The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

This landmark collection brings Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry together in a single authoritative volume for the first time. Edited by the poet Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons, The Collected Poems demonstrates the remarkable range, power, and importance of Berrigan's work.

Literature & Fiction

Notley, Alice

Berrigan, Anselm

Berrigan, Ted

Berrigan, Edmund

History & Criticism

University of California Press

The second volume of our City Lights Spotlight Poetry series, Free Cell is the latest book of poems from New York–based poet Anselm Berrigan, one of the most influential American poets under the age of forty. In a departure from his previous work, Free Cell consists of two experimental suites, “Have a Good One” and “To Hell with Sleep,” connected by a central poem.The former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Anselm Berrigan is the son of poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. He is the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

Free Cell (City Lights Spotlight)

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

Poetry. Anselm Berrigan gives us a fresh dose of his discordant mind music. TO HELL WITH SLEEP was written by the poet in the first months after the birth of his daughter, mostly during brief periods of time when he was half-awake or less so, letting the poetry be unthought within its vehicle of eight seven-line slanting stanzas per session, of which there were nine. The impulse driving the writing was to let sounds-turning-toward-words follow from the intensified state of consciousness the arrival of this baby initiated. No prescience, reflection, computer tricks, formal appropriation, or plotting of any kind was used in the writing of this work. Joy, fear, humor, sound, bafflement and recognition-in-exchange-for-recognition were the instruments. Other Anselm Berrigan titles available from SPD are SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING, ZERO STAR HOTEL, and INTEGRITY & DRAMATIC LIFE.

To Hell with Sleep

Letter Machine Editions

Poetry. New poems by Anselm Berrigan. "In the world of Anselm Berrigan sketchiness is next to godliness and repeated heavy-lifting becomes a pleasure. PREGRETS has the feel of wandering a giant armory filled with enigmatic objects and pointed memories. Dust motes in daylight betray a thin path forward so the 'tongue' of the book seems in constant peril, addictively so. 'Red copter rises slicing a scraper into outer cubicle dreams...' Possessed of a haunted style that moves beyond surface. Fathomless."--Cedar Sigo "With PREGRETS, Anselm Berrigan captures the scattered environs and tonal intrusions that compose thought-break as society--a reflection of the seemingly scattered populace, where the all is broken while becoming thought, 'unity would like / its finked deproductions back.' If we remove a cogent arc, the dips and peaks of our lives become weirdly accessible, where each observed indentation of skin on skin action becomes a jeweled aphorism, a telegrammed imagistic, from u to us--'I'm a covered base / levitating carry-ons into sub-extinction.' Berrigan synthesizes time's arrival as an act of pregret, by giving us regrets to degret from, now he's got me doing it! The breathless yet finite scrawl of these poems--ecosystems of empowerment that infuse the neighborhood walk with the centered page--re-train listening as a sort of ekphrasis of unfolding, to capture the journey's formation with a delicate insistence on the everyday apogee found between the words, 'being a thingless / telephat,' of poet to reader, 'give my love to the air out there.'"--Edwin Torres "Houdini word smithy Anselm Berrigan writes elsewhere about poetry coming from a place as if a filter between your consciousness and the world fluttering in. This magic act, not facile, is unpredictable--the filter works lovingly overtime, hard at its alchemy, arrangement, intuitive flowing 'moves' of brain flash, found attitude, multiple voiced increments. Sometimes I'm breathless inside a language barrage or barrel speedily turning not bound by any one thought. Other times I'm with abandon in the cognition quotidian soup. ('The abstract poet runs where in cognito again?') But consciousness is a vivid Zen equalizer--a syncretic piling on as words jump the gate, rhapsodize, list, lumber, scan this wild existence. So what IS the sense of PREGRETS? 'gret' comes from the 'greter' meaning to weep, mourn, lament from the Frankish 'gretan.' Was it that moment before you weep? or imagined later? Future pluperfect? Regrets suggest a past. Begrets suggest something between begetting and beginning, more complicated than 'first thought, best thought' And we have also Deflategrets, Freegrets, Megrets, Gretgrets, and then Degrets de-constructs the lament perhaps. So PREGRETS I figure gets at origins that already have some kind of affect/karma but don't have to add up. A huge relief. This work is all about duration and mind and space, and Time as spiral. Often like dream text with that crazy 'other' fluttering in wild tandem. 'The escapist fig as fondled contour.' Amazing."--Anne Waldman

Pregrets

Black Square Editions

Poetry. In his first book-length volume of poetry, Anselm Berrigan asks Why wouldn't I mind/Brushing off another engagement/To go wander around/The shallows of downtown (from Ghost town). Though he may characterize these wide-wandering poems as flitting in the shallows, it is the accumulation of these shallows, of various downtowns and what is thought and seen in them, that makes a depth of INTEGRITY &amp; DRAMATIC LIFE. I don't know what I say/&amp; this has been pointed out to me (from Not all there) but in the process of reporting what many others say, and what he himself might say, provisionally, understatedly, dramatically, with integrity and irony and feeling and cities, friends, employers, nuclear war, drinks, chocloate donuts in vellum-all the detritus and necessity of an astute, young, urban, urbane, poetically driven life-Berrigan gives us a consummately delightful invitation. Someone is at the door. Shall I ask them in? (from A short history of autumn). We are someone. We have been asked

Integrity & Dramatic Life

Edge Books

Poetry. SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING finds Anselm Berrigan, Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, once more in funny, irritable, tip-top form. Surveying the Bush-era cultural landscape and not liking what it sees, the poetry herein confronts that reality in terms disgusted ("The group is/an asshole./Self-censorship/is the American avant-garde") and terrifying ("Dreamt I was chopping off fingers/of mine with audience. Not cool"), encompassing odd disclosure ("I don't want my brother to get a job ever") and biting satire ("Osama passes/George the bong/bitching about 21st century/hydroponic weed"). And yet, even if we are all just "Trained Meat," as the title of one poem suggests, the work here never gives in to despair; we may be "under attack/in mourning/all at once" but we also "better make//room for each/grief letting/me see what/lines and/lies/not to take/and how/moment/by moment/to be." A fantastic and necessary book.

Some Notes on My Programming

Open City features a dynamic mix of prominent writers, undiscovered aspirants, and lost treasures from writers of past eras. Including fiction, essays, poetry, and artwork by an exciting range of talents, Open City has presented new works by Michael Cunningham, Deborah Garrison, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Geoffrey O'Brien, Sam Lipsyte, Meghan Daum, David Berman, and previously unpublished work by Delmore Schwartz, Richard Yates, Edvard Munch, and Ford Madox Ford. Praised in the pages of publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Library Journal, and The New York Times, Open City is today's most important literary journal. Open City #14 includes John Seabrook on ancestor hunting; Arthur Nersessian, from Fuck-Up to makeup; new fiction by Betsy Bern and Martha McPhee; and the original treatment for the improvised cult-classic film Waiting for Guffman.

Open City 14

BEY, Hakim

Pinchbeck, Daniel

Brownstein, Michael

Holland, Noy

Chester, Craig

Beller, Thomas

Yas, Joanna

Reference

Grove Press, Open City Books

"A vortex, a nexus, and a weather system all to himself."—Small Press Traffic

Notes From Irrelevance

United States

Wave Books

"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."—Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe"Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." —Virginia Konchan, Galatea ResurrectsIn Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into cornersAnselm Berrigan is the current poetry editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

Come In Alone

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Books by Berrigan, Anselm

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Berrigan, Anselm. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

Free Cell (City Lights Spotlight)

To Hell with Sleep

Pregrets

Integrity & Dramatic Life

Some Notes on My Programming

Open City 14

Notes From Irrelevance

Come In Alone

Come In Alone