Ted Berrigan: Selected Poems

[Here's a very old review of mine, published in the first issue of Arras. Kent Johnson had asked, on the ubu list, how one might compare the Sonnets of Berrigan with the Dream Songs of Berryman. This review, which is at times, naive, perhaps hints at ways these two writers might be understood together, but I use the Cantos (of course!) as the touchstone more than either the long works of either writer. But, as you can see, even then I had some beef with this "two solitudes" theory (it is a term often applied to Canada's identity crisis) of American poetry.]

The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Though Ted Berrigan may have been the ultimate “fan” poet of Frank O’Hara, upon reading the Selected Poems one realizes that a truer kinship may be with the “city poet,” of Ezra Pound. Berrigan was not able to achieve mastery of the larger improvisational structures of O’Hara, nor did he have the immense vocabulary and range of cultural reference that makes even O’Hara’s most spurious poems, like “Joe’s iJacket” or “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” rich catalogues of the “things,” in Williams’ sense, running through his mind. Berrigan’s shorter poems are structured more often in a way that doesn’t hint at its resolution (there is little motivating attitude throughout) until it has actually occurred; in other words, he tends to adopt Pound’s London period haiku-like formulas for his work, which often involves a listing of images and a resolution in a brief moment of sentiment, or even catharsis, conveyed in its last line. One example appears in Berrigan’s “Personal Poem #9,” which concludes with the line he repeats in his sonnets, “feminine marvelous and tough.” These adjectives in the poem describe his “new book of poetry! to be printed in simple type on old brown paper,” but they also serve as the moment of intensity, the “vortex” of the poem, which until that point seems a rather selfconscious homage to “The Day Lady Died” or any number of O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” poems. Berrigan was aware of the derivation, and his status of “fan,” interestingly enough, makes him one of the first poets after the initial wave of the “New York School” to recognize Ashbery, Schyler, Koch and O’Hara, all of them still living at the time, as participating in the active founding of a new tradition.

Pound’s London period is characterized, at its best, by such poems as “In a Station of the Metro”, “Portrait D’une Femme” and Mauberley, but there is a whole group of lesser poems like “Les Millwins”, the “Salutation” series (for Blast) “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour”, and the short pseudo-Chinese (not from Cathay) and Hellenic poems that give an impression, when taken as a whole, of a completely different poet. “Villanelle” shows Pound attempting a sort of human generosity that doesn’t really work for him (but which is suited to Berrigan); in it, he is contemplating the visit of friends and their eventual departure, and he confesses his weakness, a sort of inhibiting self-consciousness, in lines that seem a awkward coming from the arrogant poseur of Mauberley. However, it is this poem and others like it that demonstrate Pound’s effect on a poet like Berrigan; there is not the straining after intensity but rather a laissez-faire listing of action and attitude that attempts to convey a moment of privacy. The most Pound-like poem of Berrigan’s is, however, The Sonnets, for in it he is able to use the fourteen line poem as a unit of measure, each offering its own opportunity for a new venture but which is constructed consciously as a separate element of the whole. It may seem odd to compare The Sonnets, which can often seem formally confused and not as heroically ambitious, to Pound’s Cantos, and yet one must remember that many sections of The Cantos are themselves confused and uninspired. The Sonnets are most like the Pisan Cantos, in that they convey the thought, in a personal measure, of one man isolated but among a stream of reference and encounter. What is most interesting, however, is that The Sonnets, a modest project, actually includes a translation of Rimbaud modified in a puzzling and entirely idiosyncratic way, which is one of Pound’s more difficult tactics:

Sweeter than sour apples flesh to boys
The brine of brackish water pierced my hulk
Cleansing me of rot-gut wine and puke
Sweeping away my anchor in its swel
And since then I’ve been bathing in the poem
Of the star-steeped milky flowing mystic sea
Devouring great sweeps of azure green and
Watching flotsam, dead men, float by me

“Star-steeped milky flowing mystic” may not be an great innovation, and seems to have more than a touch of Ginsberg to it, and yet the sober melody of these lines, a distinct contrast with those of the original, are “pure Berrigan,” a poet who was more inclined to compare himself with the relatively tranquil Appolinaire than to the precocious rebel and poet maudit Rimbaud. Berrigan’s version seems as true to himself as one could hope it to be, and yet its additions and innovations do not grate at the ears and sense like many academic variations do, nor does he attempt, like Robert Lowell, to usurp the poem for his own didactic usage. Though he may not have achieved the verbal fireworks of “Le Bateau lyre,” he has nonetheless “made new” a sentiment that needed translation into a modern idiom, but with proper acknowledgement to its originator.

It might be somewhat odd to consider that Berrigan’s nearest analog among his contemporaries may be John Berryman, and yet certain parallels between their stance towards their predecessors and contemporaries and the nature of their own achievements arise in a certain consideration. Both poets seemed to have an unease with the achievements of their predecessors and therefore adopted a self-conscious “bardic” stance that was part pose but thoroughly modified by sincerity. Consequently, a great degree of partisanship among readers of their work mars any true understanding of their poems: academics don’t like Berrigan for his lack of form and the surface quality of his “content,” and poets of the anti-establishment (which often itself becomes an establishment when a certain spark is lost) think that Berryman was motivated by pure ambition and was the inspiration behind the much of the confessional slush of The American Poetry Review. This may be an exaggeration of the division, and yet it must be acknowledged that innovations by each poet must often seen through their respective monikers, “confessional” or “(post) beat,” before consideration of the purely formal aspects of their work can be achieved. One of Berrigan’s poems not included in the new selection (but on display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of Alex Katz’s Face of the Poet series) points to one of their mutual interests, which is centered around modifying, and inventing, syntax:

Buddha On The Bounty

“A llttle loving can solve a lot of things’
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. “You are lovely.
I am lame.” “Now it’s me.” If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of
The Slave Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence and feeling.
“The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former ilves
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon.” I’m not here, now, & it is good, absence.

This poem is probably as convoluted and “difficult” as much of The Dream Songs; it is, indeed, curiously like the Ann Lauterbach poem that appears next to it (one stop past his face) on display at the Museum, in that there is a tie to Stevens that is not prominent in Berrigan’s generally non-meditative work. The quotes lifted entire and unexplained from other sources, a tactic that both poets used in their own ways, reminds one also of Marrianne Moore’s work (that the quote is about an elephant helps, too). Berrigan was reading Ashbery, of course, but certain violent swervings from normal syntax (the sort which appears in The Tennis Court Oath, for instance) are characteristic, though of a different sensibility, of Berryman, either in the extreme of “The Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” which seems a little unnatural and an academic pose, or the more realized, speech-like Dream Songs. Of course, the sensibilities of these two poets are entirely different, and yet a comparison of the later poems of Berryman, those dedicated to Tristan Corbiere for instance, and the candid (though never “confessional”) work of Berrigan might be a fruitful, however odd, venture.

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 6, 2003 07:08 PM | TrackBack