Ted Berrigan

• Birth Name — Edmund Joseph Michael Berrigan Jr. • Born — 15 November 1934 • Birthplace — Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. • Died — 4 July 1983 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Spouse — Sandy Alper 1962-1969 • Children — 4, inc. Anselm Berrigan • Occupation — Poet • Education — University of Tulsa • Notable Works — The Sonnets

Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army. Following his three-year service obligation, he enrolled at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, where he received a B.A. degree in English in 1959 and fell just short of the requirements for an M.A. in 1962. He founded the literary magazine C in 1964. Berrigan married Sandra in 1962, also a poet, and they had two children: David Berrigan (a medical researcher and director of the US National Cancer Institute) and Kate Berrigan. He and his second wife, the poet Alice Notley, married in 1972 and were active in the poetry scene in Chicago for several years, then moved to New York City, where he edited various magazines and books. In 1970, Berrigan was hired as a faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he met Alice Notley. His C Press published Notley's first book 165 Meeting House Lane in Bolinas, California. In 1972, Berrigan was appointed to a teaching position at Northeastern Illinois University, formerly held by Ed Dorn. A group of his students started a small poetry press, The Yellow Press, which published a book by Berrigan, and awarded an annual Ted Berrigan Prize for a first book. In 1974, Berrigan was selected as a visiting poet at the University of Essex, and relocated with his family to Brightlingsea in Essex. They returned to the United States in 1976, living on the Lower East Side of New York City at 101 St. Mark's Place. Their apartment was a gathering place for young writers and Berrigan's contemporaries. Berrigan was a frequent instructor at Naropa University's summer writing program.

The poet Frank O'Hara called Berrigan's most significant publication, The Sonnets, "a fact of modern poetry". A telling reflection of the era that produced it, The Sonnets beautifully weaves together traditional elements of the Shakespearean sonnet form with the disjunctive structure and cadence of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Berrigan's own literary innovations and personal experiences. In the words of Berrigan's editor and second wife Alice Notley, the product was a composition "[that is] musical, sexy, and funny." Berrigan was initially drawn to the sonnet form because of its inherent challenge; in his own words, "the form sort of [stultifies] the whole process [of writing]." The procedure that he ultimately concocted to write The Sonnets is the essence of the work's novelty and ingenuity. After attempting several sonnets, Berrigan decided to go back through what he had written and take out certain lines, one line from each work, until he had six lines. He then went through the poems backwards and took one more line from each until he had accumulated six more lines, twelve lines total. Based on this body of the work, Berrigan knew what the final couplet would be; this process became the basis for The Sonnets. Addressing claims that the method is utterly mechanical, Berrigan explains that some of the seventy-seven sonnets came to him "whole", without needing to be pieced together. The poet's preoccupation with style, his concern for form and his own role as the creator, as evinced by The Sonnets, pose a challenge to traditional ideas about poetry and signify a fresh and innovative artistic approach. The book recognizes the eternal possibility for invention in a genre seemingly overwhelmed by the success of its traditional forms. By imitating the forms and practices of earlier artists and recreating them to express personal ideas and experiences, Berrigan demonstrates the potential for poetry in his and subsequent generations. As Charles Bernstein succinctly comments: "Part collage, part process writing, part sprung lyric, Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets remains…one of the freshest and most buoyantly inspired works of contemporary poetry. Reinventing verse for its time, The Sonnets are redolent with possibilities for our own.”

Berrigan died aged 48 in Greenwich Village on July 4, 1983, of cirrhosis of the liver brought on by hepatitis.