People Who Died

With my father's-day twenty-percent-off coupon and seven five-dollar reward certificates in hand I was finally able to afford The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan—a fifty-dollar book for seven and change: not too shabby. He's been a favorite poet ever since I first came across his work about twelve years ago. I actually had to bring my copy of his Selected Poems into one of my undergraduate poetry workshops so the professor could familiarize herself. She wasn't all that impressed—you know, his poems didn't fit the workshop model all that well. Hard to believe that was nine years ago already. In the one graduate poetry writing course I finished, none of the other fifteen or so students had even heard of Ted (one or two people at least knew the anti-Vietnam War protester, Daniel Berrigan, and thought I meant him). Even that class was already six years ago: the excuse there, I guess, is that it was a small, state school filled with evening students who, mostly, had real jobs and families to raise during the day. Three years before that I had quickly dropped out of a "top-twenty" MFA program: cost too much to stick around and find out what their excuse was. (Yeah, Silliman's blog post yesterday about unread grad students may have stirred up some bitterness; maybe I should meditate later. ) Anyway, somewhere back there my point was going to be that Berrigan's Collected Poems was sorely needed, not just for dedicated readers, many of whom like me were too young to dig his poems when he was still kickin, but so that more people can see what he was all about, that he's not so easily dismissed, and so that more workshop leaders from now on might be spared the embarrassment of not being hip to his words.

But I was a little surprised by Alice Notely's note to Ted's most well-known poem, "People Who Died," even if what relative notoriety it has is due to the Jim Carroll song." She reports: "Ted considered that with this work he had invented a form which anyone might use to write a poem. That is, every person has a list of 'people who died.' Jim Carroll took Ted at his word and wrote and recorded a song called 'People Who Died,' which is his own list of dead friends." If that's true, Ted's heart is, as usual, in a real cool place, but he didn't invent the form in question. A poem that's primarily a list of people who have died was written at least once before Ted did it (and perhaps there's an even earlier instance I'm not aware of). César Vallejo's "La violencia de las horas" was written about thirty or so years before "People Who Died." Check out the link and you can get a feel for the poem even if you don't really know Spanish. Just as the Carroll song is cool, but not as good as Ted's poem, so Ted's poem is cool, but not as good as Vallejo's. From the limited resources on hand, I can't tell if the Vallejo poem would have been known to Ted—who very well could have come to the form on his own. He just wasn't the first.

Seems like this kind of thing happens with New York School poets. I remember reading a Paul Auster quote where he called Joe Brainard's I Remember "totally original." I love Brainard's poem, and Auster is downright brilliant, but at one point in his poem "Tortoise Shout," D. H. Lawrence repeats "I remember" at the beginning of eight out of ten lines. There's a coincidence involved in that "Tortoise Shout" happened to be one of the poems I read when I was first waking up to "real" poetry (it was in one of those old Oscar Williams anthologies, Little Treasury of Modern Poetry I think—equipped with photos of the poets in back and everything), so the resonance was loud when I came across the Brainard poem. But I just always pictured Joe tinkering with and taking off from the Lawrence piece, and so could never see it as truly original. Maybe I'm too literal. Still, I can see there being something innovative in the cumulative effect of the Brainard poem, maybe more content-related than form-related, unless the form in question is the comprising of a book.

And hasn't some student somewhere yet written a publishable-quality thesis on all that Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery lifted from Apollinaire? (And considering his supreme importance isn't Apollinaire—maybe along with Reverday— becoming the most overlooked of the important French avant-garde poets? Or maybe I just haven't been paying attention lately, which is true, I haven't.) Heck, even the students Silliman blogged about could connect these dots: you don't need to be all that enterprising: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have given a head start by highlighting Apollinaire's this-and-that-ness in the selections they chose for Poems for the Millennium. (Critics loved to peg Ted as a Frank O'Hara knock off, but he no more built on O'Hara than O'Hara built on Apollinaire.) After that, just grab a copy of Alcools and try to find what doesn't presage the better part of Ashbery's most acclaimed/anthologized work.