a thought that Ted Berrigan is certes a poet I would want the collected of. that the poem's essential event seems always assured in his writing. the other side would be Allen Ginsberg, whose collected has so many millstones. I would always want the collected of any poet that interests me. with Ginsberg, sometimes he's too ready to sweep things into his poem, you know, Blake, Buddha, his rather public interests. the self-conscious poet. of course there is conscious and there's conscious. Howl is self-conscious but undistracted. I guess that's the note I'm trying to ring. when self-consciousness becomes distracting, the poem starts looking for effects. Berrigan's hyperactivity (I don't mean that as a medical assessment) doesn't let him stay too long in his self-consciousness. that could be what he learned, what can be learned, from O'Hara: write it then leave it. that is, each word (this isn't a screed against editing). as in: don't go looking for weighty words, the ones with special pleas in them. as an addendum to this scribble, I want to say how intrigued I was by Ron Silliman's read of Jordan Davis' article on the generations of NY poets. the idea of cataloguing these writers. I honestly don't see the point, yet I like thinking of this New York cauldron. so many writers that I like, with some manner of aesthetic shared, if only the naked energy of the city itself. I remember the excitement of coming to these many readers in the early/mid 70s, while at the same time being confronted by LANGUAGE poetry, while also catching up on earlier poetry. my interst in poetry, you see, was zilch till I was 18 at least, even tho I began writing it when I was 16. it all happened at once, more or less. the receptivity of the NY poets (1st and 2nd gen), and their looseness, certainly wre beneficent influences for this tyro. and so on...