E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fast and furious Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan Edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan University of California Press, 760 pages, $49.95

Twenty-two years after Ted Berrigan’s sudden death at 48, his Collected Poems, a 760-page brick of a book, is here. It will solidify and expand his legend. Poetry that was brash, funny, risk-taking, and fully alive when written remains bold and fresh. In life, Berrigan had legendary status on New York’s Lower East Side and wherever he taught. Loud, streetwise, stoked on speed, a man on whom little was lost, the quick-tongued Berrigan delivered his full freight whenever you encountered him. Readers new to Berrigan’s work will feel the man in this book.

He began at the top of his game with The Sonnets, published first in 1964 in mimeograph by his "C" Press, and then certified in 1967 by New York’s major New American Poetry publisher, Grove Press. William Carlos Williams had warned American poets off the sonnet, seeing the form as moribund, embalmed through centuries of use. Berrigan saw that his old poems from the early 1960s, cut up and lines rearranged, made the sonnet form new. His readers in the New York poetry and painting scenes immediately took to quoting "His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze," "old come-all-ye’s streel into the streets. Yes, it is now," and "feminine marvelous and tough." The Sonnets have Jackson Pollock’s all-over-ness, Charlie Parker’s lyric energy, and Bob Dylan’s homegrown surrealism. They simultaneously look back and leap forward, and, as powerful new poetry often does, they create their own context.

When Berrigan failed to produce a book equal to The Sonnets in audacity and scope, some spoke of him as not having lived up to his extraordinary debut. The Collected Poems presents a different picture. As his widow, Alice Notley, a top poet herself, writes in her introduction, "Ted’s poetry is full of resources: forms, techniques, stylistic practices." He mastered the short, one-to-four-line poem, such as "As Usual":

Take off your hat & coat & give me all your money

I have to buy some pills & I’m flat broke.

He perfected the art of conversing with his friends in poems while embracing his uninitiated reader. In a Berrigan poem, you enter his world as an equal. He ripped apart and put back together the list poem. Throughout his short time — this book holds but 20 years’ work —Berrigan indulged the sentimental in search of real feeling and maintained his sense of humor. We speak of a "body of work," by which we mean accumulation, the whole. In Berrigan’s Collected Poems, body has literal presence. In his cover drawing, George Schneeman, Berrigan’s close friend and frequent collaborator, subtly underscores this: on a bureau sit Berrigan’s signature black-rimmed eyeglasses.

This book’s editors have done a superb job in providing a lucid introduction covering all the bases, a chronology, and notes on the poems exemplary in their lack of pretension. They fit a poet who wondered at the end of a poem "if Ron or Pat bought any toilet paper/ this morning." In one of the book’s six back-cover blurbs, poet Peter Gizzi describes Berrigan as "totally real." "Totally" is famously a Berrigan word, and the measure of his realness, a freestanding, ongoing present, is everywhere in this book.

William Corbett joins poets Anselm Berrigan and Tom Raworth, who will be reading from their work as well as Ted Berrigan’s | MIT Stata Center, Room 32-141, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge | October 20 @ 7 pm | 617.253.7894.