The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Edited by Alice Notely (University of California Press)

It's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Ted Berrigan's poems was the rather nonbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. Here Berrigan jots down the things that does in the course of a day regardless of the emotional dynamics or the consequences of intervening events.

10 THINGS I DO EVERY DAY
by Ted Berrigan

wake up
smoke pot
see the cat
love my wife
think of Frank

eat lunch
make noises
sing songs
go out
dig the streets

go home for dinner
read the Post
make pee-pee
two kids
grin

read books
see my friends
get pissed-off
have a Pepsi
disappear

This is not Berrigan going depressed into the dark night that awaits; it reads more like a man feeling the weight of a increased waist line and the weight of familiar activity that come to seem more like stops along a maze that has no exit. The point of the list with it's small, banal listings is to make ito the end of the day, to vanish into sleep.
This takes my breath away, the idea of a series of sighs and mumbled asides rise to an audible sequence and provide the minimal but powerful considered portrait of the daily grind, the awful routines we commit to rather than pursue our what once might have been thought of as our true callings; the voice hangs on the end of the short lines, as if in suspension, waiting for an affirmative line or joke to lighten the tone, but this remains the bone-picked image of borderline despair, the slow death.
"...have a Pepsi /disappear..." encapsulates the mood , and makes it clear that sometimes one feels the words one speaks to others comes from elsewhere, not our souls, certainly not our mouths.

The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing imcomprehension of the why of the invisible world.

I don't get it, Ted. That guy writes a list of inane things he did and it is poetry. I write the following and it sucks (and I even have Irish ancestry!):

Cancer in Parts

1

I was told I had cancer.
It felt like a death sentence.
And I said Okay.

How do you say Okay when
someone says
you are going to die?

2

I was told I had cancer
and I said, Can I watch this game before I die?
And they said okay, and I did.

How do you say I want to watch a game
when you have been told you have cancer?

How do they say Okay?

My team won.

3

I was told I had cancer
and everybody cried,
even my doctor.

I didn't cry.

I said what's next?

And the air grew still and the night was quiet.

4

I was told I had cancer
and I heard the knives sharpening in another room

5

One time in my life, I woke up and I couldn't speak
and everyone but me was happy
and I was laughing

even though I wasn't happy

but no one could hear me
no matter how hard I tried

So I laughed some more.
And still they didn't hear me.

How happy can you be when you cannot laugh?
How happy can you be when you cannot hear somebody laugh?

6

I was told I had cancer
and I did not lie down in a fetal position
or tell them to kill me then and there
or let me choose my pill of choice.

I said, My team is playing,
Can I watch them before you change my life forever?

And they said yes.

7

How do you say Yes when someone asks for something
before you change their life forever?

8

How do you say No?

9

When I was six years old I stepped on a board
with a large nail sticking out of it
and the nail went completely through my foot,
from sole to air above my foot

And I pulled it out and ran
ran straight for home
a hundred miles away it seemed
and thought that nothng worse
could ever happen in my life.

I was wrong.

10

I was wrong.

I wouldn't say this sucks, Soccerfreak. In fact, I like the way you address this topic and think you're on to something with presenting it in ten parts. Berrigan's list gets to me because I detect a melancholy behind his terse lines, and I sense this bit of sadness has as more to do with tedium than with personal calamity; the poem outlines a life where nothing is going wrong, from appearances, and yet one gets the feeling of being imprisoned by their routine.

Your list deals with a rather more dramatic situation, a life-threatening and lifestyle changing disease, and where it stumbles , I think, is when it gets wordy. Cancer isn't an easy subject to write about, and one has to consider what kind of ambiguities one wants to convey that a reader might pause and consider against their own experience. I would pare back the sections, and emphasise the contrasts of details for a stronger effect, as in stanza 6

6

I was told I had cancer
and I did not lie down in a fetal position
or tell them to kill me then and there
or let me choose my pill of choice.

I said, My team is playing,
Can I watch them before you change my life forever?

And they said yes.

I would rid the poem of the recurring"I was told I had cancer "
motif and get straight to the situation, but condensing the lines, paring it back.

<i>I did not lie down
and choose my pill of choice

I said, My team is playing,
Can I watch them before you change my life forever?</i>

You might consider doing this with all the stanzas; I've found that when trying to write about personal issues in a poem I intend for others to read and consider as something worth evaluating as a possible bit of "art", the more reserved, spare, suggestively elliptical language and images serve the topic better. It helps me sort through the mixed emotions and complicated consequences, and it stops me from spinning into a wallow. You have powerful material here, and it's quite possible to edit it and retool to a fine, unforgettable expression.

Thank you for the generous response, Ted. It was, in fact, most generous. I might have replied, 'because yours sucks' :).

I have never rewritten anything, but will have a look at what you suggest. In the meantime, while thinking about my own response to Cancer In Parts (it sucks), I came up with this, specifically in honor of your friend Ted Berrigan, which is not yet spare, but at least whimsical in places (although also coarse).

Cancer Day

Wake up (whew!)
Drink water
Spit out mucus
Take meds
Take more meds
Choke on meds
Drink water
Stick plastic syringe in tube
Pour shit into tube (nutritious shit)
Repeat until nutritious shit is gone
Take shower
Clean tube wound
Wrap tube wound
Feed dogs
Let dogs out (avoid dogs' feet)
Let dogs in (avoid dogs' feet)
Drive to Chemo Palace
Say hi to nice looking chick
(who has no interest in dying old man with foolish dreams)
Turn head away while needle is inserted
Watch blood draw
Repeat twice
Wait
Hear name
Go to Chemo Room
Wait
Turn head away while needle is inserted
Watch flush
Wait
Watch first bag of stuff go in (decadron)
Wait
Watch second bag of stuff go in (benadryl)
Wait
Watch third bag of stuff go in (zentac)
Wait
Watch first bag of poison go in (chemoplatin)
Wait
Watch second bag of poison go in (taxol)
Wait
Watch nurse take out butterfly needle
Wait
Make new appointment for new poison
Drive home
Repeat nutrition stuff
Feel steroid buzz
Feel like Superman
Feel steroid buzz wane
Feel like shit (not nutritious shit)
Fall into darkness (meet Joseph Conrad in dreams)
Wake up (whew!)

Wash, rinse, repeat.

If I may, I'd like to make a couple of comments. It seems that Berrigan is telling us about things he's come to terms with. You're talking about things you haven't come to terms with - that's what the questions suggest. I guess you're trying to come to terms with them through writing this. It's a different set of problems. Someone suggested once waiting for five years to write about life events. Poignant, huh? Maybe not literally necessary. The grain of truth is, I think, that when you're close to something everything about it seems to have the same weight. But it doesn't. I think the strongest line here is "My team is playing, Can I watch them?" That's how we know it's you. Everything else supports that line, and draws its meaning from it. That's how I'd go about re-writing it. If I wanted to, you know, re-write it.
Thanks for posting Cancer Day. I'm glad I got a chance to read it.

Falcon, thank you for the observations. I am frankly astonished, to the point of finding it amusing, that both you and Ted singled out the 'my team is playing' items, as I was considering cutting those references as not germane :).

I was hanging my hat, frankly, on the nail in the foot and "I was wrong. / I was wrong."

How interesting to get these other views and to have to reconsider one's one!

Again, thanks. Having recently rewritten somebody else's post on this very site several times (waltz & capsize) to try to make poetry of it, I found it entertaining, at the very least, and perhaps I am ready to admit that I cannot do it all in one sitting :).

Take care.

Right up front let me say I like 10 things I do every day, so what I have to say isn't critical.

But the thing is I'm just not sure how to combine two or more lines into a single thing to make it add up to only 10 things. On its face, it looks like 20. But maybe that's too simplistic. Here's one way to make it add up to 10.

1. wake up smok(ing) pot

2. see the cat love my wife

or (weirdly)

2b. love my wife (while) think(ing) of Frank

3. eat lunch (while) mak(ing lunch eating) noises

4. sing songs

5. go out (and) dig the streets

6. go home for dinner (but instead just) read the Post

7. make pee-pee

8. (I have) two kids (who make me) grin

or

8b. (I) grin (as I) read books

9. (When I) see my friends (I) get pissed-off

10. have a (disappearance causing) Pepsi (and) disappear

Am I missing something? Or maybe once he wakes up and smokes pot (though he never claimed the list was in order) he quickly loses count. Or is the point of the title to make us figure this out?

If we don't take it in order, there are other possibilities.

Smoke pot/disappear

Go out/make pee pee

Love my wife/make pee pee

See my friends make pee pee

See the cat make pee pee

See my friends love my wife

See my friends smoke pot

So why is it called TEN things?

I agree with Ted--it doesn't suck. Indeed, much of it is really good.

Sometimes writing parody liberates one's style--the burden of ambition and "originality" is lifted, and a more playful language emerges. Sometimes satirizing something brings out an unintended affinity between satirist and satirized.