Berrigan: Line Repetition

Shannon and Nicolette have already addressed Berrigan's use of repetition, but I'd like to spend a little time investigating the repetition of key lines across poems. In poem IV, Berrigan describes the city with the lines, "And high upon the Brooklyn Bridge alone, / to breathe an old woman slop oatmeal" (lines 4, 5, page 4). Line 4 helps to create a setting and a tone of lonliness, which he again addresses on line 6: "loveliness that longs for a butterfly!" However, that middle line, "to breathe an old woman slop oatmeal" alludes me at first. Is the figure/character/person in New York breathing in the smells of women, slop, and oatmeal? Is the oatmeal slop? Is the old woman breathing "slop oatmeal" and the syntax is reversed? I didn't come to a definite solution for that one, but I got a sense of the scene of the city (as Shannon or Nicolette alludes to).

On "Poem in the Traditional Manner," Berrigan reinstates a line from poem IV: "And grawk go under, and grackle disappear, / And high upon the Brooklyn Bridge alone, / An ugly ogre masturbates by ear" (emphasis mine) (lines 10-12, page 7). I immediately recognized that line (Brooklyn Bridge is a memorable image) and then tried to read it in this new context. There are some images in "Traditional Manner" that don't lend themself to a city setting (sea, Asiatic, etc.) but there are images that encourage a city scene (chevrolets, gat). What is important here, however, is that Berrigan is reusing a line in a different manner and calling the attention of the reader who has been reading these poems sequentially. Like Ben Lerner, Berrigan is messing with our perception of a sonnet and makes his poet-ing obvious.

Flip the page to "Poem in the Modern Manner" and observe Berrigan as he reuses and tampers with another line from "IV." Lines 3-5 read: " [...] But I am young, just old enough / to breathe, an old woman, slop oatmeal / lemongrass, dewlarks, full draught of, fall thud" (emphasis mine) (8). Unlike the repetition of "And high upon the Brooklyn Bridge alone," Berrigan almost rewrites the line "to breathe an old woman slop oatmeal" by turning it into a list through the addition of commas. Again, this line is very poignant and memorable, but now that I've read the book I wonder if there are less obvious versions of these repetitions and rewrites that I've missed. Regardless, these beginning examples show me that Berrigan's sometimes (often) confusing juxtapositions of images and loss of punctuation are a part of his larger project to make obvious the fact that these are, in fact, NOT traditional sonnets. Poems "IV," "Poem in the Traditional Manner," and "Poem in the Modern Manner" show how lines of images are not reserved for only one use or meaning, and how Berrigan is challenging the traditional sonnet form.