Product Description

After many years out of print, Ted Berrigan's highly regarded sonnets are now available in a new edition that includes seven previously unpublished works. Reflecting the new American sensibilities of the 1960s as well as timeless poetic themes, The Sonnets are both eclectic and classical--they are verbal riddles worth contemplating.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #584006 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-01
• Released on: 2000-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The sonnet, in Berrigan's hands (and scissors), was as much an arbitrary frame for experience as a traditional form. In her introduction and notes to this fifth and definitive printing of her late first husband's 1963 collage masterpiece, poet Alice Notley makes a persuasive case for the philosophical and art-historical grounding of these poems. On now greatly facilitated rereading, however, they remain first and foremost wonderful poetry. Berrigan's "sonnets" (conventional almost exclusively in their line count) were put together using a plethora of now-famous techniques: frame-breaking jump cuts, lines and phrases transposed from poem to poem and line to line, sound-based translations from French (and English), and simply beautiful writing. These methods, some lifted from John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath, are put in the service of plotlines both poignant and surly, and details hilarious and sensuous: "I think I was thinking when I was/ ahead I'd be somewhere like Perry street erudite/ dazzling slim and badly loved/ contemplating my new book of poems/ to be printed in simple type on old brown paper/ feminine marvelous and tough." The sonnet's customary pithy closing couplet is here converted into the detached, calm endings of modern poems and short stories. And the volta, or the rhetorical turn that characterizes Shakespeare's sonnets, isn't fixed at the beginning of the ninth line, as befits a poetry influenced (as Notley notes) by Whitehead's theory of time. This edition includes seven previously uncollected sonnets; these, with Notley's commentary, make this an indispensable addition to any poetry library. One hopes it will alert publishers to the need for a Collected Berrigan, and introduce new readers to a midcentury classic.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
From A Secret Journal
Mess Occupations
Penn Station
Poem In The Modern Manner
Poem In The Traditional Manner
Real Life: 1. The Fool
Real Life: 2. The Fiend
A Sonnet For Dick Gallup
Sonnet: 1
Sonnet: 13
Sonnet: 14
Sonnet: 15
Sonnet: 16
Sonnet: 17
Sonnet: 18
Sonnet: 19
Sonnet: 2
Sonnet: 21
Sonnet: 22
Sonnet: 23
Sonnet: 25
Sonnet: 26
Sonnet: 27
Sonnet: 28
Sonnet: 29
Sonnet: 3
Sonnet: 30
Sonnet: 31
Sonnet: 32
Sonnet: 33
Sonnet: 34
Sonnet: 35
Sonnet: 36
Sonnet: 37
Sonnet: 38
Sonnet: 4
Sonnet: 40
Sonnet: 41
Sonnet: 42
Sonnet: 43
Sonnet: 44
Sonnet: 45
Sonnet: 46. Lines For Lauren Owen
Sonnet: 47
Sonnet: 48
Sonnet: 49
Sonnet: 5
Sonnet: 50
Sonnet: 51
Sonnet: 52
Sonnet: 53
Sonnet: 55
Sonnet: 56
Sonnet: 57
Sonnet: 59
Sonnet: 6
Sonnet: 60
Sonnet: 61
Sonnet: 64
Sonnet: 65
Sonnet: 66
Sonnet: 67
Sonnet: 68
Sonnet: 70
Sonnet: 71
Sonnet: 73
Sonnet: 74
Sonnet: 75
Sonnet: 76
Sonnet: 77
Sonnet: 78
Sonnet: 80
Sonnet: 81
Sonnet: 82
Sonnet: 83
Sonnet: 84
Sonnet: 85
Sonnet: 87
Sonnet: 88. A Final Sonnet
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

About the Author
Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He made his reputation in the 1960s as a poet, art critic, teacher, and publisher. He published more than twenty books during his lifetime.

Customer Reviews

"Poetry Requires Misunderstanding"-Berrigan
Although many critics and readers have crowned contemporaries John Ashbery or Frank O'Hara the champions of abstract expressionism in poetry, Berrigan's work is often dismissed because on the surface it is overtly stylistic. And while Ashbery speaks in riddles, Berrigan seems to know the worlds that surrounds each phrase and it's arrangement, (or lack thereof). his sonnets are an essential read for anyone interested in the richness, abandonment, and just plain wackiness that can be brought to life through language or even sounds.

Finally the complete Sonnets
This legendary book of New York school poetry finally appears complete. In previous editions there were mysteriously missing poems. Alice Notley, who was married to Berrigan, provides an illuminating introduction.

gorgeous lyricism amidst playful experiments
Ted Berrigan's "The Sonnets" ultimately deals with the complexities of intimately placing seemingly disparate Things--objects from different times and climes--into one singular plane. His ars poetica deals with the deep implications of the poet's decisions. "Whatever is going to happen is already happening," Berrigan writes in Sonnet L.

This line reverberates in my ears and reminds me of these lines, written by my friend Joseph Griffin, and was published in Spring 2004 in "SCRY! A Nexus Of Politics & The Arts," a journal I edited during my undergraduate days:

everything that has ever happened
is still happening
and has always BEEN happening

and everything that will possibly happen
is happening now
and WAS happening millennia ago
--"Continuum"

As Alice Notley shrewdly points out in her introduction, another way to read Berrigan's line in Sonnet L (and Griffin 's succinct two stanzas), is: "If you aren't doing it now you won't ever do it." Which is to say, How will you make use of your Allotted Time?

Berrigan chooses to keep time ("It is 5:15 a.m. Dear Chris, hello.") and conjures his own brand of "rough magic" for the record, for posterity.