Ted Berrigan Poems

This poem is an excellent example of Ted Berrigan’s work. It is from his most celebrated work, "The Sonnets" (1964), a sequence that centers around key quotes and figures that are repeated throughout the poems. It exemplifies Berrigan’s disjunctive grammar, his repetition of important lines, and his use of text from other authors. Two of his lines appear in other poems from the sequence, and he quotes from Shakespeare’s "The Tempest."