You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Aram Soroyan, and it's a fairly unusual circumstance.

Aram has edited a collection of poems by the late Ted Berrigan, considered to be the center

of the New York school.

Berrigan died in 1984, and his work has been being celebrated by many

of the people he influenced. In addition to a pretty full collection of poems under the title

so going around cities, there's recently been published a memoir called Ted by Ron Padgett from the

Figures Press, a whole collection of tributes called Nice to See You from Coffeehouse

Press, a extraordinary collection of interviews with Berrigan called Talking in Tranquility

from Avenue B, O Books, and of course the collection that Aram Soroyan has

edited Ted Berrigan selected poems from Penguin. Now, you would come under the influence of Ted

Berrigan as a young poet. Right. I met Ted. The first vivid memory I have of him is at the party that Frank O'Hara

and Joe Lassir gave, and I guess it was the spring of 64 for Giuseppe Ungeretti, this great old Italian

poet. He was immediately just a generous and sociable in an unusual way, I think, in terms of the

literary community. And I had recently published my first poems in poetry magazine, along with a

review of Robert Creeley's novel, The Island,

and I had kind of aligned myself with the Black Mountain School of Creely and Olson and Dorn and those people.

And Ted was very clearly, I knew through his magazine C, which I'd seen a couple of copies of on the Upper East Side and galleries, very much aligned with the first-generation New York School, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbury, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler.

...