Everything about Ted Berrigan totally explained
Ted Berrigan (
15 November,
1934 -
4 July,
1983) was an
American poet.
Early life
Berrigan was born in
Providence,
Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at
Providence College before joining the
U.S. Army in
1954 to serve in the
Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the
University of Tulsa in
Oklahoma, where he received a
B.A. in
English in
1959. He received his
M.A. from Tulsa in
1962. Berrigan was married to Sandy Berrigan, also a poet, and they'd two children,
David Berrigan and
Kate Berrigan. He and his second wife the poet
Alice Notley were active in the poetry scene in
Chicago for several years, then moved to
New York City, where he edited various magazines and books.
The New York School
A prominent figure in the second generation of the
New York School of Poets, Berrigan was peer to
Jim Carroll,
Anselm Hollo,
Ron Padgett, and
Anne Waldman. He collaborated with Padgett and
Joe Brainard on
Bean Spasms, a work significant in its rejection of traditional concepts of ownership. Though Berrigan, Padgett, and Brainard all wrote individual poems for the book, and collaborated on many others, no authors were listed for individual poems.
In 2005, Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry was published together in a single volume edited by the poet
Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons,
Anselm Berrigan – a poet – and
Edmund Berrigan, a poet and songwriter.
The Sonnets
The poet
Frank O'Hara called Berrigan's most significant publication,
The Sonnets, “a fact of modern poetry.” A telling reflection on the era that produced it,
The Sonnets beautifully weaves together traditional elements of the Shakespearean sonnet form with the disjunctive structure and cadence of
T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land and Berrigan’s own literary innovations and personal experiences. The product is a composition, in the words of Berrigan’s editor and second wife Alice Notley, “[thatis] musical, sexy, and funny.”
Berrigan was initially drawn to the sonnet form because of its inherent challenge; in his own words, "the form sort of [stultifies] the whole process [ofwriting]." The procedure that he ultimately concocted to write
The Sonnets is the essence of the work’s novelty and ingenuity. After attempting several sonnets, Berrigan decided to go back through what he'd written and take out certain lines, one line from each work until he'd six lines. He then went through the poems backwards and took one more line from each until he'd accumulated six more lines, twelve lines total. Based on this body of the work, Berrigan knew what the final couplet would be; this process became the basis for The Sonnets. Addressing claims that the method is totally mechanical, Berrigan explains that some of the seventy-seven sonnets came to him "whole," not needing to be pieced together. The poet’s preoccupation with style, his concern for form and his own role as the creator as evinced by
The Sonnets pose a challenge to traditional ideas about poetry and signify a fresh and innovative artistic approach.
The genius embodied in the book is its recognition of the eternal possibility for invention in a genre seemingly overwhelmed by the success of its traditional forms. By imitating the forms and practices of earlier artists and recreating them to express personal ideas and experiences, Berrigan demonstrates the potential for poetry in his and subsequent generations. As Charles Bernstein succinctly comments, “Part collage, part process writing, part sprung lyric, Ted Berrigan’s
The Sonnets remains…one of the freshest and most buoyantly inspired works of contemporary poetry. Reinventing verse for its time,
The Sonnets are redolent with possibilities for our own.”
Death
Berrigan died on July 4, 1983, following years of health problems compounded by amphetamine use and an avid addiction to diet pills.
Selected publications
Further Information
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