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Talking in Tranquility: |
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| edited by Stephen Ratcliffe and Leslie Scalapino (published with O Books) | ||
| 208 pages | ISBN 0-939691-05-1 | $10.50 |
Talking in Tranquility presents ten interviews conducted with the poet
Ted Berrigan between 1970 and 1980. Talking with a range of fellow poets and
writers (Clark Coolidge, George Oppen, George MacBeth, Tom Clark, Charles
Ingham, Barry Alpert, and Anne Waldman, among others) in New York, London,
Chicago, San Francisco, Boulder, and elsewhere, Berrigan speaks with an
illuminating and disarming candor about a wide range of topics: the art and
craft of poetry, his own work, his methods of composition in books such as
The Sonnets and in many specific poems (including various collaborative
writings with other poets and painters), his relations with and influence by
and upon other writers and/or painters in the New York cultural "scene in the
1960's and 1970's (Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Allen
Ginsberg, among the writers; as well as the painters Willem de Kooning, Jasper
Johns, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, etc.). Whatever the subject, Berrigan
invariably shoots from the hip straight for the mark: "Sometimes I hear my
words before they get to my lips, and if I don't like them I change them before
they get out." The result is an important, and wonderfully entertaining,
account of the mind-at-work of one of this country's most important
contemporary poets.
return to Avenue B
"And now I am going to deliver to you what I think about everything, and what I
have been thinking all the time, and what I've been thinking which made me
write."
"You will hear his wild tremulous wistful reflective engaging way of saying it
in any work of his that you read or hear."
"At a time when a great many poets seem certain that, individually, they have
the only answer, the only way to do things, when commuynication is often at
some level antogonistic and presemptuous, it is particularly important to hear
someone whose point was never to dictate the way other poets should do their
work. . . . Talking in Tranquility . . . is for me as important as
anything that can be said about poetry now."