PennSound Daily (original) (raw)

November 15th would have been the 85th birthday of Ted Berrigan, a poet of capacious talents and appetites whose life and work continues to resonate decades after his premature death. We honor him today by taking a tour of his PennSound author page, which has grown exponentially over the course of our history.

Our earliest recording comes from a 1968 visit to SUNY-Buffalo, where Robert Creeley provided an introduction to a set that includes a number of iconic early poems like "Words for Love," "Living with Chris," "For You," and "Things to Do in New York City," along with a generous selections from The Sonnets. That's followed by a May 1971 reading with Anne Waldman of their co-authored poem "Memorial Day" in its entirety, and while we now know that this isn't the sole surviving copy of this historic reading, that makes it no less breathtaking. Next, there's an August 1971 reading a San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, whose setlist draws heavily from poems that would eventually be published in 1975's Red Wagon, including "Wishes," "Ophelia," "Wrong Train," "Frank O'Hara," "Crystal" and "Three Sonnets and a Coda for Tom Clark," along with "People Who Died" (from 1970's In the Early Morning Rain), "Southampton Business" (published in 1977's Nothing for You) and the as-yet-unpublished "Things To Do in Bolinas." The true standout tracks, however, are of some of Berrigan's most-beloved works from the period — "Words for Love," "What I'd Like for Christmas, 1970," "Today in Ann Arbor" and "Things To Do in Providence" — performed with their full emotional weight and playful hilarity, by a young writer at the peak of his poetic abilities.

Moving forward in time, we have a trio of recordings from a March 28, 1973 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project that were released on the 1980 album, the World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980 — "Things to Do in New York City," "Landscape with Figures (Southampton)" and "Frank O'Hara" — followed by an August 1977 appearance on on Public Access Poetry with Harris Schiff, where Berrigan read a handful of mid-70s poems like "A Little American Feedback," "Carrying a Torch," "Erasable Picabia," and "From A List of the Delusions of the Insane, What They Are Afraid Of." From August 1978, we have Berrigan's appearance on In the American Tree, hosted by Lyn Hejinian and Kit Robinson. In this 35 minute program, the poet reads from Red Wagon and his Easter Monday manuscript, and discusses his compositional techniques, including his novel, Clear the Range. Highlights include "Whitman in Black," "Buddha on the Bounty," "Personal Poem #9," "Crystal," "Three Pages" and "Remembered Poem." From December of the same year, we have a Jim Brodey-organized recording of The Sonnets that starts with an intro from Ron Padgett and singing by Shelley Kraut, which unfortunately suffers from audio quality issues for a roughly twenty-minute span towards the beginning.

Next we have a handful of audio and video recordings from Naropa University made during 1979 and 1980, followed by the heart of our Berrigan author page (and one of the very first recordings to be added to PennSound) is a historic and controversial June 1981 reading of his masterpiece, The Sonnets, in its entirety as part of a residency at San Francisco's New Langton Arts Center. Berrigan had been preparing the manuscript for a new edition of The Sonnets to be published the following year by United Artists, and therefore this reading includes a number of poems left out of the 1966 Grove Press edition, making this (until the revised 2000 Penguin Poets edition) the most complete record of his debut collection. Equally important is the poet's lengthy introduction, running nearly ten minutes, in which he describes in great detail the origins of the methods employed in The Sonnets, his life story in the years surrounding its composition and his early correspondences with poets who'd go on to become some of his closest friends (including Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara and Philip Whalen).

Our last complete reading is a 1982 set at Bard College that covers Berrigan's _A Certain Slant of Sunlight_-era output, including the title poem, "Red Shift," "A Poets Tribute to Philip Guston," "Blue Galahad," "The School Windows Song," and "Sleeping Alone." There are also a few scattered tracks, including "Red Shift" from the Peter Gizzi-edited Exact Change Yearbook #1 and an excerpt from "Memorial Day" from Waldman's 2001 album, Alchemical Energy. Last, but by no means least, is PoemTalk #5, which addresses Berrigan's "3 Pages (for Jack Collom)." You can listen to all of the recordings mentioned above on PennSound's Ted Berrigan author page — clicking on the title above will take you directly there.