Ted Berrigan in Irish America (by Terence Winch)

I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate.  A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my friend Bob Callahan, who passed away last year) took place. Bob asked me and a number of other poets to read, and also invited my band, Celtic Thunder, to play a concert set after the reading. In addition to Bob and me, the line-up included Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and Ted Berrigan. It was a historic night — I’m not sure Irish America has seen anything like it before or since.

A friend of Bob’s, whose name I’ve forgotten, took some photos that night, and for reasons I don’t recall, Bob gave me a contact sheet. The photo above is from that contact sheet and shows, left to right, Ted Berrigan, Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, me, Bob Callahan, and Susan Howe (Eileen Myles, for whatever reason, is not in the photo).  At that point in our history, Celtic Thunder included Dominick Murray (guitar, vocals), Linda Hickman (flute, vocals), Tony DeMarco (fiddle), Jesse Winch (bodhran [drum], bouzouki), and me (button accordion).  Tony was sick the night of the reading, but the photo below (taken by the late Pat Cady) shows Celtic Thunder's 1982 line-up at a ceili in, I think, Baltimore.

There were many great moments that night at St. Mark’s. I especially remember Eileen Myles striding to the microphone dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, much to the delight and enthusiasm of the audience, and then delivering a terrific reading. Everyone, really, was at his or her best. But the highlight for me was Ted Berrigan’s uproarious and masterful performance.

Ted had a huge number of friends, fans, and followers, attracted by his charisma and humor, but most of all by his deep love and commitment to poetry and his inventive, expansive, inspiring work. Michael Lally (who, if he hadn't moved to L.A. back then, would certainly have been part of the St. Mark's reading) turned me on to Ted’s book The Sonnets in 1971, right after I moved to D.C. from New York, and I was hooked. Besides the night of the reading, I think I met Ted only one other time, in October of 1977, when Doug Lang invited him to D.C. to read at Folio Books, the site of Doug’s legendary reading series. Ted hung out for a couple of days and we got to know each other a bit. He even signed my copy of Red Wagon  with “For Terry, whose poetry I like very much, best, Ted Berrigan.” That was a compliment I was happy to get.    

About four years ago I bought a CD recorder so I could start digitizing some of my old LPs, which I never got rid of, as well as hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, stuffed into empty tissue boxes.  Last week I digitized the 1982 reading.  I’ll include Ted’s segment (in two parts that overlap: Download Ted Berrigan 1, with intro by Bob Callahan; Download Ted Berrigan 2). Ted once said, in an interview: “My poetry is mostly talk, and sometimes it’s heightened speech.  It’s not the words of rhetoric so much as the tone of rhetoric; it’s an Irish kind of speech—sometimes I’m making speeches, other times I’m talking—like I’m talking a walk to the store to buy the paper and back.”  You'll see what he means when you listen to his reading.

On July 4th, 1983, just eight months after the Irish-American event, Ted died, at age 48. What a tremendous loss this was. There was a memorial reading at St. Mark’s four days later in which a number of his friends (including Kenneth Koch, who concludes his remarks with a reading of the last two pages of Ted's "Tambourine Life": Download Kenneth Koch remarks)  paid tribute to him. I digitized that tape yesterday, and was halfway through the process before it dawned on me that yesterday was the 26th anniversary of Ted Berrigan's death.

-- Terence Winch

Comments

[DL]

Thank you for this timely recollection of Ted Berrigan, a gentleman with whom I spent a most enjoyable afternoon in London in June 1969. I was about to turn 21. At a bookstore on, I think, Shaftesbury Avenue known to have advanced taste in poetry and literature, I recognized Berrigan (bearded, large, loud) from readings attended in New York and introduced myself to him as a fan of his "Sonnets." He decided then and there that we would spend the rest of the day together in museums, bookstores, and pubs. The day was a sonnet, and Ted's untimely death on the 4th of July is part of my personal mythology of the day (which also includes Lionel Trilling, Lou Gehrig, James Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Sousa marches, Gershwin's Rhapsody, a Dave Righetti no-hitter, the salt in the air at Cape Cod and Cape Ann, sunsets on Lake Cayuga) and maybe this year I will also commemorate Ted's birthday (November 15). I haven't yet read it, but I believe Tom Clark on the Vanitas blog has posted something on Ted today: here's the URL.
http://vanitasmagazine.blogspot.com/2009/07/tc-locations-for-ted-berrigan-nov-15.html

[Tom Clark]

Thank you Terry for the swell piece, and thank you David for the link to my July 4th Ted tribute at the Vanitas blog. Our mutual friend the poet Tom Raworth has added some of his usual brilliant electricity to the comments thread there, and anybody else with memories of Ted is welcome to join in the thread.

[Tom Clark]

For those who are interested, here is the activated link to the Ted post:

Ted Berrigan Tribute

[Terence Winch]

Dear Tom: I had been looking through the photos in Late Returns this morning, so as to get in the right mood, so it's nice to hear from you. Great to see the Vanitas tribute as well. ---TW

[Tom Clark]

Terry,

Thanks, and great to hear from you.

Though it seems the timing was accidental in your case, it's a sort of happy accident that we posted synchronously about Ted. His heart and humor are missing ingredients in the poetry scene these days. Words floating around like alphabet soup spilled in outer space yes, but sweet truth and rough beauty and sublime blarney...? Vanished like the memory of the last notes echoing in the air hours after the fiddlers have packed up and gone home.

[Peter Winch]

Terry--

Thanks for bringing Ted Berrigan to mind again. I went to Reed College with his son David and was living on the Lower East Side in 1983, and saw Ted at some readings and parites around the neighborhood. I ran into David and his sister in New York just after he died. They were very distraught about his sudden death and their grief seemed compounded by the fact that the obituary in the Times did not mention them among his children. I hope they are doing well on this anniversary.

Peter

[Terence Winch]

Dear Peter:
I don't think I knew you went to school with David Berrigan. I actually found a copy of that NY Times obit in one of Ted's books, as I was going through my Berrigan collection yesterday, and noticed the hurtful absence of any mention of his first family. Not the way he would have wanted it, I'm sure.
---T

[Paleohippie]

Great account of a momentous event. Nice work, T.

[Curious Ellie]

Hello Peter,
I know this is awhile ago, but in case you read this, maybe it will give you some peace of mind.

I knew David Berrigan's sister, Kate. I met David a few times, about the same time you knew him, when he was in school at Reed. We wrote letters to each other after that. David and Kate were my age, and their mother's family lived in my home town in New Mexico.

David's father would have been proud of him, I am certain. David Berrigan went on to further study in the sciences. He earned a PhD in biology and a Master's in Public Health. He works in research, with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has two sons, I think. I have not corresponded with David or Kate in many years. They lived with their mother in northernmost California, but you knew that.

David Berrigan is currently director of the Applied Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, if you wish to contact him. That's somewhere on the east coast, I'm not certain which state or city.