We are the sleeping fragments of his sky

It was Miles Champion who first put me on to Ted Berrigan’s ‘Sonnets’ in his review of the Penguin ‘Selected Poems’ printed in ‘Parataxis’. It must have been about 1995. I liked the poems immediately – they seemed exciting in suggesting what a poem could be. An exhilirating break from the narrow confines of what I had to teach for the GCSE & A level syllabuses (Hughes, Larkin, Plath …). Ironically, it was very much a reaction at the level of content: disconcertingly honest references to drug taking, burger buying, little incidents of New York street life. I had already got this from O’Hara (by then I had got hold of his 'Selected Poems' from Carcanet & 'Lunch Poems') but Berrigan seemed to go even further, or was more ‘pally’, or – be honest – the poems seemed rather crudely made & anyone could do it. How wrong could I be?

Now, ten years on, I’m only beginning to see what is going on in ‘The Sonnets’ and quite how well made they are. I’ve noticed this with a lot of poetry - how by reading other poets, other books unrelated to poetry, walking around, letting things settle, so a group of poems start to speak differently. Go at the poems too directly and they freeze. Old habits of reading assert themselves.

I’m misrembering a quote in this month’s ‘Wire’ but it applies to poetry: each poet creates a new ear. You have to allow yourself to hear free of preconceptions.

In a way, Berrigan’s ‘Sonnets’ work a little like venetian blinds. I’m thinking of each poem being made up of slats which can be independently turned. Reading the poems in the mid 90s I was looking ‘through’ the slats, seeing the world ‘behind’ – and the poems can work in this way. ‘The Sonnets’ then read as a socio-poetic record of 60s bohemian living, Berrigan’s autobiography, his habits, his walks, his talks, his pills, so many cans of Pepsi.

However, reading the poems now, I see how the lines ‘angle’. How, rather than effacing themselves before a ‘Real’ going on behind, they flatten themselves. Berrigan confronts you with the line on the page. Look at it. Listen to it. Don’t immediately jump through it.

How persuasive is the first line of Sonnet II:

“Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.”

Ignoring for a moment the latent absurdity/oddity (who phones that early in the morning?), the poignancy (Berrigan is addressing a lost love as he sits lonely at this early hour?), the humour (and Berrigan is funny), the line seems so factual. So direct. The mode of address. The proper name. The time on the clock. Everything conspires to create a sense of ‘the real’.

Now ‘turn’ the slat. First, Berrigan’s knowing borrowing/homage to O’Hara’s signature opening – the “I do this, I do that” style:

“It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” (‘The Day Lady Died’)

already the 5:15 a.m. ‘now’ of Berrigan’s poem is co-terminus with O’Hara’s 12:20. There’s clock time and there’s poetic time. The entire enterprise of ‘The Sonnets’ is also a knowing dialogue with the sonnet tradition – one of the yardsticks of poetic achievement and skill – Shakespeare’s sequence in particular. Berrigan, at 5:15 a.m. is speaking ‘back’ to a whatever time on the clock in 1590 or thereabouts.

Second, the sounds. I simply hadn’t heard Berrigan’s lines. Listen:

The long ‘e’ echoing between “dear” and “Margie” and the “teen” of “15”. The long “i”, long “o”, and long “a” of the abbreviated “a” (in a.m.) which will then be worked across other lines in the sonnet. The diaristic style, the abbreviations, the numbers all suggest a casualness. Yet how calculated they are. And this is central to Berrigan’s aesthetic: the language of the everyday and everyman yields its poetry.

Third, collage. Alice Notley in her introduction reinforces the idea that Berrigan ‘built’ these poems, words working like bricks. I think it is important to do away with the typically (Romantic?) stereotype of poetic composition – poet struck by a flash of inspiration madly scribbling his lines before the Muse vanishes – and replace it with an image of the poet sat at a typewriter surrounded with notebooks, open books, abandoned drafts, phrases pinned to the wall seeing what will ‘fit’. Not to say a line won’t come ‘just like that’. But the evidence suggests Berrigan worked with phrases as raw material. (Certain sonnets are completely ‘plundered’, Berrigan’s lectures are full of admissions about his stealing ‘good lines’, his little address books full of overheard remarks).

It would be stupid to see this as a sign of failure or lack of creativity – Berrigan ‘simply’ appropriating other people’s lines. Rather, look at what he does with them. How the method of construction becomes integral to the work.

As Cage realised, modern technology of sound recording liberated composers. You could now ‘compose’ with any sound not simply those noises produced by the orchestra. There is a similar opportunity for the modern poet. Who cares whether Berrigan really said “Hello Marge” , whether it was “5:15 a.m.” (in fact, it is only us assuming the two statements are linked). We don’t even need to know who Marge is (although the notes will identify the likely candidate). The point is that the line now works as compositional material.

There’s no denying that Berrigan will have his cake and eat it. He does want the ‘pull’ of referents – girlfriends, passing time, early morning atmospheres, the hip feel of being alive and a poet in New York. He does want the themes – yes, the Big Ones: Time. Love. Death. etc. He does want the formal integrity and pleasures offered by the poetic music. Yet … what do we get on line 12?

“Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.”

Line one repeated. An immediate flattening. So simple and yet so effective. It’s not even a self-citation. Simply line one re-typed – making us acknowledge that it is all being typed. Collapse of the ‘real’ effect. Now, the realisation that language is being arranged according to logics independent of (although not excluding) ‘real life’, the anecdotal moment. Or, to put it better, ‘real life’, the lived moment enters the poem but not as its own justification. Berrigan’s poems are NOT simply ‘of the moment’. There are several logics of ‘now’ at work.

It is here I return to the earlier post on Morton Feldman. What Cage identified as “acceptance” as a compositional procedure in Feldman, I also see at work in Berrigan. It can’t be denied that Ezra Pound had employed collage techniques in ‘The Cantos’ (no coincidence that Pound figures in Sonnet I “His piercing pince-nez”) and had already broken with the ‘ancedotal’ model. Lines compose to create The Image’. What – as I see it – Berrigan does is to deliberately collapse the ‘space’by playing off modes of representation. “This is taking place right now – oh no it isn’t! these are just words on the page”). Furthermore, the material is no longer ‘sanctified’ by poetic aura. The most casual phrase, the most banal observation, is now available for composition. Life is let in to – becomes the grounds for – Art.

Furthermore, lived experience undergoes a transformation through composition as Berrigan plunders his own (earlier) poems – this he claimed was the sudden ‘breakthrough’ insight at the start of the project. (For a similar technique in music, see Zappa’s practice of ‘xenochrony’ involving collaging of live recording and studio sessions into original/recorded compositions).

And – as if this wasn’t enough – the seemingly constrictive & exhausted form of the sonnet is revitalized as it allows lines to be juxtaposed & thereby acquire unexpected meanings through placement. The tightness of the 14-line form works to Berrigan’s advantage. Anything longer and you’d lose the internal echos and reflections. Anything shorter and there’d not be enough to work on.

Each line is a strip which then acquires an ongoing ‘glue’ of sense through the line by line reading of the poem. Needless to say, this principle can then be extended beyond the individual poem to the ‘macro’ level of the sequence. Lines reoccur, trailing with them their previous contexts (by now an inextricable complex of ‘real’ + ‘literary’ + ‘textual’ meanings) to then undergo further recomposition/decomposition in their new placement. And it can only follow on from this that by Sonnet X, Sonnet I has already started to read rather differently. These poems develop in multiple directions.

Those audacious second and third lines:

“dear Berrigan. He died
Back to books. I read”

I’ll save for next time a discussion of Berrigan’s use of line and punctuation.

(Yes, I know. I really should read Alfred North Whitehead…)