Four weeks into our collective Great Pause, the Bafflers examine “Red Shift,” Ted Berrigan’s iconic New York School poem. This close reading – distinguished in part by our own Sparrow having been Berrigan’s student - proceeds from the astrophysical definition of “redshift” to speculations into what attributive meanings to which Berrigan might allude. This includes a broad look into the nature of time as surfaced in the poem and in part depth charged in Berrigan situating the poem “at 8:08 p.m.” (the Eight-Fold Path, I-Ching and Hubble’s insights into an exploding universe). We touch on his forebearers – Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery - as well as Berrigan’s friends and allies, including Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup and Ron Padgett (including a nod to the latter’s memoir TED). We look to his nineteenth-century antecedents in the Transcendentalists and Whitman as well as how Berrigan self-identified as a late Beatnik. We touch on the role the song “California Dreaming” plays in the work and Berrigan’s working-class poetics, among other ruminative forays, including the Esopus River, the poets Jorie Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh and Robinson Jeffers, as well as what existential insight might be disguised in a Harris Tweed jacket. SPECIAL FEATURE: We embed a recording of Berrigan reading the work at Naropa University, 1982, from EXACT CHANGE Yearbook 1995 no. 1 (Ed. Peter Gizzi).

ADDENDUM:

1. The chronological early publishing history of THE SONNETS is correctly listed below:
C Press — c1963. Mimeograph edition
Grove Press — c1967
United Artists — 1982 (With seven additional sonnets not in original)

2. This podcast includes speculation around Berrigan's financial straits and schemes as well as the circumstances around his death. We regret and ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies, and please listen with an open heart.

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