The Sonnets

When reading the introduction to Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, many statements about his work appealed to me. However, two in particular that tugged at me was “…to make a new statement about reality: the outcome or gist of something is in its midst not just as it ends…” and “...searching for something what looked unpredicted and what also meant something unpredicted but significant.” So much of what we’ve been doing in the last two weeks of class can somewhat be summarized to ME as just that. I really love the line that “the outcome or gist” is in the midst of the piece; there’s no forced conclusion. I also thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from the 140 character poems. At first bothered by the use of a twitter account, I was able to get past my silly prejudice and start to formulate my own method of recreating text into poetry.
With this awareness of Ted Berrigan’s writings, in XXXV you begin to see repeated lines that Alice Notely mentions in the intro. For example, “Go to the sea, the lake, the tree,” or “spins when the old bull rushes In comparing XXXV and LIX, Berrigan recycles lines like “I LOVE YOU” and “The black heart beside the fifteen pieces of glass” with a slight difference in fifteen being typed as “15” in XXXV. Each time, these lines seem to have new meaning, but also, mention by Notely, the lines can stand alone.
By taking pieces from authors he respected and studied, Berrigan still produces something new every time. In general, I love the idea of recycling to make something useful. But the ability to make a sonnet movable really interests me.