Aching to be Fucked

(As an addendum to my previous post on the nature of poetics moving forward, I provide this example of a poet and a text that manages to retain meaning whilst interrogating its nature.  To construct a more adequate relationship between linguistic interrogation and an aesthetics not in opposition to the pleasure-seeking reader is poetry's challenge, and this is largely what Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets achieves.)


The most striking and obvious realization one makes when first approaching Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets may be that the seventy-eight poems contained are not sonnets after all – at least not in the formal sense. Published in 1963 and widely considered Berrigan’s greatest work, The Sonnets offer a vast majority of poems that do adhere to a fourteen line format, though most are composed in free verse rather than the traditional iambic pentameter and a number of exceptions are scattered throughout. These exceptions, along with the extreme experimental methods Berrigan used in composing each poem, point to a higher sense of poetic purpose than that which can be derived from a strict adherence to form (this has proven to be true, at least, in much of contemporary poetry). Indeed, it seems as if by crafting his collection within the context of such an archaic poetic form, Berrigan is inviting the reader to reconsider the usefulness and implications of form itself in post-modern poetics.

The disjointed syntax and schizophrenic nature of The Sonnets can be attributed to the unorthodox process of composition that Berrigan implemented in writing them. The individual poems are for the most part a mish-mash of lines copped from other poems and strung together to form surprising new meanings. While this seems to have potential for disaster, it never comes across as if Berrigan went about this haphazardly – every line feels as if it serves a purpose in its place and they rarely feel alienated from one another, even if there is a general lack of grammatical sense and cohesive narration. Many of the same lines are recycled and reappear in different poems, giving the collected poems a rare and unified nature. It is one of many happy surprises in The Sonnets that the lines that do appear multiple times have taken on widely disparate meanings in their respective contexts, so much so that when we come across them again they still manage to feel strange and exciting. And the novelty never wears off, partly due to the fact that there are several sonnets that do not adhere to this cut-it-up formula (though it is almost hard to recognize familiar sentence structures when one has been deprived of them for so long) and partly because the individual lines carry such vivacity.

A representative instance of two poems speaking to one another can be drawn up in comparing “Penn Station” to Sonnet “XXI.” The two poems share fourteen identical lines and vary only in their titles and the order in which these lines are presented. Still, these few distinctions remarkably manage to create entirely fresh environments for the reader. “Penn Station” is one of the few poems in the collection that is given a name other than the typical Roman numeral. Berrigan makes sure that these titles count; in this case, the title lends the poem a visual template on which to sketch an incoherent narrative. Then again, it is hopeless to completely trust the title to make sense of everything, as the poem’s first line, “On the green a white boy goes,” presents an image that contrasts with the indoor bustling one might associate with a place such as Penn Station. The same is true for images such as “the green jungle” and “a sky of burnt umber.” Adding to the confusion are rhymes that come at the end of several lines but do not coalesce to form a rhyme scheme with any recognizable pattern. In throwing away the narrative and replacing it with such a collage, Berrigan succeeds in creating a poetic situation in which the reader is forced to give paramount importance to the words themselves. In doing so, the reader must develop his own meaning and is therefore allowed a chance to participate in the poem’s actual creation. 

Perhaps what strikes one most about The Sonnets is how entirely pleasurable they are to read. They are infused with such abundant life and energy that, to employ an apt cliche, each nearly jumps off the page. This kind of energy is what poets should seek to instill in their own work and Berrigan’s work provides another template – along the lines of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, whose work bore considerable weight on Berrigan's – on which they more effectively release it.


-C.T.