Yesterday was one of those wonderful days for me: I spent three hours in the Poetry Collection here at SUNY-Buffalo. My purpose was twofold: first, I finally got around to reading a 1955 issue of The Free Lance that includes poet kick-ass poet Russell Atkins's essay on his theory of "psychovisualism," which was my purpose in seeking the journal out.

Secondly, and way more interesting (for me), I spent two hours flipping through the personal notebooks of Ted Berrigan (donated to the Poetry Collection by Alice Notley). Why? I was looking for one notebook in particular, one which Notley alludes to in her introduction to the Penguin edition of Berrigan's The Sonnets: it contains his notes on John Ashbery's Some Trees and The Tennis Court Oath (especially), the latter of which greatly influenced Berrigan in his composing of The Sonnets. Berrigan, as Notley explains (and its there in the notebooks), is working towards some larger/grand theorizing / reading / interpretation of Ashbery's Tennis Court (as she says, "Ted studied them furiously in notebooks... he scoured them for clues as to sources and meanings and had a theory they were secretly influenced by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough"). Of course, anyone familiar with that Ashbery's book, in particular, knows that it resists organized/classical reading as such. So, I found the "Ashbery" notebook, as Berrigan calls it on the cover page. Here's what I can gather from it (I'll hopefully at some point write a larger paper on it):

(1) Berrigan is reading Eliot on Marvell at the time, and he connect's Eliot and Eliot's Marvell to Ashbery (see Ashbery's rewriting of Marvell in Some Trees).

(2) The Waste Land, as Notley observes, is one of the prime influences on Berrigan's _Sonnets_ ("Ted... often acknowledged a debt to The Waste Land," she writes [ix]). And, of course, Frazier's The Golden Bough is one of the key texts for Eliot. There's a tremendous amount on the Golden Bough in the notebook.

(3) Berrigan is particularily interested in the myth of the cut-up limbs of Osiris (a nice myth for his collage, and also suggesting an allusion to Pound's "Gathering of the Limbs of Osiris")

(4) Jungian Symbolism and alchemy are somehow involved

(5) The number 4 is involved

(6) Land (order) and Water (chaos) references/allusions are invovled.

It's going to take a lot longer to figure out what he's theorizing (I need to read sections of The Golden Bough) and it's going to take me re-reading through The Tennis Court Oath to figure out if it hold's at all. Even if it doesn't, though, it's all pretty fantastic to me.