The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read Free Page A

some point Ted wrote all of what would be the last section, and then Anne arranged the material. Ted always considered it to be the most successful literary collaboration he had participated in, in view of its seriousness and depth.
    Meanwhile, and in deliberate counterpoint to such longer structures, Ted was writing many short poems. He often cited as formal influences the work of Giuseppe Ungaretti (the sequence “Life of a Man” in
In the Early Morning Rain
consists of transliterations of Ungaretti’s work), and Aram Saroyan’s poems, particularly the one-word poems. The section we have called
Short Poems
is divided into two parts.
In a Blue River
contains most of the chapbook of that name, published in 1981 by Susan Cataldo’s Little Light Books.
Uncollected Short Poems
consists of a handful of poems first published in
So Going Around Cities
, as well as many uncollected short poems. Most of the poems included in
Short Poems
were written in the late 60s and, especially, the early 70s.
    The short poem obviously involves more thought process than writing/reading process, if one can split the two. A short poem is peculiarly naked, whether it’s a weighty short poem or a lighter short poem. It often seemed to take years for Ted to decide that a particular one was good enough to be published. And it’s not surprising that
In a Blue River
is a later publication. A successful short poem may be capable of projecting new meanings on successive readings, but in a monolithic way, as if a new room has opened out, rather than in the overall, textured way that a longer poem can light up in a mesh of changeable meanings. For example, it may take the reader some time to connect the title “Larceny,” in the poem which reads “The / opposite / of / petty / is GRAND ,” with the crimes of grand and petty larceny. One may be content with the observation that the opposite of petty
is
grand, a meditation on that. On the other hand a poem like “Laments,” which both praises and judges Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is awesome on the level of judgment: “you did it wrong.” The fact of judgment, and also this particular judgment—is it only of their deaths? their lifestyles?—constantly opens up more thoughtful space.
    Red Wagon
, published by the Yellow Press in 1976, is possibly the volume of Ted’s that least shows his book-constructor’s touch: it is more purely a “collection,” assembled while he was ill with hepatitis. The poems, however, are solid, andmany are among his best. By the time of the publication of
Red Wagon
Ted had taught at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa, Iowa City; at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; at Yale; at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago; and at the University of Essex in England. In 1976 he moved back to New York, where he would spend his remaining eight years.
Red Wagon
includes work written in many cities and two countries. It contains important shorter poems (such as “In the Wheel”), a number of open-field poems (for example, the popular “Things to Do in Providence”) and sprawling long-lined poems (“Something Amazing Just Happened”).
    Partway through
Red Wagon
, variety of form cedes to a denser, more slablike entity, beginning with the poem “Frank O’Hara” and the five poems succeeding it, the remnants of a disbanded sequence called “Southampton Winter.” In the original
Red Wagon
, poems from
Easter Monday
(still in the process of composition) rounded out the book for the most part, as well as a group of five sonnets. These were, in fact, five of
The Sonnets
, three previously published and two seeing print for the first time. Our version of
Red Wagon
omits the
Easter Monday
poems and the group of sonnets. It ends with “The Complete Prelude,” a poem made from words and phrases of Wordsworth’s poem. The use of another poet’s work as a word source had always been a favorite method of Ted’s (see, for example, “Sonnet VI,”