https://poetryinvoice.ca/read/poems/hall-mirrors

On Thursday, April 20, 2023 at 10:19:24 AM UTC-4, Jordy C wrote:
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> https://poetryinvoice.ca/read/poems/hall-mirrors

Good find, another favorite of mine from the later Beat poet era, Jordy

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ted-berrigan

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Ted Berrigan considered himself a “late Beat,” and, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he traced his lineage as a writer to the American Expressionist tradition. The first writer to excite him was Thomas Wolfe, who had also been important to Kerouac. Berrigan had very high regard as well for Kerouac, whom he interviewed for the Paris Review, and for another writer at the core of the Expressionist tradition, William Saroyan.

American Expressionism, which grounds literary authority in the personality of the writer rather than, say, a political creed or traditional aesthetics, can be traced to the work of mid-19th-century writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Among its most influential 20th-century practitioners was Gertrude Stein. Kerouac stated his own Expressionist position in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” where he said that a writer should pursue “not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in a sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of exhalation and expostulated statement.”

Berrigan argued that the world as presented in his poetry was a projection of his self. In an interview with Anne Waldman and Jim Cohn, Berrigan noted that: “One of my principal desires is to make my poems be like my life … I can’t see myself the way that you can see me, but I can see everything else around me. If I can make everything around me be the way that is, presumably I can create the shape of the self inside the poem, because there is a person inside almost all of the poems.”

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