Friday, February 13th: Beginning Ted Berrigan

Now that the midterm's behind us, we can move on from the First Generation New York School trio of Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch into the Second Generation of poets who rose in their wake in the mid-1960s, namely Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman (among many, many others), and we'll be starting with Berrigan — without a doubt the largest persona on the scene.

For Friday, I'd like you to read his debut collection, The Sonnets, in its entirety. It's a collection of short poems (most sticking to the traditional sonnet length of 14 lines) which work together as a cohesive whole, with lines borrowed from poem to poem, and entire poems reconfigured to make other poems. The Sonnets begins on pg. 27 of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and you can maximize your reading experience by listening along to Berrigan's reading of the series at the New Langton Arts Center in San Francisco in 1981 on PennSound (click here to visit our Ted Berrigan page — you'll find individual streaming files for each poem, or you can listen to it as one complete MP3). I'd also wholeheartedly recommend you read along with Alice Notley's incredibly useful notes, which begin in the back of the book on pg. 665), and take a few minutes to read the thoughtful introduction she's written for the collection (which starts on pg. 1).

The long-overdue Berrigan Collected wasn't just a labor of love, but a family affair to boot — Notley is, of course, Berrigan's widow, and the couple's two sons, Anselm and Edmund (who are also poets) assisted in the editing. We'll be reading a fair amount of the volume, as Berrigan's work is often self-reflexive, with poems separated by books, years or even decades borrowing from one another, so the only way you'll be able to appreciate this effect is by gaining familiarity with his body of work. I'm putting the finishing touches on the reading assignments for the remaining days (I have to try to segue into Alice Notley for the following Friday, and so am trimming a few poems from the list), but I'll have that for you soon.