Rainer Maria Rilke “Autumn Day” / Ted Berrigan “Autumn’s Day”

• Eight translations of Rilke’s “Autumn Day” including a couple of the more popular ones (Bly and Snow, or maybe the Snow is only popular in my mind because it was fresh at the time I started reading poetry) and the one-time standard (Norton).
• Stephen Mitchell’s translation, the most popular and for the past thirty to forty years the standard.
• Three more translations.
• Other relatively common ones:  Flemming’s and MacIntyre’s.
• And ones readily turned up by Google:  Felstiner,  Foreman, Crego, Kinzie, Wilkins, and the worst, from 1916,  Münsterberg

A Google Search for “Ted Berrigan” and “Autumn’s Day” turns up only nine results, yet it’s better than most of the above. The Norton and Mitchell are close. And I have a soft spot for the Snow.

Autumn’s Day

           after Rilke

Lord, it is time. Summer was very great.
Now cast your shadow upon sundials.
Let winds remind meadows it is late.

Mellow now the last fruits on the vine.
Allow them only two more southern days.
Hasten them to fulness, and press
The last heavy sweetness through the wine.

Who has no home can not build now.
Who dwells alone must now remain alone;
Will waken, read, write long letters, and
Will wander restlessly when leaves are blowing.
                 —Ted Berrigan

Heart

“The heart of a man
is not as great as an amphitheater”
—Ted Berrigan

Proverbial Sonnet (53)

Good morning, kiss. You are awake. Today's back road
have blossomed behind my eyes. Ted Berrigan is alive.
The minute blue night was only pretending
to be awake. Your drive into work, a brown sliver
under the whirling print of an elegant finger, a middle finger
opening slowly in the direction of American Beauty.
American Beauty isn't only a movie. Good morning,
you, opening slowly, today's back roads, a kiss
in the direction of American Beauty. On the car windows,
commas, periods, and question marks of water —
no words wet this movie morning. A minute blue
blossomed drive beyond the wide rows of high brown
slivers. You are awake, on the back roads, which lead me away
from American Beauty, from behind my eyes, from the line,
          “Ted Berrigan is alive.”

________
This is a knock-off. For the real deal, one of the most beautiful American poems, see Ted Berrigan's Sonnet XXXVII.

Ten Things I Do Every Day

after Ted Berrigan

wake up
shower
eat Heart to Heart
play music
drink tea

smile (almost)
fear death
wipe ass
say Hey
eat bran flakes

read something
like the news
hate the news
hug or kiss
wife and kids

lie to myself
spit in the sink
blink
breathe
& rub my eyes

Things To Do In New York City (Cool Upright Remix)

Link (updated to mp3): Things To Do In New York City (Cool Upright Remix).

Ingredients:
1. Ted Berrigan recorded in 1973 reading his poem “Things To Do In New York (City).”
2. The “Cool Upright 02” bass loop in GarageBand.
3. Various clips from dobroide's City Noise audio pack.
4. A modest drum track I laid down.

Edits in Passing

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,
a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes
from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

—Ted Berrigan, from “Things To Do in Providence”

Mentions / Tom Clark

Some fun reads, fun digging, the past few days over at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti, if you're into Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark. He makes an interesting observation on Clark's tendency toward "new words," basically getting the artifacts of the day, into his poems. Interesting because when I think of Clark's work, my impression - quite possibly wrongheaded - is one of so-called "poetic language." Always liked that Clark wasn't afraid to use it when he had to. Maybe what I'm thinking of is along the lines of the "tenderness" Latta mentions. If nothing else it speaks to the fact that Clark isn't going out of his way to use the "new words" and force them into poetry for its own sake. It's funny how the writing programs always rush to chop off the poetic language (largely for good reason, but amputation is always a drastic measure), when in fact you look through just about any contemporary poetry review/journal/zine and that language is nowhere to be found (and hasn't been since, what, fifty years? my lit mag knowledge doesn't go back nearly far enough to really know). You would just think that "poetic" would bear closer relation to the actual "poetry" of the day published. I'm not being fair, though: it's tough when public perception is close to a hundred years behind. And I shouldn't generalize about writing programs - there have always been some good ones, and many probably have at least one good faculty dude. But I'm off track. What about Clark. He's got his hands on the reigns. Let me just put down a poem of his from earlier this decade. A poem with "pants suits" and the Nasdaq, but also a "whole cosmic choir" brought to "whispering knees."

Why Hillary Became a Goddess on the Night
of Her Acceptance Speech

Because her hair looked cool
Because some of the best alien minds are watching developments
        closely
Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the
        masculine mills
Of production, yet wearing out six black pants suits
To bring us to acculturation and consequence
Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate for change
Sweeping through the gentle bacteria that make their home in her
        tireless campaign shoes
Because the worried market takes comfort in knowing what it
        must consume
Because choosing is not an issue except to the terrified cartoon
        eyeballs
In the take-out carton, wondering whose turn is first
Because some of the best alien minds consider "us" the shrill-voiced
        uncertainty factor
That threatens to bring the whole cosmic chorus to its
        whispering knees
Because Utopia is the island in time that forgot itself as it lifted
        its utensil
At the altar of its great consuming goddess No Memory, with her
        sadclown smile strained
Because her lofty position at the social fulcrum which is the
        mercy seat
Takes a terrific toll on black pants suit bottoms
Because some of the best alien minds are surveying developments in
        numb disbelief
Because 65% of the wood lice aren't losing any sleep at all
Because retreat in the face of even greater problems,
While not a bad idea, won't solve anything
Because acceptance and consumption are just what the market needs
To shake it out of its trance-like belief in what it thinks alien minds
        are saying
Because acceptance means acculturation to the masculine mills
Because happiness is merely their invention anyway, because Dame
        Pleasure is wearied
Of Earth, has taken to the air, faded, fluttered down in a still, snow-
Like inwardness to spill, scatter and be raked up with all the sibyl's
        other fallen leaves
In this enchanted-recount self-enclosure, like a small-town autumn
Where the commoners lie down nightly with what they have made
Happen, amid the bedded reeds of the vigilant event horizon
Because in this collapse its truths are received
By their souls, because of what this means to the odd weightlessness
        they feel
Because they have no way to grace their laurels
Beyond filling up the best alien minds, intent upon those peerless
        screens
With the black pants suits of our resident historian
Who's just keeping a chair among the blond clouds warm for them.

Funny Ted Berrigan/Marvin Bell Story

From a comment by Michael Lally over at Silliman's Blog yesterday: "...Ted was too popular for Bell's taste and his approach to poetry too original for Bell's goals, so Bell pushed for Ted to be not asked back, and he wasn't. Then Bell had the nerve to ask Ted to read with him just before Ted was scheduled to leave. Ted knew, as many of us did, that Bell had helped push him out, but Ted accepted and then graciously offered to read first. The reading was packed, standing room only, a lot of it for Ted. He wowed the crowd as only he could do, but he didn't stop where he normally would, and instead just kept going. It seemed like he ended up reading everything he'd ever written. By the time Bell got up to read, it seemed like hours later. Ted was smiling and acting like nothing unusual had happened, as Bell took to the podium and read to a handful of his students, everyone else, long since gone."

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.