Number 38


 


     Gary called me from his study yesterday afternoon.  When I got there, he was typing with one hand and waving a book around--like a signal flag--with the other

     "I think I've found you a tree poem," he said.

     "That's nice.  Where was it?"

     "In a very unlikely place," he told me.  "It's one of Ted Berrigan's sonnets!" 

     Ted Berrigan? 

     Ted Berrigan published his now famous suite of sonnets in 1964 to much acclaim, after which it virtually disappeared until this new Penguin edition from 2000, edited by his wife, poet Alice Notley.  Berrigan (1934-1983) was one of those deliberately difficult poets, whose works, if you are in an ungenerous frame of mind, may seem off-puttingly opaque, even hopelessly incoherent.  A Berrigan sonnet can contain lines like "The blue day! In the air the winds dance / Now our own children are strangled down in the bubbling quadrangle./ To thicken!" (Sonnet XXXll).

     "Isn't Ted Berrigan a bit...um...demanding for the tree column?"

     "Not this time," said Gary, full of missionary zeal.

     And he was right.  Here is Berrigan's Sonnet XVll (for Carol Clifford):


Each tree stands alone in stillness

After many years still nothing

The wind's wish is the tree's demand

The tree stands still

The wind walks up and down

Scanning the long selves of the shore

Her aimlessness is the pulse of the tree

It beats in tiny blots

It's patternless pattern of excitement

Letters     birds     beggars     books

There is no such thing as a breakdown

The tree     the ground     the wind     these are

Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits

Sensual, solid, still, swaying alone in the wind