Ted Berrigan by Alex Katz

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I met Ted at two parties at the same house
at the first he insulted me because, he said later
he was mad at girls that night; at the second we danced
an elaborate fox-trot with dipping--he had once taken one lesson
at an Arthur Murray's.  First I went into an empty
room and waited for him to follow me.  I liked the way
his poems looked on the page open but delicately arranged.

I like him because he's funny he talks more like
me than like books or words:  he likes my knowledge and
accepts its sources.  I know that there are Channel swimmers
and that they keep warm with grease because of
an Esther Williams movie.  We differ as to what kind
of grease I suggest bacon he says it's bear
really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car
Who's ever greased a car?  Not him I find he prefers to white out
all the speech balloons in a Tarzan comic
and print in new words for the characters.  Do you want
to do some?  he says--No--We go to a movie where Rachel Welch
and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him
laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot
Do you mean, I say, when she said We should have keeled him long ago?
Finally a man knows that I'm being funny

He's eleven years older than me and takes pills
I take some a few months later and write
I think it's eighty-three poems I forget about Plath and James Wright
he warns me   about pills in a slantwise way See this
nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization
I notice some broken capillaries who cares

I wonder who I am now myself though I haven't
anticipated me entirely I have such an appetite
to write not to live I'm certainly living quity fully
We're good together he says because we can be like
little boy and little girl I give him much later a
girl's cheap Dutch brooch Delft blue and white
a girl and a boy holding hands and windmills
But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for
Europe gives me the key to his library stored
in a room at The Writer's Workshop
I write mildly yet oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"
how a street turns that sensation to make it permanent
a daily transition as the curve opens and is walked on
of the kinds of experience still in between the ones
talked about in literature and even in Ted's library
which finally makes poetry possible for me but I've
not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be

--from Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley

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http://www.artworkbysteve.co.uk/prints.html

She

She is always two blue eyes
She is never lost in sleep
All her dreams are light & air
They sometimes melt the sun
She makes me smile, or
She makes me cry, she
Makes me laugh, and I talk to her
With really nothing particularly to say.

       --from The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

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During Naropa University's Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :

Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching at Naropa University and The New School in San Francisco.

Joanne Kyger’s writings include:

Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000

About Now:  Collected Poems

In her essay "Joanne Kyger's Poetry" in Coming After:  Essays on Poetry,

Alice Notley states:

Kyger's influence on my own practice--and on many other women's--has been considerable; she's one of the women who's shown me how to speak as myself, to be intelligent in the way I wish and am, rather than suiting the requirements of established intellectuality.  Universities are frightfully conservative because they love their traditions and especially their language; idiomatic truth can't get born there, or anything that has to be new, not just wants to be.

*

           Yuppy Wittgensteins Arise!

She writes

and drinks

coffee

and writes:

                "I want to point out that I am not up tight"

                                 "You believe this stash of writing is 'scholarly'?"

"Oh Man is the highest type of animal existing..."

and

I

love

her dailiness, which is to say her everyday manner of setting down

her life, one day at a time.  Visiting Gary's [Snyder] house last night...  I was

no longer in waiting as this world I called my own opened out.

                She is full of personality and pizzazz, she is witty:  It was suggested

by Robert Duncan that we all write/ Cock Poems for the next class.  Splendid!

Like Anne Waldman, I wish she was my neighbor.  As she is still alive, and as 

I took a class with her, I have a mind to write to her.  I once

sent her a beautiful wave painting that my friend Robin made and

I like to think it is on her window ledge in her writing shed where sit:

               Tiny light grey moth

                      New Delhi bronze rabbit

                                Roy de Forest dog

                                              Kwan Yin

             Joanne Kyger once wrote "The Life of Naropa   for Ted Berrigan," in which

she told about the sentient blissful brilliant light that was Naropa.  (Ken

gave me her Collected Poems for my birthday, but also, I have the limited edition 

Just Space, printed in Ann Arbor, which she signed: 

Write in your journal

every day! 

           And Joanne wrote It's terrible what's happening in this war

atmosphere when 'your' government lies to you and neglects the people...and:       

                           "The expression of my thoughts

             in music as natural

                    and easy as breathing

                           my greatest consolation

                                   to this day."

Here is Joanne Kyger reading at UC Berkeley in April of 2007:

Lunch Poems: Joanne Kyger

In honor of Joanne Kyger,

may her work flourish.

Above photo by Allen Ginsberg, 1963

EPC page on Joanne: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/  

Bio Notes & Publications

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How strange to be gone in a minute!            A man

Signs a shovel and so he digs          Everything

Turns into writing a name for a day

                                                  Someone

is having a birthday and someone is getting

married and someone is telling a joke          my dream

a white tree        I dream of the code of the west

But this rough magic I here abjure          and

When I have required some heavenly music        which even now

I do      to work mine end upon their senses

That this aery charm is for             I'll break

My staff          bury it certain fathoms in the earth

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book

It is 5:15 a.m.                                         Dear Chris, hello.

--Ted Berrigan

*Photo from Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceheginero/

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Uploaded on April 13, 2006
by jahdakine



She (Not to be confused with she, a girl)

She alters all our lives for the better merely
By her presence in it.  She is a star.  She is
Radiant, & She is vibrant (integrity).  She animates
And gathers the community.  Half the world's population
Is under 25.  She permits everybody to be themselves more often
         than not.
She is elegant.  I love her.
                                     She writes poetry of an easy & graceful
Intimacy.  She is brave.  She is always slightly breathless, or
Almost always slightly.  She is witty.  She owns a proud & lovely
Dignity, & She is always willing to see it through.
She is an open circle, Her many selves at or near the center, &
She is here right now.  Technically, She is impeccable, &
If She is clumsy in places, those are clumsy places.  She knows
Exactly what she is doing & not before She is doing it.  What
She discovers She discovered before She discovers it, and so
The fresh discovery of each new day.  Her songs are joyous songs,
& they are prayers, never failing to catch the rush of hope
           (anticipation)


                     Ted Berrigan, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

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