What Do I Say Next? Fast.

There's a memorable line in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto”—nothing but memorable lines in that text—to the effect that only a very few poets are better than the movies. Of O’Hara’s (mostly white male) examples, I’d keep William Carlos Williams, add O’Hara himself, and put O’Hara's fan Ted Berrigan first in the list. Berrigan’s poems are paced like the films of the New Wave, and they’re at least as funny. In fact, his work makes me laugh as much as, or more than, I do when watching, say, Bill Murray comedies. But I also feel Fellini-esque anguish when reading Berrigan, which is as true of his prose as it is his poems.

Consider this scene from “The Chicago Report,” a picaresque journal from 1968, in which Berrigan and a younger man go to a post-reading party:

Henry heads straight for the beautiful girl in the purple dress. I lose track of him. I am suspended between an acid trip and a party. I drop the burning end of my cigarette into the depths of the chair. I try to put it out. I think I succeed, but just in case, I move over to the couch. Hundreds of hours pass. Henry and the girl disappear. I drink some wine, most of the people have gone into other rooms. A young kinky blonde girl about 17 comes and talks to me. I mention Korea, and she says, “I wasn’t even born then.” I say, terrific.

I notice people are carrying cups of water over and pouring them into the chair. Very interesting. It seems to be smoldering. I hear someone say “… don’t know how it happened.” I forget it.

The exuberant abruptness here … Mike Nichols or François Truffaut could have directed it.

Though there is less of Berrigan’s prose than his poetry, the best of it—his early journals, the collaged “interview” with John Cage from 1966, the Chicago Report and the Boston journal—has been crying out to be collected for decades. With the publication of Get the Money!: Collected Prose 1961-1983 (City Lights, 2022), edited by Berrigan’s widow, Alice Notley, their sons Edmund and Anselm Berrigan, and scholar Nick Sturm, readers already familiar with the pleasures of the self-made poet have a new, single-volume resource to consult. This great book stands alongside Berrigan’s Collected Poems (2007); On the Level Everyday (1997), his collected lectures; and Talking in Tranquility (1991), his collected interviews. The book may not teach readers how to interpret or analyze poetry in a way that will impress comparative literature professors, but every page offers a sense of what a living, noninstitutional poetry community looks and sounds like. Over the book’s more than 20-year span, we see when that community is doing well—attracting new recruits, producing new poetic forms—and when it’s under strain as consensus emerges and chance intervenes to support some members but not others, and money and attention accumulate at a slower rate.

Berrigan’s medium was social. He wrote to project real feeling and high spirits into the world, but he wanted more than for his work to be read and talked about—he wanted a world that read and talked about poetry in an excited, serious, well-informed way. He said more than once that he “invented” the New York School of poetry, and there’s something to that claim. Though the poets he most admired from the preceding generation were Ivy League–educated, Berrigan was mainly self-taught; he attended the University of Tulsa on the G.I. Bill after serving in Korea and returned his M.A. with the riposte, “I am master of no art.” In a splendid case of being at the right place at the right time, he was at the center of the mimeo publishing revolution, was a leading presence in the downtown New York poetry world before and after the Poetry Project was founded in 1966, and had more than a passing interest in the folk music and avant-garde art scenes of the day—he preferred Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan and was the subject of an Andy Warhol screen test. He was gracious but not ingratiating.

Berrigan, who’d been sick with hepatitis for several years, died on the Fourth of July in 1983—he was only 48. When I was a young poet in the early ’90s, his books—and his total commitment to a 24/7 life in poetry—persuaded me that if I wanted to be a poet, I, too, had better move to the Lower East Side. Berrigan’s gamble led to mixed results in his own life, but health was no obstacle for me or for those who studied with him in his brief career as a visiting poetry professor at institutions across the US and in England. He made his life—which I knew was one of relative poverty, personal loss, and improbable belief in making a living in literature—look heroic.

Like O’Hara, Berrigan had a gift for saying the most important things in as offhand a way as possible: readers, guard down, are overwhelmed by the intensity of what they suddenly realize on their own. In the span of three decades, he innovated at least four new approaches to breaking his readers apart and putting them back together: in the echoes and repetitions of difficult marriage in The Sonnets (1964); in the sudden turn of unexpected death in his spirited long poem “Tambourine Life”; in the everyday pathos of happy marriage in “Easter Monday”; and in the summary reckoning with mortality in the major last poems “Cranston Near the City Line,” “Last Poem,” and “Red Shift,” among others. In these pieces, Berrigan looks at what the world calls responsibility and compares it to what the art, literature, and movies that he loves say about responsibility: he throws his whole self behind making an ideal. It doesn’t leave much permission for writing what he referred to as “jackoff” poems, but it also doesn’t allow the poet to strike a solemn pose and let the publicity photo do the work expected of the words themselves.

I read poets’ prose, when I get around to it, partly for the assured ease of aesthetic certainty, for the delight of seeing the poet’s familiar word-combining machine used to say something so clear that someone else paid money for it. I also read poets’ prose partly for the itinerary. I want to check out the art that excited them. Berrigan’s itinerary was extensive and included, among other highlights not then universally appreciated:

Alfred North Whitehead, Aims of Education
Count Korzybski, Science and Sanity
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism
The poems of Milton
Lord Byron, Don Juan and Cain
Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”
Miles Davis, “Bye Bye Blackbird”
Moiseyev Dance Company
Shaw on music
Complete works of John Ashbery (as of 1962)
Kenneth Koch, Thank You
Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism
Henry Miller
Hesiod
Remy De Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love
Elizabethan and Jacobean madrigals
Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature
Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar
Jack Gelber, The Connection
Frank O’Hara, review of Some Trees in Poetry magazine
Marcel Duchamp, The Green Box
Joseph Ceravolo, Fits of Dawn
Guillaume Apollinaire, Corona di cazz and In vase proepostero

Reverence and enthusiasm inform Berrigan’s lists as does a near total absence of duds. Even in this litany of gold, one item stands out for the impossible-to-fake endorsement. In a journal entry two days before his 28th birthday, Berrigan wrote, “Today I took Pat [Mitchell, who later married Berrigan’s friend, the poet Ron Padgett] to see the New Realism show during her lunch hour. Then I spent the afternoon in sheer ecstasy reading Frank O’Hara’s review of Some Trees in Poetry Magazine 1956—and The Green Box by Marcel Duchamp.”

O’Hara’s omnibus review of Ashbery, Chester Kallman, and Edwin Denby actually appeared in Poetry in 1957. It is an accomplished defense of friends—the kind that makes one wonder how much is earnest advocacy for the art and how much is camouflaged self-interest. As it turns out, a review can be 100 percent sincere and self-interested. O’Hara begins by invoking contemporary painters’ distaste for academicism versus poets’ relative acceptance of it. Poets, he writes, “do not feel that their art is contemporary, they feel that their loneliness is; for them, being academic is a way of being friendly with the other poets.” Friendliness! That sounds good. O’Hara continues: “How many recent books resemble a ‘good design’ show! Poet and public are being brought together by that famous American subject of communication, know-how. And everyone becomes friends at the wake of Art.” (So, friendliness … not good?) Berrigan seized on the cheerful absolutism of this clearing of the field in the name of art and never looked back.

In what I take to be a creative misunderstanding of O’Hara’s endearingly persuasive we-they rhetoric, Berrigan’s criticism prefers blunt assertions. His review of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems begins, “It’s a great book!” Similarly, he opens his review of Ron Padgett’s In Advance of the Broken Arm (1964) with praise of his closest competitor verging on litotes: “Padgett is really good: he’s really got something there.” In his review of two books by Allen Katzman, the commentary veers dangerously close to libel: “Another poet, after reading the following poem (printed in Lines magazine) said to me, ‘Katzman’s crazy! He’ll murder somebody some day!’” (Berrigan doesn’t agree.) Taking up a collection by the post-Auden English poet F. T. Prince, one of the New York School’s cult favorites, Berrigan leads by excusing himself from the formalities of reviewing: “I can’t find much to say about this book. Really I don’t even read it much, though I have read it much, but every time I do look into it I never fail to be dazzled by the quiet rich beauty of the lines.” And then 99 lines of a Prince poem follow. What reviewer has never wanted to take this way out? What editor would ever agree to it?

Berrigan’s reviews of poets often include as much real estate for excerpts as for his own commentary. His brief review, more than a decade after publication, of the New Directions annual for 1953 consists of a James Schuyler prose poem, “Two Meditations,” that’s nearly three times as long as Berrigan’s own text, which expresses disappointment with the press in general, a feeling one still hears grumbled downtown from time to time. The review of Lunch Poems includes the entire 85-line “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s.” Three previously unpublished reviews toward the end of the collection consist only of words from the books under review, pushing this appropriative tendency as far as it can go.

Berrigan’s literary politics are congenial and for the most part democratic: real poets read everybody, poets starting out will want to give at least seven years of their lives to making poetry the main thing they do, misunderstanding is good, everyone can make poetry (and probably ought to). His literary ethics are more complicated. For starters, plagiarism is good. “I love the idea of making art by changing one thing in a picture, in someone else’s work too, by simply changing one thing and making it be your work. And somehow it’s still their work too but now it’s all your work.” This is not, strictly speaking, plagiarism. I take Berrigan to use the term to mean transformative use of another writer’s words in a new context, from quotations of a phrase or a single line to a collage of several sources into a new work, a cento of sorts. “Tambourine Life,” his most sustained effort at making a work of quotation, begins by stealing the text of a bumper sticker by the gadfly editor Paul Krassner and goes on to appropriate lines from Yeats, protest slogans, the poet and children’s author Ruth Krauss, the aforementioned Count Korzybski, Berrigan’s own poems, reference books, Picasso, and the table talk of his friends, among other sources.

Berrigan said he wrote because “I like to see what I will say”—itself a sentiment semi-plagiarized from E. M. Forster. Less democratic and more protectively autonomous is his confession: “I didn’t want to know any other writers until I was good and because I didn’t want to be advised.” But once writers reach that threshold of security and confidence in their ability, circulating among and competing with other writers becomes important, as Berrigan avers: “Competition by no means involves there being winners and losers—the purpose of the competition is for the player to play and perform the feats that they perform to the extreme, to the utmost of their ability, including all grace, agility, deftness.”

Berrigan’s aesthetics are the most complicated of all. At first, it may seem as though his sense of beauty is a private matter, that he knows it when he sees it, and readers can know it only when they see what Berrigan sees:

There is only one way to write poems that are no good—that’s to be not very amusing. … You must make what you write be shapely in some way. There must be the feel of the shapeliness to it that one can get when one reads it. Otherwise … you’ll stop reading it after a while … it will seem to you that it’s not going anywhere, i.e., that it’s not going to work.

One poet he singled out for this “opposite of petty, which is grand” quality was Simon Schuchat, now better known as a former diplomat and a translator of Russian and Chinese poetry but then admired as the author of lines such as “Here I am walking into the ocean / the sky / which is an ocean—and the most beautiful / of many.”

And then there is the problem of standards:

Now it’s important when you write poems, to write good poems. Better yet, it’s not so important to write good poems, because, that’s what academics do; what it’s important to do is write terrific poems. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that. All you have to do is look at lots of poems by poets that are terrific, whose poems are terrific, and see what make up a terrific poem, and then write some terrific poems yourself.

This may appear to be heading toward a dead-end tautology of trying to teach poetry writing by instructing students to “write good poems.” In fact, the sense that poems have to “work” or be “terrific” is the opposite of holding oneself to a standard of excellence—it’s to hold one’s work to a standard of feeling alive. As either Berrigan or Bernadette Mayer puts it in “Litany,” a quasi-interview toward the end of Get the Money!, “What’s wrong with good writers with funny personalities is … that they aren’t running for their lives.” Or as quoted in the journals of the artist Donna Dennis, Berrigan’s partner during part of the period between his marriages, “He suggested one way to work (he said it was more real life—which sounds right) was to show the confusion stage arriving at order.” In an interview with Anne Waldman and Jim Cohn, Berrigan says, “When I was writing, I thought, ‘Ah, put these lines in here, write these four lines. What do I say next? Fast.’ I didn’t want to say, ‘Good.’ I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, that works, it enables me to say this.”

This, ultimately, is the composite picture that emerges of Berrigan: a maker of poems who listens honestly to his own best work and then continuously listens for the sound of the next kind of poem for as long as the poems will have him.

The dividing line between Berrigan’s prose and poetry is probably not that important. As Berrigan writes in an account of a teacher-training project he was hired for alongside Adrienne Rich and Ned O’Gorman, “I didn’t care to worry myself about what was poetry & what wasn’t. All that interested me was whether or not it moved me, surprised me, delighted me, bored me, etc. &, I added, a poet is simply a person who writes or has written poems: even one poem. Those definitions were not relevant to what we cared about, I thought.”

What I care about is that most of the major prose works published under Berrigan’s name are collected in Get the Money! A long fiction work, a procedurally altered Western—think erasure poem on speed—titled Clear the Range, from 1977, is not included. That’s fine. More disappointing is the omission of “Looking for Chris,” which the editors describe as “an autobiographical sort of portrait of the artist as a young man in gibberish,” one of the five parts of which is missing. As mentioned above, the early journals are not printed in their entirety; a diligent pilgrim will want to consult the complete text at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University's Butler Library. Still, readers are treated to rarities such as “Some Notes About ‘C’” (an account of one of the births of mimeo publishing), his notes on Joe Brainard, his obituary of Frank O’Hara, and “Ten Things About the Boston Trip.”

Get the Money! is edited with care but not in any attempt to idealize Berrigan, which, among other things, means the preservation of occasional regrettable sentiments. Included here, for example, is a complaint about Bernadette Mayer who, as director of the Poetry Project, allegedly removed a translation by Berrigan and Notley from an issue of The World, the Project’s house journal. (Incidentally, Anselm Berrigan went on to direct the Poetry Project from 2003 to 2007.) The translation, which resembles what in the internet era is called a subtweet, is titled “Motto of the Whores and Poets Guild,” and reads “You’ll do good if you play it like you’re not getting paid. / But you’ll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you.” Berrigan’s satirical response to Mayer’s “censorship,” published less than two months before his death, makes a kind of joke that opens an abyss of doubt: he imagines “recycling” her into lampshades and soap and calls himself the Guardian of the Ovens. That’s not a joke anyone with a heart would make, and the extremity of Berrigan’s situation doesn’t excuse it. It would have been better not to include it. Anselm Berrigan’s solid introduction speaks well of his father’s character; I’m less impressed by the group-composed editorial note acknowledging the risks Berrigan took for his belief that it is “necessary that all language be on the table.” Sounds like a rationalization to me; I want to believe it was just a lapse of taste in a dark time. I don’t get the sense from Get the Money! that Berrigan meant to exclude anyone from anything—except for boring poets, whom he wanted to get away from at all costs.