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A certain slant of sunlight

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 1999 by Notley, Alice

Ted Berrigan's book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, Calif: O Books, I988), written during I982 and completed six months before his death in July of I983, is a sequence of poems originally composed on blank postcards each four and a half inches by seven inches. As I've written in the book's Introductory Note, Ken and Anne Mikolowski of The Alternative Press had an ongoing project of sending a set of five hundred such postcards to select people in the hopes of having the cards returned to them with the "picture" side filled with holograph poems and other materials. Individual cards were then included in packets of printed broadsides, bumper stickers, and so on, sent to the Mikolowskis' "subscribers" (the packets were free). The point is that the cards as a constant size and shape became for Berrigan a form, and the poems written in this form became a sequence. The form provided for a poem that could be only as long as the card's size permitted: if the handwriting was kept very small you could wind up with a poem as long as "What a Dump, or, Easter" (3I lines including stanza breaks); however, most of the poems are shorter than that, in the eight- to twenty-line range, say. A few are very much shorter, are only a line or two lines in length, and sometimes suggestive of a postcard "message" (e.g. `SALUTATION/ "Listen, you cheap little liar . . ."'). Is such a form a form? There isn't much of the grid in it, to compare it with Berrigan's The Sonnets, which is composed very much to a grid. The form isn't a plan for the deployment of words and lines so much as an approach, an ambiance, maybe a tone. Yet there are qualities in the poems' general method which suggest The Sonnets and which suggest a fidelity to the sense of the self presented in The Sonnets. But A Certain Slant of Sunlight isn't about "art" as The Sonnets often seems to be, it's about dying and about community; it's about wreckage and salvage, and about states of consciousness that shouldn't be dealt with according to rules.

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The poems in A Certain Slant of Sunlight tend to be composed of units of information, or stories which stand for something else, or bits of language suggestive of emotional states, happenstance, philosophy, reflectiveness. They are haunted by other people's lines, lines by dead greats and lines by Berrigan's friends (who were often invited to write a few words on the cards). The Sonnets is characterized by the use of lines as units of information and knowledge and by the use of other people's lines, but also by the constant repetition of such lines; there is no such repetition in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Repetition, classically, destroys linear time and establishes a simulacrum of the flow of consciousness. A Certain Slant works by creating singular structures; as a sequence it is held together by what might be called its knowingness (the author of The Sonnets didn't know very much, in a way-- he was only in his late twenties-and the book's knowledge flows from its strict formalism as if tapped from an unconscious which isn't quite the author's). Doug Oliver once suggested to me that a typical Berrigan poem is a cognition, that is, a piece of knowledge or consciousness, a sort of "clicking in." The Sonnets are loose seen in this way, the poems in A Certain Slant are tight:

This is not pretty, sublime, or classical (though some of the others of the poems could be so described); it's both mysterious and blatant, and by virtue of the poet's proximate death extremely serious.

I've often wondered why people don't seem to notice this book so much, it being one of Berrigan's three major sequences (Easter Monday has never been published as the sequence Berrigan intended; almost all of its comprising poems have been published separately). The Sonnets is esthetically perfect, being based on an idea, and there has been increasingly a taste for such work recently. Berrigan considered The Sonnets to be somewhat self-- educational, and it is, but that isn't necessarily a drawback. The Sonnets, though, is a book that hasn't been properly understood or at least described, and in that lack of understanding may be found the reasons why A Certain Slant is neglected. The Sonnets is not, as is sometimes stated, concerned with the rejection of the "psychological I"; the psychological I is right there in the book in all its life-plots and circumstances and all its emotional field but stretched across time, warped in time, twisting and doubling back and pushing on into the future rather like karma. In all of Berrigan's work thereafter, and certainly in A Certain Slant, the I of it can be large and contemplative or more ordinarily small or, actually usually, both at once. In Berrigan there is a metaphysical I-the transcendent watcher; a presentational I-the character of the ordinary man who buys the Post at Gem's Spa to read the sports page; and an I which is deeply entangled in the stories it participates in with others. At death one might be particularly concerned with the latter, since one's responsibilities to others and theirs to one traditionally loom large then. In A Certain Slant a "caught" person is speaking, someone caught in the traps of the psychological I (and really, who isn't?), someone enraged and loving who is about to have to leave.

A certain slant of sunlight

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 1999 by Notley, Alice

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