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Ron Padgett. Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan. Great Barrington, Ma. The Figures. 1993. ix + 99 pages, ill. $10.
Ted Berrigan, maker of The Sonnets (1964) and much else, is for many poets and readers a beloved and inspiring figure in what used to be called the New American Poetry (and, more specifically, the New York School). His dazzling, dense verbal surfaces (or "baffling combustions") endure as models of contemporary writing: poets as different as Robert Creeley and Kenneth Koch have testified to the value of his work. Ron Padgett, a poet of considerable accomplishment in his own right, met Berrigan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1959 (Berrigan was a college senior, Padgett a high-school junior). The two were frequent collaborators in the 1960s, most notably in Bean Spasms (1967), and remained friends until Berrigan's death in 1983. Padgett notes that it has taken him a long time "to work myself up to writing about Ted," and the intimacy...