Ted Berrigan

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is a wonderful brick of a book with which to beam or bean yourself.

I have loved his Sonnets for many years but I had denied myself the pleasure of knowing his work in full.

I remember finding this book in a library when it first came out and discovering the long poem "Train Ride," which is addressed to Joe Brainard and is one of the funniest and most moving poems about friendship I have ever read...and also one of the funniest poems about the ego and "the mortality thing." (If you don't laugh when you get to the blank pages he provides for dissing your artistic friends and peers--after he has just done the same--there's probably something wrong with you upstairs.)

It's rather a fuck you poem to poetry capital P and a fuck you poem to death capital D and a decisive vote for love capital L and candor capital C in their places.

There are other churches in this world than the ones with stained glass windows.

And there's some free psychotherapy thrown in here and there.

Great poets will sometimes give you that gratis as well.

Here is the last poem in this collection and it's addressed to another poet I've loved for years.

The poem's allusions to and quotations of his Sonnets (the shovel line, the early a.m. time check) just make this all the more plangent.

The penultimate poem in this book (the "Canzone" which immediately precedes this poem) also attaches itself to one rather beatifically.


    Grace After a Meal

FOR JOHN WIENERS


Out we go to get away from today's
delicate pinpricks: awake and scheme
to pay the rent; the room is littered
with laundry, my desk turns
my stomach; in my stomach a white pill
turns to warmth; I stretch and begin
to flow; a door opens; the day
is warm, and we join hands
for a journey to courage in a loft.

     A man signs a shovel, and
so he digs. I fear to become a crank,
alone in a dreary room, grinding out
poem after poem, confused, con-
cerned, annoyed.
       But Edwin offers us
cookies, and coffee and beer and grace.
By his presence he offers us leads, and
his graciousness adds to our courage.
         John,

we must not be afraid
to be civilized, meaning
Love.
     It is 5:23 a.m., and the sun
is coming.