Ted Berrigan on the 38th Anniversary of his Death: Posthumous Pick of the Month [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Mark Hillringhouse Photography

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New Personal Poem

to Michael Lally

You had your own reasons for getting
In your own way. You didn’t want to be
Clear to yourself. You knew a hell
Of a lot more than you were willing
               to let yourself know. I felt
Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right.
Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I
Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity)
A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode
               Island New Englander is able to manage. You
Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not
Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too.
Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we.
He was himself & I was me. And when we came together
Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way
That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me
In what I say? Because as well I see you know
In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do
You, “in the right way”.
That’s just talk, not Logos,
               a getting down to cases:
I take it as simple particulars that
               we wear our feelings on our faces.

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Ted Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. He attended Providence College for a year before joining the army in 1954 at the age of 19. After serving in Korea he received a BA in English from the University of Tulsa in 1959 and an MA in 1962. Berrigan moved to New York in the early 1960s where he edited and published C Magazine and C Press Books, wrote art criticism, and collaborated with writers and artists Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Anselm Hollo. Berrigan taught at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and was writer-in-residence/visiting poet at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, and the Naropa Institute. In 1979 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Berrigan was a central figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, which included Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, and Anselm Hollo. He was the author of more than 20 books, including The Sonnets (1964), Bean Spasms (with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard) (1967), Poems, In Brief (1971), Red Wagon (1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988).  Blue Wind Press published So Going Around Cities: New & Selected Poems, 1958--1979 in 1980. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan) came out in 2005 from the University of California Press. [bio mostly from Poets.org]. Ted Berrigan died on July 4, 1983.

Michael Lally blogs at Lally's Alley.   [Also check out this post on Michael from 2008.]

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                                           Alex Katz,Ted Berrigan,1967.

 

             Ted Berrigan,Tim Dlugos, Penny Milford, Michael Lally, Caitlin Lally (profile) at Michael & Penny's wedding, NYC, 14 Feb 1982.

                                                 

 

Comments

[Maureen]

Excellent tribute to our forefather of words. Michael's poem spot on! And tenderly beautiful.

[David Lehman]

A beautiful post -- poem, Alex Katz's great portrait, and Michael's wedding. Ted's poem is the authentic "yes [that this] basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode Island New Englander is able to manage."

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, David. Glad you liked it.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Maureen.

[lally]

wonderful post Terence and humbling to be a part of it...part of the brilliance of Ted's poem to me is his using and/or reworking lines of mine from some early poems (like what David quotes from it) as well as from a letter I'd written to him proselytizing about my new sexual perspective on what I thought everyone should agree with me about. He turns my words and his into such a powerful statement about himself as well as me, as insightful as anything I ever wrote or anyone else I can think of...

[Terence Winch]

Michael: I'm glad you like the post. It's good to get your take on the poem's genesis.

[Laurie Price]

Wonderful poem, Michael, thank you. Brings Ted back for me. I have his picture (taken at the Naropa Institute in 1980) on my wall.

[Gerald Fleming]

Enjoyed this greatly. Also dug "[a] basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode
Island New Englander"--could be shifted west, re-placed, describe so many I knew...