Top Ten Presentations of Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets

1. Collected Poems, U. California
2. C Press (mimeo) (false memory?)
3. Grove Press chapbook with the op-art cover
4. Penguin reprint
5. selections in So Going Around Cities
6. United Artists
7. Penguin selected poems
8. various anthologies

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The stereoscopic effect only happens if you read it straight through; for some reason the two-to-a-page, three-to-five-to-a-spread layout in the collected is very felicitous. The Pound motif Brian pointed out and Alice confirmed came out louder than ever this time for me; what's also much clearer to me now is how much that "big three" version of the New York school was subliminally imparted to me here, Kenneth's rainway and some made-up movies, O'Hara's feminine marvelous and tough, Ashbery's academy of the future. Reminds me to wish publicly yet again for the eventual publication of Petroleum Lima Beans and other early uncollected Ashbery, the most stunning piece of which is of course "The Poems" (in the Evergreen Review with the cow on the cover -- undecided whether Ashbery ever really earned the post of ruler of the universe? track this issue down).

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At a conference in western Joisey today. Surprised how quickly I'm warming to the new David Sylvian project - it usually takes me about four listens to adjust to his change of direction, and Nine Horses is as wild a swerve as any, but chronologically and sonically it comes between Dead Bees' loungey sound and Blemish's glitches. More later.