Postscript

going around cities

Wolfram Hogrebe

Adam Knowles

pp. 177-189

in: Geoff Ward, Statutes of liberty, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstrakt

Ted Berrigan (1934–83) was wont to say that he invented the New York School of poetry. And there is psychological, though not historical truth to this. His poems do not simply issue from such an idea, but also take it on as their subject matter; saying it, to make it happen. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Berrigan moved to New York in the early sixties and met Frank O"Hara, whom he venerated. Chiefly from his reading of the older poet, Berrigan developed a poetry that could move easily from neo-Surrealist snapshot effects to autobiographical narrative, transcribed talk, and the collaging of "found" texts — including recognizable chunks from the work of Ashbery and O"Hara. An early poem presents Berrigan on a "Whirl thru mad Manhattan dressed in books/looking for today", and an analogue for his co-opting of found materials occurs in the periodic references to "liberating" the physical book from the bookstore. Berrigan's liberation of bits of O"Hara is strictly an act of de-liberation, the first example historically of the older poet being laundered and turned into a reusable influence. The begetter of Berrigan's demi-Surrealist non sequiturs and flip one-liners is immediately apparent: "It's not exciting to have a bar of soap/in your right breast pocket/it's not boring either/it's just what's happening in America, in 1965".