Poetry Books of the Year 2005

Two big gorgeous nutritious books published this fall are almost enough to make one proud to be an American. Well, to get real, let’s just say that the posthumous Collecteds of June Jordan and Ted Berrigan show the depth and resilience of the human spirit as filtered though late Twentieth Century US, and that reading these books will shake you up and leave you ready to go to work and dream.

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, October 2005) gives us 649 pages of love. Jordan, who died in 2002, wrote poems that speak directly and colloquially, equal parts humor and politics, love poems and rants. She was, as Adrienne Rich writes in her brilliantly evocative Foreword, “the most personal of political poets.” But it doesn’t stop there: Jordan spent the last decades of her life teaching at Berkeley; rather, she reinformed Berkeley with her own revolutionary poetry ideas, creating the course “Poetry for the People” (textbook of that name available from Routledge) in which you learn to be a poet by getting out there and teaching young people what poetry is. I knew June’s books as they came out -– it was as if she were somehow living the Future, going through the changes but always with an eye on the possibilities and a mouthful of the unmitigated truth. I can’t say what I liked more: early poems like “What Would I White?”; the Black Power revolutionary era of “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” dedicated to Poet Agostinho Neto, President of “The People’s Republic of Angola,” or the sweet sour “Haruko/Love Poems,” and the hilarious “Owed to Eminem” which was published in Vibe shortly before she died. What I do know is that to read the Collected Jordan is to read a history of the US, 1969 - 2002. It was a helluva time. And the editors (who, in true selfless June style, don’t even put their names on the cover) Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles, have created a helluva book: fitting, on time, and essential. Book of the Year.

The gorgeous The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, November 2005), edited by his widow Alice Notley and sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, finally gets all the Ted words back in line and open face and also a few uncollected as well. Sure feels good, 749 pages, and clear as a bell. The bell being the one Robert Creeley referred to when he wrote of this seminal figure of the New York School: “The bell rings. Ted is ready.” I’d bet that’s what you’ll get, right away, if Berrigan is new to you. Like you are swimming together and this lovely guy just ahead of you is not only showing the way but also speaking over his shoulder while doing so, telling you everything that you’re doing, what you’re seeing. For my g-g-generation around St. Mark’s in the 70s and 80s, Ted was the figure of Outwards: his sonnets revived that antiquated form, his collabs were like love like poetry (try Bean Spasms, the book he wrote with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard if you want to see how far collaborative writing/bookmaking can be pushed). To hear (and there is no voice like Ted’s voice: his charged tremolo racing his signs of irony to Blakean ecstasy) him in On the Level Everyday is to hear what it means to be a poet 24/7. What it all comes down to is these poems, and they do their job the way Ted did his: lifting, sampling, satirizing, dancing. His tricks and gambits, his hippie Oulipo – the only thing I can compare it to is The Bible. Book of the Year.

And two books by the leading voices of the next generation both came from the same publisher....