Elinor Nauen

40 years ago, July 4, 1983, Dave Righetti pitched a 4-0 no-hitter for the Yankees against the Red Sox & Ted died. 

 

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,

a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes

from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts

to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

—Ted Berrigan from "Things to do in Providence"

 

A week or 2 later I dreamed Ted called me & said it was boring being dead & he was done with it & what had he missed. I could only think to tell him about Righetti's no-hitter. And how desperately sad everyone was but I felt shy to say that now that it was over. 

I just reread Edward Foster's modest, insightful, moving little chapbook, Code of the West: A memoir of Ted Berrigan. It weaves in a cross-country trip he took by motorcycle with notes on his friendship with Ted & on Ted's work. Originally published in 1994, it's worth tracking down. 

Great night at the Poetry Project in celebration of Get the Money!, a just-published collection of Ted Berrigan's prose. Happy to hear the dozen or so readers with excerpts & stories, happy to hug so many people Ted mattered to. I loved Anselm saying that many of his dad's friends are now his friends, & to relish this contentious, loving community of 40, 50, 60 years. Happy that Johnny read, who of everyone there had known Ted the longest, since he was (in a poem of Ted's) "19-year-old knife fighter Johnny Stanton." Get the book!

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,

a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes

from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts

to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

 

~ from "Things to do in Providence"

Ted Berrigan (November 15, 1934 - July 4, 1983) 

 

We had a spat (that's why I forgot my jacket yesterday, truth be told). I would have been satisfied with a hug & a promise but he gave me this beautiful poem of Ted's. Johnny! The most handsome Stanton in Manhattan! 

A sound poetic training is nothing less than the science of being discontented. 

~ Ezra Pound

 

Aw Ez, U the man. My pet peeve is ME.

 

Ted used to say once you're a poet you're a poet 24 hours a day & whatever you're doing, a poet is doing it. He said it to reassure me when my first book came out & it didn't explode everything, so I felt done in. 

 

The science of being disconnected. Meaning what, that I need to keep better track of what pisses me off? 

 

2020 has certainly been a sound poetic training.

Happy birthday, Ted Berrigan. I liked everything better when you were alive. I would have brought you a book & a pill today. You would look at me. You liked women, you liked poets, you liked life, but not enough. Instead today I sneezed & napped & studied Norwegian. It is what it is. As you said, whatever is going to happen is already happening. 

For Ted Berrigan

 

We were afraid of everything except kindness. We made a cult of generosity. We slapped them silly who weren't witty or lovely. We wanted better boots, better polish, better hair. We thought about country diarists without leaving our rooms on 23rd Street. We bought one expensive handcream that someone else paid for. We knocked down screens to see a woman wash her back. We ate Krishna feast. We found soft wool undershirts on the street & said they were Patti Smith's. We called her Patti. We said Bob, & people were supposed to know we meant Dylan. We won prizes & forgot to pick them up. Our teeth broke. We checked into the hospital to rest. No one we voted for won. We were Black Jacobins. We recognized beauty & nothing else. Nothing else mattered.

 

11/15/2018

I’d only had a copy for so long that I’d forgotten what this wonderful shade, painted by Tim Milk, really looked like. It was nice to feel Ted in the room & of course nice to see Johnny with his big laugh, enjoying himself with Joe Carey & his girlfriend Stacy (who shares my birthday AND has many other wonderful qualities). 

Nick Sturm sent me this page from a notebook of Ted's in his archives at Emory University. Where'd he get the picture? (He snatched it, for sure: no way he asked for it.) Where was it taken? (Rockaways or Florida.) Did he know I'd be perplexed 35 years later? Probably! That man was a mixer, that's for sure—someone who stirs things up! I bet he grabbed it one time when he came over to help me find some pills I'd hidden so well they were lost for a long time. If Ted Berrigan can't find pills, you know they're well hidden! (Ask me where they finally turned up.)

Now I'm remembering once trading baseball cards with Anselm, who was about 6 at the time, & Ted made us trade back because he thought I was taking all the good cards & leaving Anselm with the duds. I probably was, although I was more interested in cute than stats, & Ans didn't care. I wanted Jim Palmer, the Orioles' handsome Hall of Fame-bound pitcher who later on posed in his underwear. A dreamboat!

Tim Milk did this wonderful window shade painting of Ted Berrigan. I don't remember who had it or where it ended up. I found this xerox the other day & it made me think of what a great poet & life force he was.

I often send these lines to people who are grieving:  Read More 

In his storage space, Johnny found this amazing never-sent letter Ted Berrigan wrote to Joe Brainard back in 1982, so beautiful & heartening about poetry, art, & love, & it made me miss not just Ted but that whole era so much. Feels suddenly like so much is ending & that there's almost no one left from the really  Read More 

We found so many things while clearing out Johnny's storage space.

We threw out a lot too.

Not this!

It's full-length, down to the ballet slippers he is wearing, & signed: Ted Berrigan, 1981

I hope you appreciate how much blood & sweat not to mention magical eliadic mind-power over matter bulk it took to compress 425 lbs of beautifully-aged crispy-sweet jelly-pork major-poet self-taught American mortal-coil flesh (meat!) into this dingbat-suit Oscar De La Renta whipped up personally for me to wish you HAPPY BIRTHDAY in, Stanton!
 Read More