage,” if you take fifteen to be most likely fourteen and understand that his heart really is beside the poem not in it. These poems, designed to contain anything and to expand temporally, can do so because the form’s finiteness is emphasized. It could probably be argued that this form is the one he was most informed by afterward, even when he was being transparent and “sentimental”—when he had finally learned the uses and control of sentimentality, since he consistently explored the spaces between lines, and the spaces between phrases, within the poem as frame. He had also learned from his sonnet form how to find the congruences in supposedly random happenstance:
    Can’t cut it (night)
    in New York City
    it’s alive
    inside my tooth
    on St. Mark’s Place
    where exposed nerve
    jangles
    (“ FEBRUARY AIR ”)
    This is verbal, environmental, and emotional happenstance, where the parts of the moment click in.
    If you the reader are a poet, Ted’s poetry is full of resources: forms, techniques, stylistic practices—manners and mannerisms, ways of sounding like a person, ways of achieving exaltation. If you the reader are a reader (of poetry), Ted’s poetry is a gift. He is working hard to amuse—make you enjoy this taking up of your time; to “say,” what he knows, reasons, feels; and to be like you, at the same time acknowledging his (anyone’s) own secret: “I never told anyone what I knew. Which was that it wasn’t / for anyone else what it was for me” (“Cranston Near the City Line”).
    We have, traditionally, the senses, but words are our sensors. We use them to feel our way across and through, up and down. Ted understood this as well as any poet I can think of. So much of his poetry is about the