You Were Like Skyscrapers Veering Away: My First Time with Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets

By Dean Gorman

They feel like flash collages. They seem to happen faster than even O’Hara’s most runaway poems. Maybe it was the speed Ted Berrigan consumed almost religiously in those days, that had come to replace alcohol as the drug of choice for second-generation of New York Schoolers. Or maybe the pills were an aesthetic choice. Yeah, there’s serious substance abuse emerging in the poems. “Like a crime,” says David Lehman, “true innovation in art requires premeditation, means, motive, and opportunity.” Berrigan’s Sonnets sustain the kind of linguistic adventurousness of certain poems from Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath; yet take a quasi-confessional approach. And with their drug-rattled angularity they risk coherence, clarity, even credibility.

There are poems I absolutely love in this collection: sonnet XXXIV (“Time flies by like a great whale”), sonnet XXXVI (Berrigan’s take on “The Day Lady Died”), sonnet L (beginning and ending with “I like to beat people up”), the scatological yet somehow sweet LXI: “How succulent your flesh sometimes so tired/ from losing its daily battles with its dead! All/ this and the thought that you go to the bathroom/ fills me with love for you, makes me love you even more than the dirt/ in the crevices in my window/ and the rust on the bolt in my door.”

Here’s a section from Sonnet LXXV:

Thus I, red faced and romping in the wind

Whirl thru mad Manhattan dressed in boots

looking for today with tail-pin. I

never place it right, never win. It

doesn’t matter, though. The cooling wind keeps blow-

ing and my poems are coming.

Except at night. Then

I walk out in the bleak village and look for you

If I had to boil the spirit of this book down to one passage, this would be it. The speaker nakedly (and I might add, self-consciously) paints a picture of a young man completely engrossed and intoxicated by poetry, but also—and more importantly I think—by life. Here we have the spirit of playfulness Berrigan inherited from predecessors like Koch and Ashbery, the presentation of a somewhat quixotic persona (“red-faced and romping in the wind”), the speed and chaos of the city, the blustery and precocious young poet coming into his own (“my poems are coming”), and that shaky edge where love meets lust (“Then/ I walk out in the bleak village and look for you”).

Rarely does a book incite such varied reactions. On one hand, you have to admire Berrigan’s project—its scope, its aplomb, its sheer balls. Yes, it’s experimental by nature, but it’s trying to be more than that. It wants to be multi-faceted, complex, contradictory, ambivalent, sweet, sad, didactic, exclusive, inclusive, dark, optimistic, funny, timeless. To put it simply, it wants greatness.

But at the same time Berrigan seems to undermine all that amplitude by putting up walls or obstacles to prevent or detract his audience from reading the book as some sort of candidate for opus status. He defies both his critics and adherents through a systematic camouflaging of the narrative. There’s a razor-thin drama that unfolds in these sonnets between the speaker and his lover/s, an unwanted pregnancy, and possibly another man; but the story is so elliptical, so buried beneath allusion and idiosyncratic diction, that you never really get a clear sense of what is going on. Take Sonnet LXXVI (the birthday sonnet). Berrigan finally delivers some plain statements which hint at his everyday life, but when he does unmask, it’s all bitchy anxiety and quotidian detail: “I wonder if Dave Bearden still/ dislikes me,” “I wonder if I’m too old,” “I wonder/ if Ron or Pat bought any toilet paper this morning.” This is not an original voice here. This is a poet lethargically attempting to channel O’Hara’s charming nonchalance and Williams’ reverent investigation of the mundane.

Another notable feature of the Sonnets is Berrigan’s employment of literary and cultural allusions, as well as his casual name-dropping. Is Berrigan “using” these friends and icons, or is everything happening so fast that the references just spill out? Do the figures become (as in some of O’Hara’s most celebrated poems) part of the moment or day equal in relevance to all other details, or are they meant to resonate more deeply? Are they a kind of literary décor, or just a young poet excitedly and unabashedly wearing his influences? What are “Pollock Streets” like? was Keats really a “baiter of bears?”

I tend to read the references as mostly inconsequential. In the world of the Sonnets Snow White “sleeps among the silent dwarfs,” Seurat and Juan Gris “outline Central Park in…blocks of blooming water,” and, most tellingly, Marilyn Monroe’s death is mourned with a B-movie and “King Korn popcorn.” It’s not that the people Berrigan mentions don’t matter—they are integral to the moment in time the poem lives in—but they are used mostly to propel the poem along; as sound, as action: “Ezra pound came down, came/ down and went.” They ask you to be a knowledgeable reader, but to almost immediately let go of that knowledge.

This is a dangerous poetry—a seriously unserious, knotty, quixotic, labyrinthine lyrical snapshot. It succeeds at simultaneously telling you something and nothing. It manages to be casually didactic in the way it spits out its little bites of cultural and literary history (in this way the Sonnets are akin to projects like the Dream Songs, Lowell’s Imitations, the Cantos, etc.). It carries with it all the precarious and hyperbolic bluster of a rock bands big “concept” album. It is Sgt. Pepper’s, Village Green, Ziggy Stardust, and Kid A all rolled into a collection of loose fragmented sonnets. The ideas and jumps from line to line, phrase to phrase, can be so sporadic as to be disorienting—giving the sense of being “out” of the poem (and, consequently, the sequence) at times. The poems ask you to put your trust in the mind and body of the speaker in many of the same ways Ashbery, with all his associative leaps and bounds, seems to ask in his poems.

And of course the biggest risk the Sonnets run is their use of excessive—and at times, it seems, deliberately arbitrary—inter-sequence anaphora. I have to admit this is hard to get past. By the time I finished the book, I was sure I’d read “my dream a drink with” and “a semblance of motion” about fifty times in as many different contexts. Don’t get me wrong, he mixes them up quite well, often times to surprising and interesting results, but in general the refrains become coy and indulgent as the books nears an end—suggesting at times even a brand of laziness.

Upon re-reading, however, as the book unfolds a bit more, the multiple refraining and reordering of lines from poem to poem—like Kees’s “Round” on a massive scale—begs to be taken, at least symbolically, as a sort of statement about process and medium. It’s as if Berrigan’s saying ‘don’t forget, poetry is essentially just playing around with words, and no matter how hard you try to be original you end up simply rearranging what is already available.’ On one hand, this is a very democratic idea: we’re all sharing the same toolkit, so anyone who wants can join the game—plus it’s free! Or is it communistic in nature: i.e., we all have the same stock supplies, therefore no one has any advantage over anyone else (we all know that isn’t true). Still another (and more optimistic) way of thinking about this is that it is true we are limited to words, more specifically the English language, but there are endless combinations within this construct to make something truly original or break from tradition—whatever your aim might be as a poet.

For all their unevenness, the Sonnets are (for lack of a better phrase) a force to be reckoned with. An exercise in New York School strategies one minute, but then something very archaic—almost Elizabethan—the next, Berrigan’s capacity to be entranced by poetry is contagious and, for me at least, he’s the right poet at the right time.