Ted Berrigan's Death

Ted Berrigan's death leaves a hole of adamant loss. There won't be another like him, ever, and what's left as always to do is to remember that, and what his writing was all about, and how, with such disarming simpleness, it could hold the largest imagination of human relationships and the world in which they are given to be.

Robert Duncan spoke of him as a genius of pathos , a power that could move the heart so commonly, simply, as in one of his great poems, "Things to Do in Providence." His insistent ritualizing of his friends' names, his lovely rehearsal of them, often as a poem would begin, to make the company of his life become the place where all authority of speech might then occur—what a generous and American act! I recall a British friend's irritation on hearing him do this, at a reading he gave with Jim Dine in London years ago ("Ted / is ready. / The bell / rings . . ."), and saying something like, "I don't know those people . . ." She missed the point altogether because Ted would dearly have liked her to know them—they were the greatest friends in the world.

He was an Irishman from Providence, which always moved me. Together with Charles Olson and John Wieners, he was my particular New England—certainly all I ever knew or believed in. I loved the way he took on New York and not only made it but so permeated its New York style, like they say, that I do think he's finally as evident in that manner of poetry as is Frank O'Hara, whose work he so loved. But the pace and rhythm of his poems, the

seemingly open way of the words, the commonness of them, the literal action of what happens, the content at once so obvious and so resonant, all that is inimitable, however large the appetite now to possess it.

Then, as with Mr. Wieners, he remains forever in mind as a great gentleman, an exceptional one. He taught manners, and common caring, by his own example. Despite he was a hard man to interrupt (!), he certainly heard you. I remember my own applications to his attention got always a courteous reception and response. He had great honor—put most simply as he did, "Give it your best shot . . ." "I'd like to take the whole trip . . ." He made an extensive, particular, possible world of his life and lived there difficultly sans complaint.

The raw shock of his death, no matter he or anyone else expected it, makes no room now for spelling it out further. You will hear his wild tremulous wistful reflective engaging way of saying it in any work of his that you read or hear him reading. Thankfully there is the substantial collection of his poems, So Going Around Cities , and the reissued Sonnets , and much else. It won't bring him back but it's what he left, solid as a rock.