Ted Berrigan: The Sonnets
The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan. Penguin Books 2000. 94pp, ISBN 0 14 058927 9. US $16 [this is an American edition and not distributed in the UK - it should, however, be available from bookshops by special order, or try an online store such as www.amazon.co.uk].
Ted Berrigan's early masterpiece The Sonnets is a sequence of seventy-eight short poems, none of them formally sonnets, though the majority are fourteen lines long. Most of the poems were written in New York in the spring of 1963, and their world is that of the wide-open pre-psychedelic sixties of pop art - Andy Warhol painting Marilyn Monroe, only a few months dead - where the poet's affection for comic books and B-movies could prove quite as integral to his work as his love of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud or the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. In 1963, Berrigan was twenty-eight and recently-arrived in New York, having attended the University of Tulsa under the G.I. Bill after military service in Korea. Many of the friends he made on the way also gravitated to New York, and one of the book's many charms is its sheer friendliness - its atmosphere of having been written among friends, lovers and mentors, people who supported each other, living in each other's pockets and spare rooms.
One of the book's main formal influences is The Tennis Court Oath, John Ashbery's fierce, uneven 1962 collection of experimental poems and cut-ups, written out of Ashbery's experience of alienation from his native language at a time when he was living in France and conducting his daily life in French. While The Sonnets learned a lot from the mysterious disjunctiveness of Ashbery's work,
You can make this swooped transition on your lips
Go to the sea, the lake, the tree
And the dog days come
Your head spins when the old bull rushes
Back in the airy daylight, he was not a midget
And preferred to be known as a stunt-man
(Sonnet XXXV),
there's little sense in Berrigan's work of the poet alone in Language with no-one to talk to: the material of The Sonnets is above all shared. The young artists, writers and friends of Berrigan's circle held much more in common than a set of influences: one sonnet might be Berrigan's rearrangement of an abandoned poem given to him by a friend, another might be a variation on a John Ashbery poem or a homage to Frank O'Hara, another a cut-up entry from the diary of the artist Joe Brainard (Berrigan was an inveterate and frequently hilarious collaborator with artists).
The many voices thus brought into The Sonnets are often splintered and distributed, key lines repeating in different contexts with a dizzying disparity of effect, but in fact the degree of language-disruption is highly variable from line to line, and from sonnet to sonnet: some of the book's strangest and still-fresh surprises come when the reader, having grown to expect disjunctiveness, arrives at a passage or a poem written in entirely plain English syntax, and at first fails to recognise it as such (the shock of the one plain glass mirror in the hall of distorting glass).
Acknowledged as a major influence on experimental writing since the 1960s, The Sonnets is an often funny, often beautiful, always likeable collision of sex, drugs, friendship and Dada which should be more widely known. One last quote:
O wet kisses, the poem on the page
Can tell you about teeth you've never dreamed
Could bite, nor be such reassurance! Babies are not
Like Word Origins and cribbage boards or dreams
of correspondence! Fucking is so very lovely
Who can say no to it later?
(Sonnet LIII)
This review appeared in issue 28 of Northwords magazine.
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