Berrigan Anselm - The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Mark's Church in New York City in February 1979, Ted noted that when he first began studying poetry independently he was drawn to Shakespeare's sonnets for their wit, brevity, and in particular their diction. He recognized the possibility of a poetic model in those works, and this was significant in that he was initially drawn to Ezra Pound's Cantos but didn't feel he possessed the store of historical data necessary to fill such sprawling works. He followed these remarks by reading Shakespeare's sonnet XCIV (They that have the power to hurt and will do none) which contains the lines They are the lords and owners of their faces / Others but stewards of their excellence, lines that Ted appropriated and altered three years later in his poem In the Land of Pygmies & Giants: Anselm! Edmund!
Get me an ashtray!
No one in this house
In any way is any longer sick!
And I am the Lord, and owner
of their faces.
They call me, Dad! One (or two in this case) might have memories of these lines as simultaneous command and exhortation from the next room, which raises the curious question of what came first: the speaking or writing of the poem? And since Ted, as so often was the case in those days, was lying in bed awake, writing, reading, talking, and smoking while we played in the front room of our lower Manhattan railroad apartment, couldn't the poem have been written and spoken at once: an example of a practical, domestic working method, of getting it in the ear and on the page while also getting the sorely needed ashtray? Given that Ted made use of lines that might have been spoken, sung, overheard, written, and readby himself or, literally, anyone elseit's not out of the question to think so, nor is it unusual to come across a high-end Elizabethan utterance mixed in rather easily with some affectionate and gently comic spoken diction of the late twentieth-century variety. The necessity of segregating manners of speaking, be they high or low, simply did not exist for Ted, whose conception of what materials might be necessary or amusing within a poem was unbridled (see the one-two combo of The Complete Prelude, a no-frills condensation of Wordsworth, and Paul Blackburn, a brief song-made-of-facts written to mark the imminence of that poet's death, for a coincidental illustration of this point). In the Land of Pygmies & Giants appears toward the beginning of A Certain Slant of Sunlight, the last book Ted completed before his relatively early death at the age of 48 in 1983. The Sonnets and A Certain Slant of Sunlight make for an interesting comparison. The Sonnets and A Certain Slant of Sunlight make for an interesting comparison.

While in The Sonnets Ted would simply take and/or cut up the works of friends (Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallupall of whom he met while living in Tulsa) or heroic figures (John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Rimbaud), in A Certain Slant of Sunlight friends were invited to write lines onto postcards, which Ted would then write around or through. Where The Sonnets is a numerically ordered sequence and, as he commented at a legendary reading of the entire book at 80 Langton Street in San Francisco in 1981, the book through the writing ofwhich he became a poet, A Certain Slant of Sunlight was the last book Ted would work on before his deaththe culmination of his poetry. Its sequential aspect is hidden by titles, its erudition isn't that of a young man's breakthrough discoveries, and its merit is still under-discussed. A Certain Slant of Sunlight is also the book that we have the most direct personal connection with, having been present for its writing, which mostly took place in 1982, and having both wittingly and unwittingly provided material for some of the poems (see Treason of the Clerks for example). Since we were both still very young (10 and 8) and since Ted's death would follow in about a year, this book has always been an important one for us to return to in order to ask the type of vital questions poetry is especially poised to answer: who was he, and, by extension, who were we? It's still fascinating to consider that kind of information available there, sometimes in the lines (They call me, Dad!) and sometimes in the spaces between them: for I am a lot more
insane than
This Valley The two decades of nonstop production that followed the writing of The Sonnets were marked by several major formal shifts and explorations. The heavy-duty cut-up and appropriation methods that Ted employed so boldly throughout The Sonnets were never given up per se, but were instead blended into the surfaces of his later works.