<\/p>\r\n
My sophomore<\/span><\/strong> year at college I took Organic Chemistry (got a D), Physics (A), Intro to Poetry (A), and Psychology (Pass). I was in the process of transitioning from pre-med to no-med. The poetry-class teacher was Ted Berrigan, visiting Ann Arbor from the East Village. Ted was a big man with a beard who giggled like a little girl. He liked everything I wrote. He said young poets didn\u2019t need criticism, they needed encouragement.<\/p>\r\n I visited him later on in New York. He was a player in the contemporary art\/poetry scene in NYC. That\u2019s how I once wound up in Allen Ginsberg\u2019s apartment. (Ginsberg wasn\u2019t there.) Berrigan lived on the edge, financially. He traipsed around to hip bookstores in NYC and collected money for his poetry books that had sold. And he also made real money on the burgeoning college poetry-reading circuit. He sometimes made $1000, adjusted for inflation, for a reading. [Got this\u00a0 money info from a new book of Berrigan’s collected prose, Get the Money<\/em>.] Writer\/professor Donald Hall brought Berrigan to Michigan for the visiting-prof job.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Berrigan called<\/mark> poetry \u201cwork \u201d — as in \u201cshow me your work, Bert.\u201d His poet friend Anne Waldman did a reading at the UGLI (undergrad library), and I handed her my work — a couple poems — and she published one in the St. Mark\u2019s Poetry Project mag, The World<\/em>. This was around 1972. I have to look that up. I think the poem was \u201cYellow Pages.” It\u2019s a found poem, lifted from the page headings of the Yellow Pages. For example: \u201cappraiser attorneys \/ automobile barbecue \/ bicycles burial \/ chaplains cigar \/ clubs cranes \/ day dentists \/ drapery engineer \/ . . . topsoil transmission \/ truck vacuum \/ washing water \/ womens zippers.\u201d Definitely the best poem I ever wrote.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n . . . Just back <\/span><\/strong>from my attic, home of dead poems. The World <\/em>poem was not about the Yellow Pages. It was about Herbie Hancock, kind of. “Yellow Pages” — the poem — was published in a different East Village mag, Telephone<\/em>. The mag was called Telephone<\/em>. The poem was “Yellow Pages.” You following? If so, you get an A.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My sophomore year at college I took Organic Chemistry (got a D), Physics (A), Intro to Poetry (A), and Psychology (Pass). I was in the process of transitioning from pre-med to no-med. The poetry-class teacher was Ted Berrigan, visiting Ann Arbor from the East Village. Ted was a big man with a beard who giggled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30358"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30397,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30358\/revisions\/30397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}