Get the Money!: Collected Prose (1961-1983) by Ted Berrigan
Edited by Edmund Berrigan, Anselm Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Nick Sturm
City Lights Books 2022

Ted Berrigan’s Get the Money! Collected Prose 1961–1983 confirms that behind Berrigan’s poetry lies a critical discourse driven by a gregariousness all his own. For as casual a tone as Berrigan’s prose often strikes, it is girded by a surprising wealth of omnivorous reading and socializing within the upper echelons of the 1960s/70s New York poetry and art circles. His deep investment in these local scenes is delivered upon the page with a welcoming style that harkens to the barroom as much as the classroom. In his editor and eldest son Anselm’s words, Berrigan’s prose holds forth according to “an ethos of affable excitability grounded in attention.” As a writer, Berrigan is generous, always welcoming and, at least when not pulling the reader’s leg — or even when egging his readers on — ever forthright. If he pisses you off, or otherwise offends, that’s generally the point, and it’s intended with good humor. Most of all, Get the Money! is unassuming. Berrigan eschews formality and pretension in his writing. If he’s to be accused of having any kind of schtick, it would be that he generally comes off as just a regular working-class guy utilizing the written word in order to express what he thinks as plainly as possible. Yet that is exactly, for the most part, who he is and what he’s doing. He sticks close to his roots and incorporates that humility directly into his artistic engagements, building the poet-character known simply as ‘Ted’ from the inside out.

Most readers will likely be unfamiliar with the vast majority of these writings. While more than half of the pieces have previously appeared in print, it was predominantly with small magazines whose availability remains limited. With the exception of the selection from Berrigan’s personal journals from the 1960s, which previously appeared in the small press poetry magazine Shiny #9/10 (1999) culled together by Anselm Berrigan and Larry Fagin from 13 journals housed in Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, roughly 40 to 60 years have passed since the original publication of any item. Few have been included in any other collection of material. Meanwhile, the previously unpublished pieces gathered here are among its chief highlights. No reader of Berrigan will be disappointed. Those who primarily know him through his poetry will discover here the various manners by which his prose writing, in both public and private, systematically develops his aesthetic and critical sensibilities.

Berrigan’s overall approach is often one of attentive creative response. When writing reviews, he introduces anomalous methods of critical engagement that answer to a wide variety of works. Whether mirroring William Burroughs’s distinctive cut-up by giving it a go of his own when reviewing Nova Express — “To speak is to lie. To live is to collaborate. ‘But what is he painting?’ Arrrgh, it’s a theater full of people suffocating. ‘I got you — keep it practical and they can’t —’”— or writing his own set of poems “lifted” from lines of the other poet’s work under review (or in some cases, just composing his own poems in response) Berrigan frequently pushes the constraints imposed by the traditional “review” format. Rather than developing consistency of tone or style, this makes many of his responses more varied and surprising than the average collection of reviews. As readers we have no more idea of what to expect next than Berrigan himself no doubt did. He most often utilizes the occasion of these writings as an opportunity to embrace spontaneity in an open-ended encounter with the work under consideration.   

When Berrigan does remain within expected boundaries of conventional reviewing, his exuberance is evocative of the given work’s merits: “This book, 5 Aces & Independence (from Tombouctou), by John Thorpe, is about all the ‘issues’ (money, war, marriage, tribal separation) in that it is person(s) experiencing them. No one else is writing like this. It is a stunning read.” Direct in conveying his enthusiasm, especially with visual art, his reviews often end in brief final sentences. These ever-pithy summations are buoyed by authoritative declaration, at once precise in their appeal to more of an everyday exchange of ideas. For instance, his take on the art of Italian poet Franco Beltrametti: “He is a beautiful artist. One wishes to take what he makes, and place it on one’s wall, and look at it, often. That is art.” And here he is on the portraits of Alice Neel: “Her pictures are enormously alive, and they make you want to keep your eyes open. […] What more can you ask?” What more indeed. Far more than a sense of how the art looks, Berrigan offers how it makes him feel. When at his best, Berrigan offers a blend of the utmost subjective nearness with an undeniable sense of objectivity achieved through distance. It’s as if he has his hand extended out towards the reader beckoning us to come on in and fully experience the sensations on show.  

Quintessential Berrigan moments such as these pop up all over. As with his journal recollection regarding poet Barbara Guest’s support for his magazine C, a journal of poetry, “Barbara also said ‘Ted, you can count on me for at least 20 for any issue, or anytime.’ She’s great!” Or his jotted-down remembrance in a journal after an evening out: “We came home thrilled & pleased and filled to the brim, tho there had been room for more. Incidentally, Bill [Berkson] was beautiful to look at as well.” Appearing as well are writing strategies he uses throughout his poems, such as the chronicling of daily experience: “Friday came & Harris came by, Marion cooked a big dinner, Harris gave me pills, I read On the Road, a little. Anselm & I watched the Knicks game, I fixed the clock, it’s 3:30 a.m.”  

Then there are statements revealing his alertness to certain observations that he explores yet keeps veiled within a near ironic opaqueness: “I must ask Philip Whalen where he learned to throw such clean tantrums”; “All those who are going to keep going will, all those who aren’t — well it isn’t important anyway.”; “…though it is quite simple to see through the paintings of today, it is not easy to see around the paintings of tomorrow. — Bachelard.” That last statement arrives at the end of what Berrigan attests to be an “essay, by Gaston Bachelard, [that] was translated from the French by Ron Padgett and myself. It appeared in Bachelard’s last book, The Poetics of Space (Olympia, 1965).” Yet as the editors inform us —  having dutifully looked into acquiring permissions for publishing all of Berrigan’s frequent quotations — this piece happens to be another creative engagement, “it did not require any permission, as it seems to have come from Ted himself.” In some measure no doubt riffing off Bachelard’s work, it remains an invention of Berrigan’s own.

An example of a similar Berrigan writing practice, is his now fairly infamous “made-up” interview with composer John Cage:

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it is better to be brutal than to be indifferent?

CAGE: Yes. It is better to be brutal than indifferent. Some artists prefer the stream of
consciousness. Not me. I’d rather beat people up.

There was a minor scandal resulting from this interview after it appeared in Mother, no. 7, 1966, as it won a cash prize. However, it is quite clear Berrigan had no intention of hoisting any sort of nefarious trick upon the literary world with the document. He rather clearly felt it was obvious to any invested reader what was going on. After all, the line “I’d rather beat people up” plays off a deeply ironic one, intended to shock and challenge readers, that shows up several times in Berrigan’s first book of poetry The Sonnets published in 1964: “I like to beat people up.” He wasn’t attempting to hide anything about the nature of the interview and Cage, although he found out after the fact, reportedly didn’t mind one bit. As Anselm Berrigan relates here in his Introduction, “After calling John Ashbery to ask, ‘Is this guy for or against me?’ and being told that, yes, Ted was a big fan of his works, Cage acknowledged he had nothing to do with the interview.”

At any rate, it proves to be an infectious form of immersive response to an admired artist and a literary exercise worth repeating. As Berrigan demonstrates with his lesser-known yet just as whimsical and absorbing, if quizzically challenging, “An Interview With John Ashbery” which appeared in The World, no. 8, 1967:

Q: What is your favorite kind of music?

A: Rock ‘n’ roll. Right now, I am flipped for the Zombies doing “She’s Not There.”

The more you read writings by and about Berrigan, such shenanigans become a de rigueur aspect of his work. Whether you appreciate or are dismissive of them is of course a different matter. The very best and, it might be said, worst thing about such works is that they are nothing if not fun. Whether such sort of fun should be a part of “serious” poetry is one of the central questions raised by Berrigan’s work. How does such deadpan conveyance of the quite-literally-invented as “factual truth” impact our readerly understanding of such texts? How do we judge their overall merits…especially when we as readers are not well enough informed to be “in” on the joke? Just how far apart is the poem or other literary text from the stand-up comedy routine and, more importantly, who decides what that relative distance should be? Berrigan clearly calls “bullshit” on such questions. He was deeply and utterly serious in his devotion to poetry and art — especially when having fun.

A previously unpublished “note” on his wife Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane (C press, 1971) offers another method of Berrigan’s sense of play as he calls out the lack of attention coming to women poets: “I can tell you this much already: when the regular poetry world is busy digesting the ranking of Berrigan, Padgett, & Clark in the top ten, they won’t even notice that there are no girls in the Top group, (again), BUT, in the second, & ‘fast-coming’ ten, right after 10 come a bevy of pigeons wide awake on the wing: Miss Mayer, Miss Notley, Miss Anne Waldman, & the veteran, Joanne Kyger.” (202)  Berrigan’s metaphorical mixing of teamsports ranking with avian-comparisons is a bit dated, but in the ensuing decades all these women have continued to publish and reach high levels of popular and critical recognition generally exceeding that of Berrigan himself. He long ago recognized the quality and ambition of their work.

In fact, throughout these pieces Berrigan writes with insightful enthusiasm about the work of a number of women poets and artists. “Litany”, for instance, is a heartfelt listing of sundry statements, quotations and references to the work of poet Bernadette Mayer, which when reread in light of her recent passing achieves extra potency as an homage demonstrating Berrigan’s extraordinary foresight. Much like Mayer’s own work — the vast quantity of which she wrote after Berrigan’s piece — it is at once jokey and serious, flippant yet pious, full of the solemnity of the grand gestural language-use that is shared between the two poets. Poetry is eternal, as Berrigan often expressed. He felt called to writing poems — it was the work at hand, a duty of sorts to be filled. Here he pays dutiful observance to Mayer’s own remarkable dedication to a life practice of writing poetry. Not a crystallized perfection of poetic forms (though she accomplished that as well) but rather the daily habit of accumulated pages incorporating any and all of life’s ongoing affairs. Here are some excerpts: “Well, I believe / in the Communion of Saints, and so, I would say, does she.”…“Send me the tone that sings.”…“‘There are no works of art without sentiment.’”…“‘I like to write something big all at once, in a few sittings, or a few months, the Kerouac school, I guess.’”…“Literature will save the world.” Nothing about it is serious while at the same time everything about it is deadly serious. It’s a fervent testimonial statement to the value and beauty Berrigan finds in reading Mayer’s work.

While “Litany” is previously unpublished, it is dated Nov 15, 1977, and in an entry from “4 Journals” (also previously unpublished) Berrigan records: “Jan. 19th [1978] — A letter from Bernadette saying she liked my critical piece and was furious with Language for not using it.” Apparently, the piece was somehow either too much sentiment or not astute enough for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine editors Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews. This was an unfortunate decision for two editors now widely known and celebrated for having practiced an eclectic editorial agenda focused upon experimental poetry. It’s rewarding to finally have Berrigan documents such as this one readily at hand as they remind how many historical details and facts about poetry-relations during that recent era have yet to be fully unveiled and explored.

This is a big, jaunty book. The editors are Berrigan’s family, Notley joined by her two sons Anselm and Edmund, along with scholar Nick Sturm who has been publishing insightful criticism and commentary on both Berrigan and Notley, along with several others for several years now, and most recently served as editor for Notley’s forthcoming Early Works (fonograf editions). There’s an informative introduction by Anselm, full of fresh appreciation for all his father achieved as a poet, teacher, and member of the arts community on the Lower East Side. The cumulative effect of reading through these pieces is enthralling and revelatory. It will be fascinating to see how such a laid back yet clearly engaged and astute level of commentary as Berrigan achieves might play out amongst readers immersed in today’s poetry world wherein everything is so saturated with MFA careerism. Funnily enough, Berrigan himself once managed to scrape by relying upon “visiting poet” appointments in the burgeoning academic market of that world in his own day, and now the fresh openness of his embrace of the everyday hustle of language might serve as partial anecdote to the current status quo.