309  NEW YORK SCHOOL

Ted Berrigan Symposium

In The Sonnets (1964) Ted Berrigan took up the challenge of the "stultifying" sonnet to see if an ingenious new approach could breathe life into the form. Reinventing verse for its time, Ted Berrigan's inspired Sonnets are redolent with possibiilties.

     "Part collage, part process writing, part sprung lyric, one of the freshest and most buoyantly inspired works of contemporary poetry. Alice Notley calls Ted's sonnets "musical, sexy, and funny."

    While Berrigan's sonnets don't usually present the expected rhymes and such, they do update the given premise that the first eight lines will be resolved in the last six.

Kenneth Koch, Joel Lewis, Ron Padgett, Marjorie Perloff, Philip Whalen                            1990, 45 min St. Marks Church