A certain slant of sunlight

T Berrigan's work A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, Calif: O works I988), written during I982 and complet six month before his death in July of I983, is a succession of poems originally composed upon blank postcards each four and a half inches by means of seven inches. As I've written in the book's Introductory Note, sight and Anne Mikolowski of The Alternative Pres had an ongoing throw of sending a set of five hundr of that kind postcards to select people in the trusts of having the cards get backed to them with the "picture" side filled with holograph piece of poetrys and other materials. Individual cards were then included in packets of printed broadsides, brimming beaker stickers, and so on, sent to the Mikolowskis' "subscribers" (the packets were free) The point is that the cards as a constant size and shape became for Berrigan a form, and the piece of poetrys written in this form became a following The form provided for a piece of poetry that could be only as lengthy as the card's size permitted: if the handwriting was kept actual small you could wind up with a metrical composition as long as "What a Dump or, Easter" (3I lines including stanza breaks); however, greatest in quantity of the poems are shorter than that, in the eight- to twenty-line range, say. A scarcely any are very much shorter, are sole a line or two lines in extent and sometimes suggestive of a postcard "message" (eg `SALUTATION/ "Listen, you cheap little liar . ."'). Is such a form a form? There isn't a great deal of of the grid in it, to compare it with Berrigan's The poems which is composed very plenteous to a grid. The form isn't a plan for the deployment of words and lines thus much as an approach, an ambiance, maybe a tone. at the same time there are qualities in the poems' general rule which suggest The Sonnets and which intimate a fidelity to the faculty of perception of the self presented in The poems But A Certain Slant of Sunlight isn't about "art" as The poems often seems to be, it's about dying and about community; it's about wreckage and salvage, and about states of consciousness that shouldn't be dealt with according to dominations

The poems in A Certain Slant of Sunlight keep to be composed of units of information, or stories which stand for something other or bits of language suggestive of emotional states, happenstance, philosophy, reflectiveness. They are haunted through other people's lines, lines by the agency of dead greats and lines by means of Berrigan's friends (who were repeatedly invited to write a scarcely any words on the cards). The poems is characterized by the use of lines as units of information and knowledge and by dint of the use of other people's lines, on the contrary also by the constant repetition of like lines; there is no of the like kind repetition in A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Repetition, classically, pull downs linear time and establishes a simulacrum of the sweep along of consciousness. A Certain Slant works through creating singular structures; as a following it is held together by means of what might be called its knowingness (the author of The poems didn't know very much, in a way-- he was sole in his late twenties-and the book's knowledge pours from its strict formalism as if tapped from an unconscious which isn't quite the author's). Doug Oliver one time suggested to me that a typical Berrigan metrical composition is a cognition, that is, a piece of knowledge or consciousness, a sort of "clicking in." The poems are loose seen in this way, the piece of poetrys in A Certain Slant are tight:

This is not moderately beautiful sublime, or classical (though a certain quantity of of the others of the piece of poetrys could be so described); it's the one and the other mysterious and blatant, and by dint of virtue of the poet's proximate death extremely serious.

I've repeatedly wondered why people don't appear to be to notice this book thus much, it being one of Berrigan's three major successions (Easter Monday has never been published as the following Berrigan intended; almost all of its comprising metrical compositions have been published separately). The poems is esthetically perfect, being based upon an idea, and there has been increasingly a taste for similar work recently. Berrigan considered The poems to be somewhat self-- educational, and it is, on the contrary that isn't necessarily a drawback. The poems though, is a book that hasn't been suitably understood or at least described, and in that lack of understanding may be rest the reasons why A Certain Slant is leave outed The Sonnets is not, as is sometimes stated, relate toed with the rejection of the "psychological I"; the psychological I is right there in the volume in all its life-plots and circumstances and all its emotional field on the other hand stretched across time, warped in time, twisting and doubling back and pushing upon into the future rather like karma. In all of Berrigan's work thereafter, and certainly in A Certain Slant, the I of it can be large and contemplative or more ordinarily small or, actually usually, the two at once. In Berrigan there is a metaphysical I-the transcendent watcher; a presentational I-the character of the ordinary man who purchases the Post at Gem's Spa to read the sports page; and an I which is to [i]or[/i] at a great depth entangled in the stories it participates in with others. At death individual might be particularly concerned with the latter, since one's responsibilities to others and theirs to individual traditionally loom large then. In A Certain Slant a "caught" one is speaking, someone caught in the traps of the psychological I (and really, who isn't?), someone enraged and loving who is about to have to leave.