A Certain Slant of Sunlight

by Ted Berrigan

Poetry. Berrigan's last collection of poems, these were written originally on postcards with drawings by the author; photos of some of the postcards are included. His widow, Alice Notley, has written an introduction in which she characterizes the writing as "a realm of shorter poems, written in a newly freed voice, that drifts among day-book, epigram & lyric, in all literary awareness, describing the feel of a difficult year."

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

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

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

My second favorite moment of this volume was when Berrigan quoted O'Hara almost verbatim. And while there were still some excellent points in this collection, it isn't really a collection. It ought to have been pared down into a chapbook at best, if not just a handful of poems to be included toward the end of the Collected Ted Berrigan (which I haven't consulted to see how this was handled).

"Project" books are potentially wonderful, but the risk is always that the project gets "finished" or "realized" at the expense of the individual poems. Here we have something that was a project for Berrigan and which he didn't finish in his lifetime, but which has been made into a book as edited by his wife, Alice Notley. If anyone could have done this well, it would be Notley, and I believe she did the very best possible with what (good) information she had. At the same time, I think this project doesn't buoy up the weak poems in the collection. I might think the gestalt is a fine idea, but as a reader of poetry, I still want to be invested as I turn each page.

[Sam Lohmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"THE HEADS OF THE TOWN (for Harris Schiff)

They killed all the whales

now they're killing all the acorns

I'm almost the last Rhinoceros

I guess I'd better kill them."