Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan – Alice Notley with Edmund Berrigan – Interview by Garrett Caples
We celebrated, a few weeks back, the publication, by City Lights, of Get The Money!, the much-anticipated Collected Prose of legendary “New York School” poet Ted Berrigan, edited by his widow, Alice Notley, his sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, and New York School scholar Nick Sturm – (see here and here)
In addition, just this past week, the Poetry Foundation published an extensive and illuminating interview with Alice (with contributions from Eddie) by Garrett Caples, the book’s in-house editor, with Alice recalling her life and times with Ted – “She Really Enjoyed Him” – It’s truly essential reading and can be found – here
See also Jordan Davis‘ review of Get The Money! for the Poetry Foundation – here
Garrett Caples writes:
“As we worked on the book, we realized we should record some of Alice’s memories about the various pieces Ted wrote during their marriage, so I arranged to interview her for the Poetry Foundation…Eddie was on hand to facilitate. Our interview lasted some two and a half hours – inevitably, I had to cut a great deal of compelling material in order to get the article down to size. Among these cuts was a two-page stretch devoted to Alice’s memories of Ted introducing her to Allen Ginsberg and some of her insights into their relationship. This particular material seemed too good not to use.”
So, well, we’re happy to feature it here. Our thanks to Garrett for alerting us to this valuable unused material.
Alice Notley on Ginsberg and Berrigan (from the Poetry Foundation interview):
Garrett Caples: Talk about Allen a bit in relation to Ted, because they seem like they had an interesting relationship.
Alice Notley: When Ted was teaching in Ann Arbor [1971], I knew vaguely that Allen was coming to give a reading. But I was staying with Ted in this rooming house. I went into the bathroom to take a shower and I came out wearing a shirt and underpants and carrying a towel and I walked into the room and Allen was there with this young man. Ted said, “Alice, this is a test of your aplomb. I’d like you to meet Allen Ginsberg.” And I said, “Oh, okay. But I would like to get my pants on.” I went back in that room and put those on.
Allen gave everybody employment. He had some money and he gave it to members of the community in different ways. One way was to hire them to do things. He hired Ted to edit Peter Orlovsky’s book for City Lights, Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs (1978). He hired me later to do some typing and filing for him after Ted died. He would hire people to go through his junk mail and write a poem. And I did that, Michael Scholnick and I each did that. And I think another person did it (Simon Pettet). Bob Rosenthal would come over with all of Allen’s junk mail and he would go through it and sift out things, I think Ted did it too. And you would make sure that there was nothing he had missed. Then you had to write a poem about it. And then he would give you $25. You could always go to Allen on that level. Allen was a member of the community. He lived around the corner a lot of the time. He sent Steven Taylor over with a message when Ted died, he came over when [Ted’s daughter from his first marriage] Kate Berrigan died. He was just there and he knew what was happening and he was one of us. But he was also Allen Ginsberg. But you could totally rely on him in a way.
GC: He seemed like he had lots of respect for Ted.
AN: They had aesthetic conversations. Allen didn’t understand The Sonnets. There was a lot of kinds of poetry that Allen didn’t understand. He would say, “I don’t understand it,” and he’d want to have a conversation about it. He asked Ted if he wasn’t cutting up his emotions. I can’t remember what Ted said, but Allen felt that Ted was cutting up his emotions. Allen asked me to explain Philip Whalen’s poetry to him once. He said, “I don’t understand it.” And then I said something very lame because I didn’t know how to explain it to him but Allen thought it wasn’t like poetry. He had an idea of what poetry was, which was like his poems. And it was poetic. The idea that something as jarring as The Sonnets, as clipped at the ends as that, he wasn’t sure that was poetic. He wasn’t sure Philip’s poetry was poetic because a lot of the time it sounded like prose. Whereas Allen knew that he sounded like Christopher Smart or somebody like that. But also Jewish, like “Kaddish”
Edmund Berrigan: But for dad, things like The Sonnets<, as much as they’re writing, they come out of Abstract Expressionism, in a way. There’s a point where they seem like a visual art made out of made out of language, as opposed to the writing of a poem.
AN: They come out of John Cage. Well, they come out of Dada first. It comes out of Dada and I don’t think Allen did Dada. I’m not sure to what extent he even did Surrealism. He did the 19th century, but he didn’t like the 18th century. He only liked Christopher Smart. He liked the 19th century. He liked poetry from other cultures a lot. Blake was his master, partly because Blake had visions and Allen had visions when he was young and had a nervous breakdown. He went to the asylum and everything. He wrote out of it, the trauma of being queer and having a crazy mother, being Jewish and all of that. I think he associated poetry forever with Blake and the visionary experience of the long line. Or the short line, if you’re being Chinese.
GC: I assume “Howl” must have been big for Ted too. Do you know anything about his encounter with that?
AN: I’m sure it was, but I think it wasn’t part of his talking aesthetics. There are a lot of poems that you read when you’re younger and, but then you have this other batch of poems that are your aesthetics that you go to all the time. And he settled on the New York School for that. Then people that came in later that he consciously admitted, but he also spent a lot of time when he was younger reading “official” poetry, in anthologies; he was influenced by people like Delmore Schwartz and Theodore Roethke in individual poems. There’s no way he wasn’t influenced by “Howl” but I don’t remember him talking about it.
EB: Or maybe not “Howl” specifically, but Allen was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in ’65, where dad went to become a star, in a way.
AN: I think he took Allen’s poetry for granted and he took its greatness for granted. It wasn’t something he was going to use, but there are poems in A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988) where he’s using Allen’s lines. Allen had the Kerouac thing as well, the camera thing. They’re like the same thing for Ted; it’s like the same shape of this same area. And then you access from it. But you don’t get the shape of the poem from it. You get a sound from it.
EB: Allen did things like introduce dad to Neal Cassady. Kerouac was obviously super important for dad, although I don’t know if Kerouac’s a clear influence anywhere in Get the Money! necessarily. But you would think that dad’s sense of prose must be somehow informed by Kerouac to some extent.
AN: No. It might be in something like the Harry Fainlight obit. But Jack was romantic and Jack could describe. Ted was romantic, but then he was also anti-romantic because he was Irish and he was afraid to go there. Phil Whalen once told me that; I asked him something like, “Do you believe in astrology?” And he said, “No, I’m Irish. And if I go there, I’ll just drown.” There are all these things you can’t do if you’re Irish, because you’re already doing them; it’s already in your character, so you have to go against them. But Jack was a beautiful writer and Ted read all the books. And he read all of Allen’s books. If there was a new Allen book, he would read it. The first time I met Ron Padgett, Ron had just seen Allen and Ted said, “What is he doing?” Ron said, “I asked him if he was writing any new works. And he said he was just piling up the pages.” Ted said, “Far out,” like Allen’s writing again. It was that kind of thing.
GC: It was just unassailable position that Allen had, then, for Ted?
AN: Allen’s Allen. He was a god. He’s sacred.
