Week 7: Ted Berrigan and the start of Alice Notley

Here's Ted Berrigan outside Lower East Side institution, Gem Spa — a newsstand centrally-located within a few blocks from the Berrigan/Notley apartment at 101 St. Mark's place, Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh's apartment at 33 St. Mark's Place (a social hub for the mid-to-late 60s poetry scene), and St. Mark's Church on the Bowery, where the Poetry Project has existed for more than forty years. The egg cream was purportedly invented there, and every morning around sunrise, Berrigan would head down there for a chocolate egg cream, a Pepsi and The New York Times. Factor in a died of greasy hamburgers and doughnuts (and, oh yeah, a steady diet of amphetamines) and it's no wonder he died young.

Hopefully, having spent half the quarter getting acquainted with Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch, you'll be better able to pick up some of the social interaction between the various poets we're studying. More than anybody else, you'll see this in Berrigan's poetry — lines borrowed from other poets, forms borrowed from other poets, name-dropping of other poets, communication with other poets, and collaboration with other poets. Keep an eye out for these moments: they're key to Berrigan's poetics.

Here are the readings for next week, including a few poems by Berrigan's wife, Alice Notley, which will start our 3 1/2 classes looking at her work. All page numbers are in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, except for (of course) the Notley poems on the 20th, which are in Grave of Light:


Monday, February 16th:

• Words for Love (115)
• Personal Poem #2 (116)
• Personal Poem #7 (117)
• Peronal Poem (117)
• For You (119)
• Tambourine Life (121)
• Living with Chris (151)
• Things to do in New York City (163) MP3
• 10 Things I Do Every Day (164)
• Rusty Nails (183)
• The Great Genius (220)
• It's Important (225)
• In Bed (230)
• People Who Died (236)
• Telegram (237) MP3
  
• Laments (337)

Wednesday, February 18th:

• 3 Pages (351) MP3
• Sunday Morning (354)
• Something Amazing Just Happened (355)
• Today in Ann Arbor (357) MP3
  
• Things to Do on Speed (361)
• What I'd Like for Christmas, 1970 (369)
• Today's News (371)
  
• Things to Do in Providence (376)
• Frank O'Hara (381) MP3
• Crystal (382) MP3
• Chinese Nightengale (383)
• I Used to Be But Now I Am (385)
• "I Remember" (419)
• Whitman in Black (420) MP3
• People of the Future (429)
• Hearts (432)
• Night Letter (432)
  
• Going to Chicago (468)
• Three Poems: Going to Canada (483)
• Reading Frank O'Hara (510)

Friday, February 20th:

Ted Berrigan:

• In the 51st State (513)
• Red Shift (515) MP3
• Last Poem (521)
• Small Role Felicity (522)
• DNA (535)
• Poem (568)
• A Certain Slant of Sunlight (569)
• Creature (594)
• Dresses for Alice (608)
• A City Winter (614)
• This Will Be Her Shining Hour (645)

Alice Notley:

• Cold Poem (3) MP3
• I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year (4)
• Dear Dark Continent (8)
• Incidentals in the Day World (9)
• Your Dailiness (19)
• But He Says I Misunderstood (25)