The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Read Free Page B

made from a poem by his friend, the poet Dick Gallup.) This method could result in a kind of book review, or a dialogue with a poet’s style, or could be used to delve into Ted’s own consciousness. Here it is also a way to employ the now-forbidden language of English Romantic Poetry, which being part of the poet’s education is part of himself.
    If “Southampton Winter” had dissolved as a conception, poems such as “Chicago Morning” and “Newtown,” written in Chicago in 1972 and resembling the “Southampton Winter” poems, became the basis for
Easter Monday
. The sequence was not really conceived until Ted’s arrival in England in 1973. At both Northeastern Illinois University and the University of Essex Ted took teaching positions that had been held by Ed Dorn, who, like Ted, had recently entered into a second marriage and fathered two more children. Ted became interested in the concept of the second act, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now clichéd statement, “There are no second acts in American life.”
Easter Monday
, dedicated to Ed Dorn and named for Willem de Kooning’s beautiful painting as well as for the day after theday of rebirth, is meant to address the possibility of the second act. Ted had hoped for fifty poems, inspired by the artist George Schneeman’s notion that once he’d started a project, a set of collages, say, he might as well do fifty. Ted ended up with forty-six.
    Ted kept
Easter Monday
in a folder on the cover of which is inscribed
EASTER MONDAY/Poems (1972–1977)
. The poems were written in Chicago, London, Wivenhoe, New York, and Boulder; many are sonnets, most have an impasto texture—thick abstract expressionistic paint—and many of them are composed of other people’s words. “From the House Journals,” for example, is made from the first lines index to the
Collected Poems
of Frank O’Hara; “In Blood” is a selection of lines from a sequence of mine; and “The Ancient Art of Wooing” is made from a poem of mine I’d given up on, which was itself made out of a magazine article. A poem like the latter is a little like a palimpsest and a little like urban erosion. But the poems speak to and with the words of people Ted cared about or was interactive with. A few of the poems, on the other hand, are direct addresses to friends, delivered in an almost courtly manner. The sequence is very much about “not dying,” in William Saroyan’s phrase, not giving in to deathy forces. Ted didn’t declare the sequence finished until shortly before he died in 1983, when he made the final decisions for it. There are a handful of
Easter Monday
out-takes to be found in
Nothing for You
and
So Going Around Cities
.
    It should be noted that Ted was always open to chapbook and broadside publication.
In a Blue River
and
The Morning Line
are in fact chapbooks, and, as I’ve indicated, parts of
Easter Monday
were first published in chapbooks. A mimeographed stapled book with the singularly lovely title
A Feeling for Leaving
(Frontward Books, 1975) contains twenty-two of the poems. Another nine were published in 1980 as
Clown War
22 (edited by Bob Heman) under the title
Carrying a Torch
.
    By the time
Nothing for You
was published, in 1977, Ted’s and my sons, Anselm and Edmund (my co-editors of this edition), were five and three years old. Ted had two other children, David and Kate, from his marriage to Sandy Alper Berrigan. He had always delighted in being with his kids, and there are references to all of them throughout his work. The title
Nothing for You
comes from a word game Anselm and Edmund had made up, which went something like: “No cookies, no candy, no soda. Nothing, nothing for you.” This was a great joke, a chant accompanied by laughter. Ted had been asked by Lewis Warsh for a book for Angel Hair Books, butit was one of those times when he felt he had nothing. So he conjured a manuscript out of piles of rejects and old poems and gleefully named it after our sons’