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| Moonshine Sonata | |
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These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, ISBN 0 86806 029 1, paperback.   Listen to the Poet Read  |
I've realised why Ted Berrigan is not so hot Edward Berrigan, the Seattle engineer, not that other one He writes to his wife in Kuala Lumpur: 'What are you up to down there?' ('Doris . . . I'm getting to like middle age . . .') See? boring it's because he has the inborn talents of a painter, not an engineer; no matter how hard he tries, etc. Another Boeing rolls off the assembly line Ted thinks he's okay he's not okay, it's divorce time in Seattle. He'll be the next to go: Doris! Doris! maybe . . . Later imitating the collected works of the Darmstadt Engineering Group reading soup in the darkened kitchen he's Canadian, they tell me an 'emigrant'; his wife's sick she flies home to Ontario in a Boeing jumbo - did Ted built it? At least the fuselage? She takes up a fat-free diet; it's goodbye to Seattle, hello Saskatchewan: middle age rises above the tundra the Boeing plant is bathed in its glow. Notes: Ted Berrigan, 1934-1983, a leading member of the second generation of the so-called New York School. Through the 1970s he was a leading light in the group of young poets who gathered around the St Mark's Poetry Project in New York City. The cover photo for Dazed in the Ladies Lounge is of John Tranter and Lyn Grady (later Lyn Tranter) at the 1964 Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children Nurses' Graduation Ball at Sydney's Menzies Hotel, Wynyard Square. |
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