This landmark collection brings Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry together in a single authoritative volume for the first time. Edited by the poet Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons, The Collected Poems demonstrates the remarkable range, power, and importance of Berrigan's work.
Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was the author of more than 20 books, including The Sonnets (1964); Bean Spasms, with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard (1967); Red Wagon (1976); and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988). Alice Notley is the editor of two of Ted Berrigan's books, The Sonnets (2000) and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988). She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) and Disobedience (2001). Anselm Berrigan is the director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project and the author of Zero Star Hotel (2002). Edmund Berrigan is a poet and songwriter and the author of Disarming Matter (1999).
"Comfortably intimate—classically adroit in its formal wit and invention—altogether unique yet in no way excluding, this meticulously edited edition of a master poet’s collected works gives us the defining bridge from the 'New American Poetry' of the ’50s to that poetry now contemporary on both coasts and in all conditions. No one ever recognized the people with whom he lived more particularly than did Ted Berrigan, and no one ever brought them home to a reader with such unaggressive and persistent power. This is a great, great book for all seasons of the mind and heart."—Robert Creeley
"Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself. It is wonderful to have his Collected Poems in print."—John Ashbery
"A comprehensive and carefully chronicled volume that puts Ted Berrigan in historical context as one of the most influential poets of his generation. His poems: deft, light, definitely humorous, irreverent, poignant, ‘marvelous and tough.’ The truth doing its work, ‘the great man doing the ordinary thing,’ with a quick ear and a quick tongue, revealing the personal in the universal. He gives you his full attention—‘about to be born again thinking of you.’ "—Joanne Kyger
"In a life devoted to experimental art, Ted Berrigan shaped his poetry and the space he occupied with a bold artistry based on his playful but powerfully skeptical view of the world. He wondered what might actually be captured within the pages of a book, but The Collected Poems allows us to again enjoy Ted Berrigan’s delightfully demanding presence."—Lorenzo Thomas
"A singular balance of personal-historical vision and sentiment both sweet and sour, developed within the fractured verbalism of the late twentieth century found lyric, creates in Ted Berrigan's poems the unique colors of a particularly lived (and still intensely living) ensemble of moments."—Tom Clark, author of Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan
"Some people are just more real than others. I don't know another way to say it. Ted Berrigan is totally real and he has fashioned an important sound for all of us to listen to. He put it all together just before everyone else in his time, our time, got going. America is lucky to count him as one of its great poets."—Peter Gizzi
760 pp.6 x 8Illus: 1 b/w photograph
9780520251557$41.95|£35.00Paper
Mar 2007