Review by J.F. Quackenbush

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN
by Ted Berrigan

University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way
Berkeley, CA 94704-1012
ISBN 0-520-23986-5
2005, 758pp., $49.95
www.ucpress.edu

In our time, most books of poetry are printed in relatively small runs. This fact, coupled with the transient nature of many of the small presses that publish new verse, often means there are many great books by poets of substantial merit that are woefully unavailable to the reading public. With the publication of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, this sad state of affairs has finally been corrected for one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is a weighty tome. The book runs 758 pages in hardcover and contains the majority of the prodigious amount of poetry Berrigan wrote over the course of his short life. Conceived as a “collected books” and edited by Berrigan’s widow and literary executor, Alice Notley, with assistance from their two sons—poets Anselm and Edmund Berrigan—there is a personal, private quality to the text. The collection feels almost like a family project, carefully redacted and arranged, and always faithful to Berrigan’s artistic intention. Indeed, Notley credits the idea for a “collected books” to Berrigan in her introduction. At times when moving through the text and endnotes, I had the sense of looking into a family scrapbook or photo album and that above all else this book is a product of a Berrigan’s family wishing to honor his work.

This personal quality to the editing is wholly appropriate given the immediacy of Berrigan’s highly personal writing. Berrigan was very much influenced by Frank O’Hara’s half-serious “Personism.” The poet revealed in this volume is a writer concerned very much with the small scale of human interaction. These poems are letters to friends, dedications to loved ones, and private musings on the most seemingly insignificant moments in life; here is the dullness of short train rides (the exquisite long poem “Train Ride; February 18th 1971”), getting up in the morning (“Ten Things I Do Every Day”), opening the mail (“Today in Ann Arbor”). Berrigan’s subject is revealed here to be the small moments of a life captured gently and with skill at their most essential. It is almost as if Berrigan were saying: “This is life, you might want to pay attention.”

Still, these are not quiet poems. Collected here great abiding themes of happiness and the pleasure Berrigan found in his friends and family—which may not be readily apparent in individual works-—coalesce in the whole like a good-natured running joke. This volume sees the death of the mythical postmodern artiste, and the full revelation of Ted Berrigan as a companion and guide. To be sure, found here is Berrigan deconstructing the sonnet, composing poems using cut-up techniques on magazine articles, endlessly borrowing lines and phrases from his own work to find new modes of expression in intertextuality. But taken together as a body of work, Berrigan’s experimentation reveals itself as playful and exuberant rather than a cold postmodern intellectualism. This is the rare avant-garde that is totally accessible in its experimentation. Berrigan’s ex nihilo formal innovations—the Things To Do poem, the People Who Died poem—and other experiments do not seem so haphazard as they might in the anthologized forms from whence many of them are familiar. Notley and her sons do provide a certain amount of explanatory material in an appendix that notes the significance of certain names and the methods that were used to compose certain poems, and while much of this information is interesting, it turns out that the appendix is not as necessary as might be expected of a poet as experimental and fond of obscurity as Berrigan. This book does what such collected-works anthologies should do, which is put the poet’s work in context with itself. To that end, the internal consistency of the poet’s voice becomes a sort of language to which the reader is granted admission by the volume.

Reading the book is like learning to speak Berrigan’s language and the further I went with it, the more personally involved I became. Now, after several readings, I have the most peculiar sense that I have begun conversing with the poet and with his work. To be specific, it is not merely that I am coming to know the body of work, but that it is also coming to know me. This personal experience is a truly great and mysterious achievement by one of the acknowledged masters of twentieth century poetry, and an experience all lovers of the art form owe themselves to have.

–from Rattle #25, Summer 2005

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J F Quackenbush is a poet, critic, struggling novelist, law student and black magician who lives in Tucson, Arizona where he hates it. His work has appeared in the journals blazeVOX, Rattle, Stirring, Arcturus, Crossing Rivers into Twilight, Wordplay, and others. He cofounded the web-zine and proto-blog YankTheChain.com in the late nineties, is the current Poetry Editor and occasional contributor to Wet Asphalt, and is the reigning and undefeated Iron Poet Lyricist on Iron Poet the internet based poetry parody of the popular Japanese television export Iron Chef. His first book of poetry Household Activities: 100 Poems is soon to be published by Wet Asphalt Press.  www.wetasphalt.com