The 'Mess and Message' of Ted Berrigan

Today on Dennis Cooper's blog "DC's Spotlight," Cooper provides a long quote from Reva Wolf concerning Mr. Ted Berrigan. The quote remarks on The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2011, UC Press), to be precise. "The message of his poetry is the mess that is life," writes Wolf. More on mess, appropriation, style, and Stein:

'In his piece “Interview with John Cage,” first published in the collaborative volume, Bean Spasms (1967), Berrigan transformed Warhol’s “everybody should like everybody” into “everybody should be alike”, producing an intriguing paradox. Copying words would seem to correspond to being alike, or with sameness. Yet Berrigan’s various kinds of copying, with their deliberate or accidental mis-copying and with their recontextualizations, show us that this sameness never occurs. This paradox fascinated Berrigan from early on; in one of many notes on “style” in his journals, dated December 27, 1962, he quoted at length from Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation, including this passage on the apparent contradiction of likeness: “Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and Romanticism.” Berrigan illustrates by example that the truth of who anybody is forces itself out no matter what. We are left with “mess and message” instead of with a neat machine-made copy.

'This mess and message of Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation have made it difficult for some critics to know what to do with his writing. In her 1973 overview of contemporary poetry, critic Marjorie Perloff—a great supporter of the work of Ashbery and of O’Hara—complains that Berrigan’s poetry is “self-indulgent” and that it has the “superficial O’Hara trappings,” but that unlike O’Hara’s poetry, “nothing adds up”. Two decades later, another critic, Geoff Ward, repeated Perloff’s judgment, asserting that Berrigan’s writing is too dominated by O’Hara to contain a unique voice. One critic even put Berrigan and Padgett’s volume, Bean Spasms, on a list of publications that librarians need not bother to acquire. Slowly, though, the critical scales are beginning to tip in the other direction, and the recent publication of the Collected Poems has given some critics a better sense of the breadth and complexity of Berrigan’s work.

'If in Berrigan’s poetry “nothing adds up,” as Perloff would have it, then perhaps we ought to say that in life itself, nothing adds up. Perhaps Berrigan’s messy contamination of life with art, and of art with life, has made Perloff and other critics uncomfortable. Or perhaps the honesty of this contamination is the source of their unease . . .

Read the rest at Dennis Cooper's blog.