My other B poet is Berrigan. I first saw him as simply a Frank O'Hara imitator. Later, I began to appreciate the combinatory logic of the Sonnets. I also like his book of postcards, A Certain Slant of Sunlight. I'd rather see the postcards, though, than read the poems printed on the page in conventional format. There's a poem in the Selected Poems--I cannot seem to find it right now--about how they should give him a grant to write poems. That side of Berrigan turns me off. Wait, I just found it, he recounts a dream in which he gets a phone call from the Guggenheim Foundation. A bit too self-congratulatory for my taste. There's definitely an ugly side to Berrigan's poetic personality, although I'm sure many find this ugly side attractive rather than repellent.

All the poets I've dealt with so far have fairly distinctive styles, although Berrigan's is a bit harder to define; for me it approaches a generic, Ron Padgett/Frank O'Hara New York school style. Yet when he is good he is very very good. "Reborn a rabbi in Pinsk, reincarnated / backward time, / I gasped thru my beard full of mushroom barley / soup; / two rough-faced blond Cossacks, drinking / wine, / paid me no heed, not remembering their futures--/ Verlaine, & Rimbaud."