‘THE POEM UPON THE PAGE IS AS MASSIVE AS ANNE’S THIGHS’: TEXTUAL PROMISCUITY IN TED BERRIGAN’S THE SONNETS

NICK SELBY

The publication, in 1964, of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets brought Berrigan to a place of central importance in the New York experimental poetry and arts scene of the time.1 Indeed, because of The Sonnets, Berrigan might be seen as the ‘only begetter’ of the Second-Generation New York School of poets, a group distinctly different from, though acutely aware of its ties with, First-Generation New York poets such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and (especially) Frank O’Hara.2 The collage techniques, gossipy interjections and surreal juxtapositions of The Sonnets, along with its ironic sense of its own cultural marginalization, fondly recall that earlier generation of New York poets. However, The Sonnets literally tears up that earlier work; it steals from those earlier poets by cutting-and-pasting snatches of their work into its own textual body. Both Daniel Kane and Geoff Ward have remarked upon the important role played by The Sonnets in establishing Berrigan as, in Kane’s words, the ‘main spokesperson’ for Second-Generation New York poets, and in Ward’s words, a vitally ‘important mover and shaker in

1 The Sonnets was first published in New York by ‘C’ Press (Lorenz and Allen Gude) in 1964. A second edition was published by Don Allen’s Grove Press (New York, 1967), and a third, again in New York, by United Artists in 1982. The Sonnets, introduction by Alice Notley, notes by Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, with seven sonnets restored was published by Penguin Books, 2000. All references to The Sonnets in this essay are to this edition. 2 Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets, 2nd edn, Basingstoke, 2003, 177, notes – wryly – that Berrigan ‘was wont to say that he invented the New York School of poetry’. 84 Nick Selby

New York poetic culture’.3 The Sonnets is therefore a vitally important text in the understanding of the cultural energies and dynamics of the poetry and poetics of radical New York in the early sixties. This essay argues that the experimental energies of The Sonnets, its generative and generational tensions, alongside its weirdly disjunctive humour, trace an economy of desire in which the sexual is both subsumed by, and seen as a product of, the textual. The Sonnets is important, that is, in helping define a particular cultural moment because of its restlessly promiscuous textuality. Berrigan, it would seem, was surprised and amused by the notoriety that The Sonnets brought him. At a reading of the sequence in San Francisco in the summer of 1981 he noted how he had ‘made’ the first six sonnets very quickly, in less than an hour. Shocked and excited by these first six sonnets, he had put them away ‘in a drawer’ before completing all eighty-eight poems in the sequence between March and July 1963.4 Though he acknowledges that The Sonnets was the work that turned him into a ‘proper’ poet, he describes how that happened more in terms of a move from innocence into poetic experience, than in terms of the sort of carefully crafted career move that Libbie Rifkin has argued it was: ‘By writing this [The Sonnets]’, Berrigan notes, ‘I became the … person I am here …. It was written as total discovery.’5 Given the sexual-textual dynamics of the sequence this comment is revealing in its emphasis upon a movement from innocence into experience. Not only does The Sonnets plot a mode of personal and poetic becoming for Berrigan, but it is also the mode for his ‘making it’ into the heart of what he calls the New York ‘literary scene’ (a scene not dissimilar, it might be remarked, in its in- jokes, gossipy sexuality and promiscuous inter-personal relations to

3 Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Berkeley, 2003, 107; and Ward, Statutes of Liberty, 179. 4 A recording of this reading, at the New Langton Arts Center, San Francisco (June 1981), is available on the Electronic Poetry Center website, at http://www.writing. upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan-1981.html. Berrigan’s introductory remarks at this reading are transcribed in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, ed. Anne Waldman, Minneapolis, 1991, 19-22. 5 Rifkin misses, that is, Berrigan’s wry, self-deprecating humour. See Libbie Rifkin, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan and the American Avant-Garde, Madison, 2000, 108-35.