Talking in Tranquility: Interviews With Ted Berrigan

by Ted Berrigan, Leslie Scalapino (Editor), Stephen Ratcliffe (Editor)

Talking in Tranquility presents ten interviews conducted with the poet Ted Berrigan between 1970 and 1980. Talking with a range of fellow poets and writers (Clark Coolidge, George Oppen, George MacBeth, Tom Clark, Charles Ingham, Barry Alpert, and Anne Waldman, among others) in New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Boulder, and elsewhere, Berrigan speaks with an illuminating and disarming candor about a wide range of topics: the art and craft of poetry, his own work, his methods of composition in books such as The Sonnets and in many specific poems (including various collaborative writings with other poets and painters), his relations with and influence by and upon other writers and/or painters in the New York cultural "scene in the 1960's and 1970's (Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, among the writers; as well as the painters Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, etc.). Whatever the subject, Berrigan invariably shoots from the hip straight for the mark: "Sometimes I hear my words before they get to my lips, and if I don't like them I change them before they get out." The result is an important, and wonderfully entertaining, account of the mind-at-work of one of this country's most important contemporary poets.

Genres: Poetry

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

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

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berrigan doesn't repeat himself from interview to interview, he builds on what he has said before.