Ted Berrigan in Irish America (Terence Winch)

 I’ve played Irish music and written poetry for most of my life, but have generally kept these two worlds separate.  A major exception to this practice took place at St. Mark’s Church in lower Manhattan on November 10, 1982, when an Irish-American night at the Poetry Project (organized by my friend Bob Callahan, who passed away in 2008) took place. Bob asked me and a number of other poets to read, and also invited my band, Celtic Thunder, to play a concert set after the reading. In addition to Bob and me, the line-up included Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, Susan Howe, Eileen Myles, and Ted Berrigan. It was a historic night — I’m not sure Irish America has seen anything like it before or since. 

A friend of Bob’s, whose name I’ve forgotten, took some photos that night, and Bob gave me a contact sheet, which is the source of the photo above. It shows, left to right, Ted Berrigan, Maureen Owen, Robert Kelly, me, Bob Callahan, and Susan Howe (Eileen Myles, for whatever reason, is not in the photo).  At that point in our history, Celtic Thunder included Dominick Murray (guitar, vocals), Linda Hickman (flute, vocals), Tony DeMarco (fiddle), Jesse Winch (bodhran [drum], bouzouki), and me (button accordion).  Tony was sick the night of the reading, but the photo below (taken by the late Pat Cady) shows Celtic Thunder's 1982 line-up at a ceili in Baltimore.

There were many great moments that night at St. Mark’s. I especially remember Eileen Myles striding to the microphone dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, much to the enthusiastic amusement of the audience, and then delivering a terrific reading. Everyone, really, was at his or her best. But the highlight for me was Ted Berrigan’s uproarious and masterful performance.

Ted had a huge number of friends, fans, and followers, attracted by his charisma and humor, but most of all by his deep love and commitment to poetry and his inventive, expansive, inspiring work. Michael Lally (who, if he hadn't moved to L.A. back then, would certainly have been part of the St. Mark's reading) turned me on to Ted’s book The Sonnets in 1971, right after I moved to D.C. from New York, and I was hooked. Besides the night of the reading, I think I met Ted only one other time, in October of 1977, when Doug Lang invited him to D.C. to read at Folio Books, the site of Doug’s legendary reading series. Ted hung out for a couple of days and we got to know each other a bit. He even signed my copy of Red Wagon  with, “For Terry, whose poetry I like very much, best, Ted Berrigan.” That was a compliment I was delighted to get.    

                          Cover of Ron Padgett's memoir of Ted; Alex Katz portrait of Ted; photo of Ted by Mark Hillringhouse

Many years ago I bought a CD recorder so I could start digitizing some of my old LPs, which I held onto for a very long time, as well as hundreds of cassette tapes, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, stuffed into empty tissue boxes.  One of the first items I digitized was the 1982 reading.  I’ll include Ted’s segment (in two parts that overlap:  Ted Berrigan 1, with intro by Bob Callahan; Ted Berrigan 2). Ted once said, in an interview: “My poetry is mostly talk, and sometimes it’s heightened speech.  It’s not the words of rhetoric so much as the tone of rhetoric; it’s an Irish kind of speech—sometimes I’m making speeches, other times I’m talking—like I’m talking a walk to the store to buy the paper and back.”  You'll see what he means when you listen to his reading.

On July 4th, 1983, just eight months after the Irish-American event, Ted died, at age 48. What a tremendous loss this was. There was a memorial reading at St. Mark’s four days later in which a number of his friends (including Kenneth Koch, who concludes his remarks with a reading of the last two pages of Ted's "Tambourine Life") paid tribute to him. 

Though Ted died far too young, his poems and his influence live on. 

LAST POEM
by Ted Berrigan

---

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
"The intention of the organism is to survive."
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark's Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

[An earlier version of this piece ran on 5 July 2009 on the erstwhile Best American Poetry blog.]

Comments on "Ted Berrigan in Irish America"  from July 2009

Thank you for this timely recollection of Ted Berrigan, a gentleman with whom I spent a most enjoyable afternoon in London in June 1969. I was about to turn 21. At a bookstore on, I think, Shaftesbury Avenue known to have advanced taste in poetry and literature, I recognized Berrigan (bearded, large, loud) from readings attended in New York and introduced myself to him as a fan of his "Sonnets." He decided then and there that we would spend the rest of the day together in museums, bookstores, and pubs. The day was a sonnet, and Ted's untimely death on the 4th of July is part of my personal mythology of the day (which also includes Lionel Trilling, Lou Gehrig, James Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Sousa marches, Gershwin's Rhapsody, a Dave Righetti no-hitter, the salt in the air at Cape Cod and Cape Ann, sunsets on Lake Cayuga) and maybe this year I will also commemorate Ted's birthday (November 15). I haven't yet read it, but I believe Tom Clark on the Vanitas blog has posted something on Ted today: here's the URL.

http://vanitasmagazine.blogspot.com/2009/07/tc-locations-for-ted-berrigan-nov-15.html
        Posted by: David Lehman | July 05, 2009 at 08:25 PM

Thank you Terence for the swell piece, and thank you David for the link to my July 4th Ted tribute at the Vanitas blog. Our mutual friend the poet Tom Raworth has added some of his usual brilliant electricity to the comments thread there, and anybody else with memories of Ted is welcome to join in the thread.
        Posted by: Tom Clark | July 05, 2009 at 09:03 PM

Dear Tom: I had been looking through the photos in Late Returns this morning, so as to get in the right mood, so it's nice to hear from you. Great to see the Vanitas tribute as well. ---TW
        Posted by: Terence Winch | July 05, 2009 at 10:10 PM

Terry, Thanks, and great to hear from you. Though it seems the timing was accidental in your case, it's a sort of happy accident that we posted synchronously about Ted. His heart and humor are missing ingredients in the poetry scene these days. Words floating around like alphabet soup spilled in outer space yes, but sweet truth and rough beauty and sublime blarney...? Vanished like the memory of the last notes echoing in the air hours after the fiddlers have packed up and gone home.
        Posted by: Tom Clark | July 06, 2009 at 03:33 AM

Thanks for bringing Ted Berrigan to mind again. I went to Reed College with his son David and was living on the Lower East Side in 1983, and saw Ted at some readings and parties around the neighborhood. I ran into David and his sister in New York just after he died. They were very distraught about his sudden death and their grief seemed compounded by the fact that the obituary in the Times did not mention them among his children. I hope they are doing well on this anniversary.
        Posted by: Peter Winch | July 06, 2009 at 10:31 AM

Dear Peter: I don't think I knew you went to school with David Berrigan. I actually found a copy of that NY Times obit in one of Ted's books, as I was going through my Berrigan collection yesterday, and noticed the hurtful absence of any mention of his first family. Not the way he would have wanted it, I'm sure.
        Posted by: Terence Winch | July 06, 2009 at 09:21 PM

Fantastic piece. Thank you, Terence.
    Posted by: Gerald Fleming | July 04, 2013 at 11:07 AM

Everything written by Terence Winch combines wit and insight. He rewards every visit to his BAP blog. His latest volume of verse, THIS WAY OUT, is another keeper. If you don't own it or haven't read it, do both pronto.
        Posted by: Earle Hitchner | February 23, 2015 at 03:44 PM

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