T. C. MARSHALL Reviews
Can It! by Edmund Berrigan
(Tucson:
Letter Machine, 2013)
with references to his previous books in T.C. Marshall's collection--
Disarming Matter
(Woodacre, CA: The Owl Press, 1999)
and
Life (NY: Boog
Literature, 2000)
as well as
The Selected Poems of
Steve Carey, ed. E. Berrigan (NY: subpress, 2009) & Alice Notley’s
essay “Steve” in Coming After (Ann
Arbor: U of M, 2005)
The poet Eddie
Berrigan is anything but collected. If you can do it in a poem or a paragraph,
he probably will. We see and feel this polymorphous poetics surging forward
with heart in his latest oeuvre, Can It!,
where “the Unborn Second Baby” gives us his own songs in a delicious multitude
of forms. Some seem totally made up, and some mostly matter of fact. Like his
dad, he ranges freely among methods, neither owning nor owned by any
discernible one. His late great father, Ted Berrigan, seemed to put all
approaches to the test of telling some truth--whether it would be aesthetic or
experiential or more often both. Young Edmund appears to let even more
approaches into this book than his father before him practiced in a whole
career.
An approach
like the one in “Opening” working with recombinant phrasing of sentences to
form a quasi-narrative prose-poem still can tell truths in its various tones.
We get faux-naif philosophical bits like “The right here is right by my side”
or “My diminutive complete faith in supernatural power makes every moment
religious” (21). These are the kinds of statements Ted loved that can make you
laugh and simultaneously nod at how true they are. We also get whacky
variations like “My diminutive is right here by my side, having terror” and
“Having complete faith in supernatural waggishness, every moment an ingenious
hope of the future is exhausting” (21). Between them comes an aesthetic
observation: “Having pretended and then laid claim was an artful measure” (21).
This is an aesthetics that depends upon neither seriousness nor univocality; it
has taken the modernist lesson of collage into new territory of fun without
leaving truths out of the picture. From Pound/Eliot to O’Hara/Berrigan and now
beyond via Breton/Burroughs, this poetry calls upon its readers to experience
the assembly of meaning in its “artful measure,” and to accept pretending as an
opposite equal to high modern pretenses.
At another
point opposite to pretending and pretense, Can
It! presents its diaristic pieces. The book begins in and frequently
returns to straight-forward expression. The title poem, the “Foreword” and the
“Epilogue,” and such pieces as “San Francisco Diary,” “Texas Road Trip,” and
“Paris Diary,” all are prose accounts of lived moments or series of
experiences. “Doug” is a poem in lines that tells simply of the passing of a
belovéd step-father and fellow poet. All of these pieces are frank. Arch
sensibility, camp, irony, and cleverness are minimized in these pieces; their
tone is as plain as their titles (except in the title poem, which borrows a
joke from Ted).
Ted is the
focus for several of these pieces. The “Foreword” tells us about the posthumous
value of Ted’s writing for this son: “a lens I could use to gauge the
situation” of going on without him; it “represented his voice but also his
absence” and “was about adaptation and survival.” The younger Berrigan found a
shared “interest … behind the words” in the “intuitiveness of poetry” as “a
vehicle … for continuing our relationship.” Can
It! is a book that is not just about these relations in “intuitiveness” but
a lively enactment of forms of it. The poet’s hope here is for “a book that can
carry this kind of information” in working “as both a whole and as parts” that
we can enter “from any point like a memory” and “that feels infinite but
remains brief.” All of these claims are realized in Can It!’s shaping of lyrical personal experience and imaginative
recomposition of the parts played by words. Their writer names this book “a
place where I could store intangible information while letting myself off the
hook” (ii).
That last bit
gets inside the emotional value of this work and its ways of getting beyond the
diffident cynicism of the age. “Oh Death,” with its mock poetic title, tells
very simply and clearly Eddie’s memory/experience of the day Ted died. The most
poignant moment seems to be when his poet-mother says, after announcing his
father’s death, “If you feel angry and you want to break something, you can go
ahead” (18). Eddie says he took up a plate from the sink, “felt a surge of
emotion,” and put it back down. That idea of a need to break something provides
a funny way to look at this book. Can It!
breaks a few rules but also demonstrates an unbroken chain linking the young
Edmund to his father Edmund, known as Ted, and beyond that to several threads
of poetic inheritance. Sentences, lines, words, thoughts, and their syntax and
co-ordinations get broken in some parts of this book “That tells a whole story
by showing a fragmented record” (ii). However, the whole is greater.
There are
angers in it: “’Beyond age lies a pain in the river,’ he screamed, ‘and beyond
that, lies!’” or the recorded Texas road-trip image of a sign in a yard full of
broken-down trucks “which read, ‘You poisoned my son’s puppy!’ The word
‘poisoned’ was bigger than the others” (127). There are self-aware comments
about griefs: “Movies where the male lead represents some kind of absence seem
to resonate with me” (131) or “Doug had come into our lives and filled in some
kind of empty space. Now he was leaving” (138) or the description of Eddie’s
own astonishment at the peacefulness emitted by Doug Oliver’s dead body (142).
These are fine expositions, but the detailed work of putting word next to word
throughout this book is the really great memorial to the feelings of this young
poet whose fathers were Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. From the latter, this
book takes its epigraph, “Emotions stagger forwards / in these distracted
councils”; from the former, it derives a half-dozen key anecdotes and several
poetic impetuses. There is a story called “The Blood Barn” that seems an homage
to Ted’s cut-up cowboy novel, Clear the
Range. There are cut-up poems, a “fake” interview, the simple descriptive
poem “Doug,” the whacky “Objects: A Play,” the transcribed chat with a fellow
poet, and the anecdotal piece with Ted’s jokey “post-card poem” à la A Certain Slant of Sunlight as its
punchline. And yet, by including all this and more, Can It! is all Eddie.
You can see
that by looking back at two fine early works of his: Disarming Matter from 1999 and Life
from 2000. Anselm Hollo’s jacket blurb for Disarming mentions the “little balloons” that appear above your
head when you read that book with an ear for its music. It is a speech music
with all the quirky stops and starts of our talking ways. A poem like “Eyes”
might work with his being “the son of a dead man,” but its moves showed over a
dozen years ago that this young poet had his own claim to “artful measure.”
Each of the four sections of Disarming
takes a different tack, one works with claiming the fourteener as Eddie’s own
by making fourteen of them newly while another builds small square prosy
inventions that veer between being tales and being personal philosophies
banging against words as they go. “Words” ends “I remember my whole self
accepted the words I chose not mattered it’s beautiful to be plain or not to.
Does this not freeze, when I talk it slows down, words do not represent, nor
sound” (45). This book is not what you’d call plain, but Life very much is.
Life is one paragraph for each of his
years at that point since birth in 1974. The first few are one sentence each,
but each is what Stein said a paragraph of good prose should be—emotional. The
three years of high school get one page starting “High School is a blur,” but
the baker’s dozen sentences there present every anxious bit of those years
remarkably, from “Start writing poetry everyday” to “Regrettable Tom Petty
phase” and other sentences about writing, friends, money lack, girls, music,
and lit. They include “Steve Carey dies of a heart attack” without placing him
in poetry or the heart, but you can tell he had a place in both.
Another work
of Eddie’s that tells us a lot about him and what he works for is his edition
of The Selected Poems of Steve Carey
from 2009. The editor’s “preface” doesn’t do much more than give the poems a
history, though it mentions their quality of “voice” and calls them “terrific
to read out loud” and says they’re “meant to be heard” (8). If we turn to
Eddie’s mother, Alice Notley, though, we get “Steve”—an essay that tells us his
“exact sense of rhythm” comes from being a drummer and a singing guitarist
(117). We also hear exactly how he loves “turns of phrase” (118) and that after
Ted’s death “Eddie visits Steve a lot, sort of out of the blue each time”
(125). Notley asserts that “Steve … lays his life on the line for and in his
poetry, in order to write it properly” (127). These things could quite rightly
be said of her second son too. He got his own heart and voice going from more
than just Ted or Ted’s being dead. He knew how to shape a bit of a dad on his
own out of what could be found and what was given.
Steve Carey’s
“About Poetry” (46) or “The Islands” (74) might be the song-shaped influence
behind young Edmund’s poems and guitar playing, or not. The almost impossible
image at the end of “New Petit Mal”: “A gaggle of bones / down through the
scrub” (31) might have opened Eddie to his own constructions, or not. Carey’s
poem “Poem” (91) may be about Alice Notley partly and maybe showed even Ted how
excellently this adventure would go. That it could result in a lyricism of
multiple tones like “We have forfeit / The requirement of our consent” near
“’Bitchin’ kamikazee ingenue’ is right / (singing, ‘Do wah diddy, diddy dum
diddy do’)” seems almost impossible until you hear it done again in “Sign hung
from an Abandoned Coal Mine” (41) or “The Orbit Poem” (76) in Disarming Matter. When Notley writes “He
has been hurt in his youth and the result is rampant poetry and also fear and
instability; the more hurt you are, the more poetic you are, the less likely
you’ll be conformist enough, or have enough professional stamina, to get the
circumscribed recognition a ‘famous’ poet gets” (127), it could be about her
second child now man.
Edmund
Berrigan’s poetics work a kind of politics on the poetry world like his
mother’s claims about Steve Carey do. “The Orbit Poem,” in its last few lines,
offers two sentences we can take as assertions among the things Eddie would
like to do:
I
have a desire to transcend conscious speech,
not to the
exclusion of words or letters,
it is
not a scholarly wish, must be removed
from
the present past future inclusive everything
beyond understanding. The only
reason I know
anything is by writing it down
& forgetfulness
keeps everything down where it’s
rooted & comes
to a permanent stop.
(76)
*****
T. C. Marshall lives near Fall Creek in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains where he used to walk regularly with Norman O. Brown; Tom claims to be able still to hear the wise old codger singing Morenita Mía on the trail and asking sharp questions about the biome. Some of Tom’s own creative works in progress can be seen at postlanguage.blogspot.com, on YouTube, & at maizepoem.blogspot.com. His next performance to be YouTubed will come in the Spring and be called something like “Face their Violence or Face the Music.”
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