The Sonnets

The Penguin Poets

by Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley (Editor)

Originally published in 1964, The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan is considered by many to be his most important and influential book. This new annotated edition, with an introduction by Alice Notley, includes seven previously uncollected works. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Berrigan's poems involve friendship and love triangles, but while the former happen chronologically, Berrigan's happen in the moment, with the story buried beneath a surface of names, repetitions, and fragmented experience. Reflecting the new American sensibilities of the 1960's as well as timeless poetic themes, The Sonnets is both eclectic and classical — the poems are monumental riddles worth contemplating.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century, Fiction, Reference, Read For School, New York

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, where he received a BA in English in 1959 and fell just short of the requirements for a M.A. in 1962. Berrigan was married to Sandy Berrigan, also a poet, and they had two children, David Berrigan and Kate Berrigan. He and his second wife, the poet Alice Notley, were active in the poetry scene in Chicago for several years, then moved to New York City, where he edited various magazines and books.

A prominent figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, Berrigan was peer to Jim Carroll, Anselm Hollo, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and Lewis Warsh. He collaborated with Padgett and Joe Brainard on Bean Spasms, a work significant in its rejection of traditional concepts of ownership. Though Berrigan, Padgett, and Brainard all wrote individual poems for the book, and collaborated on many others, no authors were listed for individual poems.

The poet Frank O'Hara called Berrigan's most significant publication, The Sonnets, "a fact of modern poetry." A telling reflection on the era that produced it, The Sonnets beautifully weaves together traditional elements of the Shakespearean sonnet form with the disjunctive structure and cadence of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Berrigan's own literary innovations and personal experiences.

Berrigan died on July 4, 1983 at the age of 49. The cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver brought on by hepatitis.

Reviews

[Grace Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine
and the day is bright gray turning green”

“As stars are, like nightmares, a crucifix.”

“Doctor, but they say "I LOVE YOU"
and the sonnet is not dead.”

“Then were we so fragile
Honey scorched our lips”

“In the morning she wakes up, and she is "in love.”

“Whatever is going to happen is already happening”


“The black heart beside the fifteen pieces takes the eye away from the gray words”

“To the big promise of emptiness”

“Musick strides through these poems
just as it strides through me!”

“lovely light is singing to itself”

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best examples I know of poetry that is simultaneously a spontaneous mind map of the moment and rigorously formal.

And they're funny

And they make you want to write

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

FUCK YOU TED I WILL DO IT TO YOU WITH GREEN NOODLES. I LOVE YOU WHY CAN'T WE PEPSI TOGETHER. Don't just read this. Listen to this on Penn Sound while you eat red noodles.

[Ahmed Ridha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The biggest crime this book commits is being smarter than me. I just can't let that slide.

[Timothy Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think there are two kinds of poetry readers -- those who want poetry to be an experience, and those who want it to be a puzzle. For the latter, this is going to be one of the greatest books of the last half-century. As for me, though, I'd much rather get my pleasure directly from a poem than from analyzing it. The Sonnets are all cut-up poems -- Berrigan uses what he cryptically refers to as "The Process" to rearrange the lines according to a mathematical, syntactically random, pattern. A few of the sonnets are reproduced with the original line sequence, so you can see that they at least at one time made sense. And when the lines are jumbled, it is a bit of fun to try to makes sense out of what remains. When certain lines are repeated, or echo those from previous poems, the result is a the startling effect of "everything happening at once" that Berrigan seemed to be seeking. Yet in the end, the book reads more like an experiment than a book, and while I can appreciate it, I can't really say that I enjoyed it. And you have to wonder, would the poems have lose their value if they weren't cut up? Is the book all form and no substance? Well, probably.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am afraid to succeed, afraid to fail
Tell me now, again, who I am (31)

This one made me so salty, I don't know why I do this to myself.

Chaos reigns supreme in Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets. It is a disorienting experience, and the more one struggles to find their footing, the harder it is to do so. The 78 poems of The Sonnets do not inhabit a space where time is sequential, so much as they exist simultaneously with Berrigan rearranging, repeating, and reassembling the text, much like what he does with the concept of time.

My biggest annoyance, above the lack of structure, was his particular obsession with Anne and her thighs. When he compared their largeness to the poem upon the page further cemented her objectification for me, in a way that I could only describe as an attempt at performative masculinity. It's a particularly jarring experience because nothing else in the collection does this. Overall, a dizzying, unpleasant experience and personally, not a masterpiece to me. I can value it for what it did back then but I still insist that the literary canon needs to be revised and updated.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Notley writes in this introduction that Ted Berrigan took inspiration from, among other things, John Cage and Alfred North Whitehead. Specifically, their thoughts on chance (your chance is not the same as my chance), order (using I-Ching and other devices to plot order into spontaneity) and time. For "time" in particular, Berrigan took the last line of some of these stanzas, used it as the first, then took the second to last, moved it to the top, and so on.

When I read this I had just put down one of the news weeklies we get in the mail. I'd also just read the news of the day online. At times like that my head swims because everything has already happened and the facts are laid out and they aren't going to change but there's going to be an endless amount of facts and news stories out there right after I finish reading that last one. It often feels overwhelming. And if I could just mess with linear time a little bit, that'd feel lovely. These poems do just that.

[Patty Gone · Rating 4 out of 5]

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics lists three sonnet types: the Petrarchan, the Spenserian, and the Shakespearean. When will the Berriganian earn its rightful place amongst them? Fifty years after its original publication, Berrigan’s “classical and eclectic” tone (as Alice Notley calls it in her Introduction), his balance of reverence and irreverence, as well as his composition methods, remain influential to 21th century verse. Berrigan pays homage to Shakespeare and these long-dead sonneteers, but reinvents their sonnet, creating his own constellation of poetic tradition, namedropping and leaning on heroes (Apollinaire, O’Hara) and friends (Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett).
In LXXVI, Berrigan gloats “a little over new ballad quickly skip old / sonnets imitations of Shakespeare. Back to books. I read / poems by Auden Spenser Pound Stevens and Frank O’Hara. / I hate books. / I wonder if Jan or Helen or Babe / ever think about me.” Over the course of five lines Berrigan self-aggrandizes, self-deprecates, drops influences, dismisses the whole reading enterprise, and contemplates his crushes, somehow perfectly encapsulating how a bard spends an average afternoon.
Fittingly, the book opens in fragment: “His piercing pince-nez,” glasses that stand as mark of a bygone stuffy intellectualism which Berrigan smashes. He composed the book by cutting and pasting, citing Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath as a major influence. He tossed out other avant-garde modes such as Surrealist exquisite corpse collaborations or automatic writing, finding the truth of daily activity through disjunction and editing. Berrigan had a blueprint, the fourteen line form, and treated his word bank of notes and failed poems as bricks from which to construct the poem. Each unit is “subject to breakage and reconstitution.” Everything is in play. With each line and phrase able to be used, re-used, and repurposed, Berrigan gave himself myriad possibilities of composition and recombination. Reading the poems in succession, the repeated fragments are welcome returns, building a world of Berrigan subconscious, at once disjunctive and personal, a place where the sky shifting to twilight and one’s own poems are described with the same adjectives: “feminine marvelous and rough.”

[Rufussenex · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sonnets are one of the best examples of what I call "phantom limb" poetry; you read it, and feel the trace of some emotion so viscerally that you are convinced it must be real, but upon thought and concentration and meditation realize is nothing at all. But unlike other poets of this genre –the Ashberys, and Palmers, the Scalapinos– I find Berrigan's opus endlessly human and fascinating, a free verse koan that I can ponder forever, and from which I draw the most sincere inspiration.

[Brandon Choi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seurat and Juan Gris combine this season
to outline Central Park in geometric
trillion pointed bright red-brown and green-gold
blocks of blooming winter. Trees stand stark
naked guarding bridal paths like Bowery
Santa Clauses keeping Christmas safe each city block.
Thus I, red faced and romping in the wind
Whirl thru mad Manhattan dressed in books
looking for today with tail-pin. I
never place it right, never win. It
doesn't matter, though. The cooling wind keeps blow
ing and my poems are coming.
Except at night. Then
I walk out in the bleak village and look for you.

[Madi Badger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why was this ever published

[Nicholas Montemarano]

Wow. I couldn't get through this book, which I had been looking forward to reading, nor did I experience much more than confusion. The intro's explanation of Berrigan's sonnet method, though interesting, doesn't change the fact that these poems—those I got through—were frustrating puzzles. This isn't why I read poetry.

[Erin Lyndal Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had wanted to read this book for ages, and becoming such a huge Alice Notley fan in recent history just upped the ante.

I did not love this book as much as I had expected. If I were to read more about it or engage with scholarly perspectives on it, I think I'd get much more out of it. Unfortunately, I'm not excited enough by this book yet to do so and will most likely just move on to a different text.

I enjoyed the way Berrigan would repeat lines from one poem in another. That has some exciting possibilities. Ultimately is felt like a great idea in theory that fell flat in execution. I didn't feel as though he did anything with the text when it would appear for the second time,a nd I wanted to see more interactivity.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book and an important--but THIS EDITION keeps us from seeing this as a masterpiece.

Berrigan is breaking ground here--doing things with repetition and fragmentation in ways far more engaging than FOH's "Biotherm." The play between structure and digression is wonderful. Often, the most delightful/nonsequiter line in a sonnet is the one that ends up repeated in a later poem--what seems to break the pattern becomes part of it. And it's funny & it's sad & all that good stuff too.

On the down side, some poems are terrible--many of the ones added to the Penguin edition but left out of previous editions.

[Matt Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is apt. "The" is the perfect way to describe these sonnets.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

How come nobody has made me read this before? How come nobody has made me read Ted Berrigan?

You fuckers! You are all absolute fuckers!

[Johndorsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the greatest book of poetry of the 20th century.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to think that when he says "DEAR CHRIS" he meant me.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it hits, it really hits. When it doesn't, it still isn't bad. As far as the unavoidable coupling question goes: I still prefer Alice Notley, but I understand her affection for Ted.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This exercise in style over substance, misleadingly called "sonnets", left me cold. Berrigan's experimentation is derivative of William Burroughs (it is evident that all "sonnets" have been derived from one "sonnet" that has been cut-up, shuffled, re-shuffled... essentially regurgitated; as it must be, considering its only value is in its formal derangement), his name-dropping is derivative of Ginsberg (just as Ginsberg channels Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and others in Howl, Berrigan calls upon Joe Brainard, Richard Gallup, and others... perhaps to add substance that the poet cannot muster) and misogyny is derivative of Henry Miller ("my dream a drink with Henry Miller"), and his unmotivated use of obscenity is derivative of all three. 

Whereas Burroughs and Ginsberg wrote to overcome oppression (during a time when homosexual acts were still illegal in North America) Berrigan's obscenity is unmotivated in that it lacks an obstacle to overcome. When it is obscene it is obscene only for the take of being obscene. In the time of Henry Miller, lines about "fondling snatches" and "virgins aching to be fucked" could have been read as provocations against censorship and/or the prudish status quo. But in the aftermath of the obscenity trial against Howl, Berrigan's "sonnets" arrived too late to be considered groundbreaking. As a result, it amounts to little more than the casual misogyny that Miller is known for.

He refers to his friends and to himself so fleetingly that the reader can neither take interest in these characters nor the poet's confession. The reader, unable to decipher what the poet is trying so urgently and insistently to say, will eventually realize that the poet has no message to convey; that the poet is not concerned with the what (content) but with the how (form); or, to put it more bluntly, the poet is more concerned with the sound of his own voice. 

[Abraham Tibor]

I read this a few months ago, and I couldn't give it a star rating, and didn't love it uniformly, but some of the poems have glued themselves to me.

The idea of a dialectical prism—a space where the poet writes a limited number of lines and then rearranges them, creating friction between them, hoping the sparks that fly are something close to incommunicable—is important, and a bit of a step forward from Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath

Some of the poems did nothing for me, especially around the second quarter of the book. The lines don't fit together like you feel they should. Things don't click at all. But as you read through the rest of the collection, meaning starts to get dragged up from some the collective memory of the poems. Each of these poems is happening close to simultaneously. This is the cacophony of city life, or the polyphony of memory. You are you now, but each past you is talking to you at the same time. How can all this live in you at the same time?

Berrigan would laugh at all this. As he says: "Some people prefer 'the interior monologue' / I like to beat people up"

I had read a few of The Sonnets before, but I think sonnet xxviii is the unsung gem of the collection.

xxviii—

to gentle, pleasant strains
just homely enough
to be beautiful
in the dark neighborhoods of my own sad youth
i fall in love. once
seven thousand feet over one green schoolboy summer
i dug two hundred graves,
laughing, “Put away your books! Who shall speak of us
when we are gone? Let them wear scarves
in the once a day snow, crying in the kitchen
of my heart!” O my love, I will weep a less bitter truth,
till other times, making a minor repair,
a breath of cool rain in those streets
clinging together with a slightly detached air.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apparently The Sonnets is a pretty big deal, especially if you're into the New York School of Poets. The poems in this collection are experimental and unconventional; although Ted Berrigan apparently had a "method" for putting the poems together, there doesn't seem to be much logic to it. According to the introduction:

With most of the poems, though, it's difficult to determine how the materials were chosen and ordered. Some sonnets are composed of phrases, lines, or blocks of material from previous sonnets, exclusively or in combination with new material; some sonnets contain entirely new material; many are composed of lines or blocks of lines from older poems written before The Sonnets, or are simply older poems; some are composed of lines by other poets. These poems are pervaded by instincts learned from using chance methods: Ted was searching for what looked unpredicted and what also meant something unpredicted but significant. (xi)

I'm not sure that I would agree that there's something "significant" in the majority of the poems. There's a lot of focus on the mundane parts of life: sex, drinking Pepsi, watching movies, hanging out with his poet buddies. The repeated lines don't seem to hold much significance other than existing for the sake of motif. At worst, the poems are fragmented and barely coherent; at best, they approach a kind of frantic genius in which even the smallest moments are heroic.

Poems that I liked:
"VI," "XVII," "XXVIII," "XXXVII," "LIX," "LVI."
=6/78 (7.7%) poems that I liked.

[Tereza Matuchová · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 hviezdičky

Bohužiaľ nebohužiaľ DNFujem.

Tieto sonety (sama od seba by som ich jednoznačne sonetami nenazvala, no budem rešpektovať voľbu autora) by boli celkom fajn pre nejaký bookclub hĺbavých čitateľov, ktorý majú veľa vína a vôľu porozumieť. Ja nemám ani bookclub, ani víno a ani tú vôľu.

Nerozumela som absolútne ničomu. Viem, že to bol zámer autora, vytvoriť moderné dielo aurobiť z básní akúsi skladačku, no na mňa to nezafungovalo. Hoci som mala aký-taký kontext o tomto diele, nedokázala som si to poskladať a potom to celé na mňa pôobilo tak ... pretentious (nepoznám ekvivalent tohot slova v slovenčine).

Určite sa nájde hŕstka ľudí, pre ktorých toto bude zázrak, no ja za zázrak považujem odkomunikovanie emócie, spomienok, ideí a atmosféry cez poéziu. Toto pre mňa okrem pekných slov a fráz (za ktoré dávam tej pol hviezdičky) nemalo žiadnu pridanú hodnotu. Adios amigos.

[James Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of the Sonnets, of the idea of the Sonnets, and I have no qualms with the method, and I like Alfred North Whitehead too, and its poetic blasphemy to say this, but...they're kind of boring here and there. Some of the repeated lines that become motifs are placed too near each other. I feel like the passage of time and the 'advance' of post-avant poetry has diminished their radicalism to a degree. That being said, they are fun, and you come across lines that blow you away, like say: "Max Jacob,/When I lie down to love you, I am one hundred times more/A ghost!", which is pretty brilliant. Maybe I'm just not a huge NY School reader. I do like these Sonnets, I'm just not as bowled over as I was when I was 22.

[Dylan Marcus · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I am the intended audience for this collection: I loathed every stanza.

It's like a 1st gen chatbot given the prompt to "write beat poetry on speed".

Take your crumpled horn and shove it.

Giving it an additional star because the morning coffee is making me feel charitable.

I shall sail this book out my window now, before it infects the rest of my shelf with ! or ( or Anne's thighs.

[Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

This approach to poetry reminds me of students who view poems as puzzles or ciphers to crack. Lines are rearranged or written out phonetically, but my experience wasn’t that these methods created *greater* meaning for me than there would have been originally… This style does force more active engagement from the reader, at least. You can picture the writing process in simultaneity with the words already existing on the page.

[amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Between all the random mumblings of these sonnets there were some beautiful lines. However, these sonnets mostly fall to nonsense before getting cut up, copied, and pasted together. It felt a bit too much like doing something different for the sake of being different, all while forfeiting quality.

[Nicolas Duran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather interesting. The introduction hits different after it’s been read. I like the aleatory stuff when it makes meaningful statements—it doesn’t always. I’m a sucker for meaning coupled with beautiful sounding sounds. Some stunning moments as well. I’d bet I’ll return to this in 20 years.

[Gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

experimental contemporary sonnets that got me more stoked abt poetry than i'd been in while. ted's a hidden gem of the new york school.

[Tim Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not nearly for everyone.