Ted Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island on November 15, 1934. He attended Providence College for a year before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 at the age of nineteen. After serving in the Korean War, he received a BA in English from the University of Tulsa in 1959 and an MA in 1962.
Ted Berrigan Checklist:
Section A: Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides
Section B: Collaborations
Section C: Contributions to Periodicals
Section D: C Press
Section E: C: A Journal of Poetry
Berrigan moved to New York in the early 1960s, where he edited and published C: A Journal of Poetry and ran C Press, wrote art criticism, and collaborated with writers and artists such as Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Anselm Hollo. Berrigan was a central figure in the second generation of the New York School of poets, which included Hollo, Padgett, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, and many others. He was the author of more than twenty books, including The Sonnets (C Press, 1964), Bean Spasms with Padgett and Brainard (Kulchur Press, 1967), Red Wagon (Yellow Press, 1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (O Books, 1988).
Berrigan taught at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York and was writer-in-residence / visiting poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has also taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, and the Naropa Institute. In 1979, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ted Berrigan died on July 4, 1983.