II. Ted's Technique as a Model
In addition to the seeming urgency to establish an American aesthetic movement that matched the avante garde-ism of European deconstruction and cubism, as well as the paranoid quality of the "younger generation's" response to the militarization of the public sphere, another consideration in interpreting Berrigan's Sonnets is his drug usage while writing, which seems to have influenced his writing much the same way performance-enhancing drugs positively influence endurance and concentration, I have no sustainable moral qualms with this approach, although one has to wonder what leading contemporary poet, John Ashbery, might have produced under similar conditions. The point is that all these influences converge in Berrigan's collages and make them somewhat inscrutable or, at least, more readerly rohrschachian than usual for modern poetry. In short, there's a randomness that abstracts.
There are, of course, some remedies for this snafu. One is to lock yourself in an old NYC hotel (the Chelsea will do) and have a lost weekend filled with amphetamines and whiskey, reading The Sonnets over and over, until you have either a breakthrough or a breakdown (which, in this instance, could amount to the same thing). Or you could settle, as I did, for Berrigan's own performance of his Sonnets at a public reading (see above, or browse online), perhaps following with the text, as I did, to experience whatever musicality and rhythm was present, to glean his subtle emotive nuances that spring out of his rather quick, slurred delivery, suffused at times with his labored breathing (Another advantage of this latter entry into Berrigan is that you can more easily experience the force of the "simultaneity" Timothy Henry refers to. Somewhat put off by Berrigan's molasses-like delivery, I was able to find on YouTube a recording of another apparently anonymous poet performing Berrigan's Sonnet XXXVI, and this proved invaluable as a contrast, as this poet's delivery was slower, more deliberate, and emphasized the pauses between phrases or images in a manner that was far friendlier to clarity and formal comprehension than Berrigan's, although this alternate performance was also more mechanical and emotionally suppressed. Still, together, these performances greatly enhanced the reading. Also quite valuable in deciphering the collage form employed by Berrigan was his worksheet on collage construction that was included in the readings for this unit.
Still, Berrigan's work represents a challenge that is kind of corollary for that represented, say, by T.S. Eliot and his poetical desire to stimulate his so-called 'objective correlative'; there is much that is solipsistic in Berrigan's approach, and one that you might call a desire to stimulate a subjective correlative-a fully personalized response from the reader, rather than some shared iconography. Thus, for example, in considering even his very first collage sonnet of the sequence, one is presented with a halting proposition:
His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze
Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.
These lines work, to this reader, like shattered, remnant Corinthian columns sun bleaching in the sand. Where do they come from? How did they get here? What does it all mean, this here and now of this shattering? What can I expect next?
Compare Berrigan's opening to the now cliche'd Shakespearean opener:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
I am so tired of this quite lovely poem that I often lampoon it by stuttering at the end of line one (impeh...impeh...impediments). There's some beautiful chisel work here for sure, but the wholly predictable sentiment has not stood the test of time (check out the divorce rate, spear-shaker, you want to say) and the dance of the iamb feet, all rhythmical and regular, appear embarrassingly quaint to the mosh pit denizens of the freeverse bangalang. The point is, as near as I can approximate, that I know what the Bard is doing, know how this will go, understand the images and metaphors of the dance, and can predict where it will cease-any literate reader can. But with Berrigan you are on your own, the correlative has to rise up (or flow down, depending on your orientation) from the reader, making Bertigan's music far more experimental and personal and challenging to the bourgeois reader hooked on bromides and wind-up truths and sentimental memories of Word [sic, real sic] War I.
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