"Meandering: Learning Light and Dark from Ted Berrigan "
by Michael Dylan Welch
It’s been more than 40 years since Ted Berrigan died, and for some reason he’s been on my mind. His first book, The Sonnets, is said to be his high point, in 1964, at age 30. He didn’t write haiku (or so I used to think), and mostly his poems were lengthy, after the sonnets. But he had shorter poems too, and that’s what interests me when I pick up a copy of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, edited by Alice Notley, his second wife, and published by the University of California Press in 2005. It’s a brick of a book, in hardback, at 750 pages, and I confess that most of it doesn’t gel with me. My bias is toward the short poems, not the New York School of surreal and avant-garde, and so I explore the short pieces, not to deeply analyze or contextualize but mostly to share, with intuitive reactions.
I thumb through the pages. I am a third of the way through the book before I find two poems I’d call short:
Matinee
Morning
(ripped out of my mind again!) (187)As Usual
Take off your hat & coat & give me all your money
I have to buy some pills & I’m flat broke (187)
These pieces begin a set titled “Life of a Man,” so we can take them as unfolding vignettes, a few longer poems mixed in.
. . .
