At 76, Alice Notley is a formidable figure in contemporary poetry, having emerged from one of the most celebrated American avant-gardes of the late 20th century, the New York School, only to forge her own distinctive long-form feminist poetics through the early 21st. Despite the uncompromising nature of her poetry she has achieved a certain measure of mainstream success, regularly publishing book-length works with Penguin (most recently 2020’s For the Ride), and receiving both scholarly attention and critical acclaim in outlets such as the New York Times, even as she continues her radical small press endeavors. Next year, for example, Fonograf Editions will bring out The Speak Angel Series—a new sequence of six book-length poems in one almost 700-page tome—along with Early Works, gathering much of her poetry written between 1969 and 1974. Only a small number of poets in a given generation can be said to have reached such an enviable position as she has.

Under ordinary circumstances, the last thing I would dare say to such a person is, “So, tell me about your husband,” even if the husband in question is Notley’s first, Ted Berrigan, an Apollinairian giant of American poetry whose influence continues to reverberate some 40 years after his death. And yet, this is precisely the situation in which I recently found myself. As an editor at City Lights Books, I acquired Berrigan’s collected prose, Get the Money!, a book Notley edited along with their two sons, the poets Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, and noted New York School scholar Nick Sturm. Get the Money! is an extraordinary volume. As may be suggested by such a title—a mantra derived from one of Berrigan’s literary heroes, newspaperman Damon Runyon—much of this prose was written for paid gigs, often as standard reviews of books or art shows, but often enough in contexts not specifically designated for publication. “Teaching with the School Teachers,” to cite one example, is a report he was obligated to write on a pair of seminars he gave to a group of teachers on the subject of teaching poetry to high school students, and yet it’s as vivid and freewheeling an example of Berrigan’s poetics as he might have written in any more conventionally literary context. Despite the unsystematic, occasional nature of its individual items, despite its inclusion of selections from journals, of random creative prose, of introductions and obituaries, of notorious “interviews” with John Cage and John Ashbery written by Berrigan himself, Get the Money! projects a compelling and unified poetics that transcends the sum of its parts. It displays all the gravitas of the single book of prose some 19th-century French painter or poet might have left behind, such as Redon’s À soi-même (1922) or Mallarmé’s Divagations (1897). The book is a marvel in itself, yet is sure to send readers back to the main body of Berrigan’s work, his Collected Poems (2005), for another look in light of its insights. If you’re a poet, moreover, Get the Money! is exactly the sort of book that will make you want to write poetry.

While she has shepherded this material since Berrigan’s untimely death from hepatitis C—in addition to the work of her second husband, British poet Douglas Oliver (1937–2000), with whom she moved to Paris in 1993—Notley took on an emeritus role with Get the Money!, allowing her sons and Sturm to manage the day-to-day mundane aspects involved in turning a manuscript into a book, with Eddie serving as the primary editorial liaison between the group and myself. Nonetheless, as she was the only one among us present for the creation of so much of this work, Notley was frequently called upon to elucidate and adjudicate various questions that arose over the course of the project. An email from her on one of Ted’s texts was always a jewel, frequently studded with information which, while not necessarily germane to the editorial question at hand, was historically valuable in its own right. After a couple of these, I began to wonder whether we could capture more of this info in a way that would be less strenuous and time-consuming for her. Under these circumstances, asking Notley about Berrigan suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea, and, after much trepidation and consulting with Eddie, I managed to propose an interview focused on the book, to which she graciously agreed. I asked Eddie to sit in as well, and he occupies a liminal space between interviewer and interviewee that might have intrigued his father, given Berrigan’s interest in the interview as a form.

What follows is about a third of that interview, conducted over the course of two and a half hours, condensed and edited for clarity.

When do you meet Ted?

Ted and I met in ’69.

Did he start showing you stuff immediately?

That was what he did with people. If they were anywhere near the business, he would show his work. He was teaching in Iowa. I didn’t have him as a teacher. I had gone to Iowa for one year and then left—and thought I was leaving forever. I came back and he was there. He had just broken up with Sandy Berrigan and we got together. I found out about this poetry I hadn’t really known about. I had known about some of the Beats, but I didn’t know about the New York School. Everybody at Iowa had that Midwestern thing, you know, the dead animal on the road and the second wife and how terrible everything is. What the woods look like. The only women poets were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, as far as I could tell.

I had started writing poetry as soon as I went to Iowa, but I didn’t know what I was doing. When I came back, Ted was there. He had become friends with Anselm Hollo and he had a lot of poetry books. He went away in the summer and left me the key to the room at the university where he was keeping them. But he showed me, for example, “The Chicago Report,” and it was one of the first works of his I ever read. He wrote a poem for me right away called “Grey Morning.” It was in In the Early Morning Rain (1970). And he had just written “10 Things I Do Every Day.” I had no idea whether I liked this poem or not, but I did like the one for me. I liked “The Chicago Report” a lot.

“The Chicago Report” is couched as a letter to Ron Padgett, but was it a real letter that became a piece or did he write it as a piece that also was a letter to Ron?

It started out as a letter to Ron. Then Ted realized he was going to write a piece. But he left it in the form of the letter to Ron. It has a lot of influences. I realized that one of the influences is Hunter S. Thompson, because the Fear and Loathing pieces were being published in Rolling Stone. It’s partly Gonzo journalism, but there’s another thing he was doing, which was that he had been reading Samuel Johnson [and] Boswell’s Journals. He decided that the most interesting thing to do on this trip would be to pretend to be Boswell and pretend his friend Henry Pritchett was Johnson, that he was following Henry and describing what Henry was doing, although there’s much, much more about himself. But he’s thinking about Johnson and Boswell. It’s what he told me right away.

Did he ever cross paths with Thompson?

No, he had no ambition to be in touch with anyone who was more famous. I never did either. People would be my heroes but I didn’t need to meet them. I never became close to any of the New York School poets until Kenneth Koch made me be close to him. Ted was the same way about the New York School poets. He watched them and edited them for his magazine, but they were another generation and it was presumptuous to think you could be friends. He idolized them too much. I did too.

He doesn’t get too close to Frank O’Hara, for example.

Frank was a role model for Ted.

The primary one?

Yes. He observed Frank’s character and wanted to be like Frank. But he wasn’t gay, so it was complicated. They were both Irish. But Frank was middle-class, upper middle-class, and went to Harvard. Part of what Ted was doing with his journals was making sure that a working-class person from Rhode Island could be a poet and a literary person.

It’s a funny milieu for Ted to have been attracted to because it’s so distant from where he was coming.

Not the poetry. He was so attracted to Frank’s poetry. It’s hard not to be, but it took decades before it got out of our group and people started appreciating it on the outside. Now everybody acts like they own it. It really pisses me off. Whereas with John Ashbery, you are always trying to figure him out. To the extent you want to do that, as a poet, you understand he must be great, because he makes you want to do it. You try to crack it. One of the bases of The Sonnets (1964) is Ted trying to crack The Tennis Court Oath (1962).

Your co-editor Nick Sturm asked to hear your thoughts about the process of poets like you and Ted writing prose, to which I would add, was writing prose an adjunct to poetry or an art in its own right?

For Ted, it was part of being a literary person, to write in certain prose forms. He had studied the lives of great poets and understood they reviewed things, they wrote letters, they translated, they kept journals. They always kept journals. Every once in a while, they tried to see if they could write a novel. He did those things because he knew those were the things his predecessors did. The journals are different each from the other and had different motivations. He was trying to track his life in the early journals to see if he was doing all the right things in being a poet. When he wrote the ones in the ’70s, he was sick. It turned out he had hepatitis C. He couldn’t write poems and he was trying to show himself that he had an interesting life, with a lot of literary activity, even though he wasn’t writing very much.

Did he always keep journals or just during certain periods?

He did it pretty constantly in the ’60s, before I met him. There’s a point where it becomes a form in itself and you use it as a technique to make actual works. I did it one way but he did it more in a poetry way. If you keep a journal, the time passing will always make a shape. When I kept diaries, I knew that I was waiting for the thing to happen in the middle. Ted did different things with it. He identified with Basho in that way, like the Basho journal [“On the Road Again, an Old Man”]. He identified with the Japanese writers who had many addresses, because he had had many addresses.

The Basho journal is not like the other journals, though it’s grouped in the journal section.

He took somebody’s Basho translations and remade them into better translations. This was something he did from time to time. He took a little Penguin book; he worked on it until he had something he could totally identify with; he became an old man, like the man in the diary.

None of these were meant to be published. When Lewis Warsh was editing various things, Lewis had taken on autobiography and journals as a form. He would always try to get things from Ted. Ted would find some journals and give them a shape. But Ted rewrote all of these a little bit. He changed the tenses so you would understand there was a person who wrote the journals and there was a person who was typing them up into a presentation for the public.

What other prose pieces did he show you early on?

He didn’t show me the “’60s Journals” although I was aware he had them and it was a big deal when he decided to sell them. Ted had all the copies of Kulchur. I read all the reviews he wrote in the original magazines. I remember finding them so funny. The art stuff, he was very diffident about. You could see Ted learning the vocabulary, how to look at art, how to talk about art. He used it to learn with, and also to “get the money.” It was $15 a review.

It almost seems like he did that as an apprenticeship.

He did it because he was a New York School poet. I did it too. But it wasn’t his thing. He had theories about what his talent was. He didn’t think he could describe anything. He thought what he could do was choose words that worked on a lot of different levels at the same time. He could find ordinary words or phrases like “Gem Spa.” Put it down on a piece of paper and it would mean a whole lot of things.

You could say that the prose was an opportunity for him not to do any of the things that he thought he was able to do or unable to do. Rather, he was doing something else and usually serving another purpose and maybe serving another person.

Much of the book was written for specific occasions, but sometimes he writes a short piece of creative prose like “Brain Damage.” What can you say about that piece?

He tried to throw it out before he died. He had a file with about three works in it and he put them in the garbage. I took them out and I said, “You cannot throw out anything.” So, he kept it. It must be influenced by reading William S. Burroughs. It’s a cut-up. But he never told me how he did it. Sometimes he would tell me how he did things like that. But that one remained a mystery. It’s possible this was made out of an article from a medical magazine.

What about “10 Things About the Boston Trip”?

That’s from a book called Back in Boston Again (1972) by Ted, Ron Padgett, and Tom Clark, published by Telegraph Books. Later Ted found the manuscript copy of “10 Things About the Boston Trip” and cut it up into strips. He put them in an envelope, but first he showed them to me. He was making an art object. I said, “The last one is missing.” And he said, “Write down the following,” and then he told me what the last one was. I wrote it on the outside of the envelope and it’s an object in the file “Longer Works of the More Academic Type.” Everything in that file is like an art object, and it’s got writing on it; sometimes it’s the original publication and it’s old and frayed. He kept newspaper clippings. It’s very beautiful. He would take the pages he had written out of the Poetry Project Newsletter, cross out everything by everybody else with a colored marker, and then make this little booklet.

Let’s talk about that file for a minute, because that’s his arrangement of pieces, right?

To some extent, except it would get slightly rearranged from time to time because I kept it so long. We started putting things in it because we didn’t know where they belonged. I’m not sure what the original “longer work” was, probably those “Three Book Reviews” of Tom Clark, Lewis MacAdams, and Ron Padgett that are poems made entirely out of words from their books. He worked on those for a long time. He’s actually having a conversation with the book and with the authors; he’s showing the words to them, having an argument with each of them, but then also praising them.

How often would he write a creative piece of prose that wasn’t a review or an article, like “Brain Damage” and the other ones in Get the Money!?

He was doing a bunch of them when I was pregnant with Anselm, like “The Life of Turner.” He would be reading a book, and start seeing a work in it. He would make some two pages into a prose work. But he couldn’t always do anything with it, so it became a “Longer Work of the More Academic Type.”

So some of that folder is just holding onto things he’s not sure what to do with? Obviously, “Longer Works of the Academic Type” is a lie or joke because the pieces are mostly short and nonacademic, but is there some categorical distinction to this section?

Yes. They’re of the academic type. “The Life of Turner.” That is an academic subject. As is the concept or fact of “Brain Damage.” These are things that are studied in the academy. Speaking at length about poetry is an academic thing to do.

At a certain point he writes these pieces devoted to single authors, including one about your first collection [“Note on Alice Notley, Not Used, for 165 Meeting House Lane, Published by ‘C’ Press in 1971”].

That was a discarded biography. For the longest time I could only find the second and third pages, and somehow the first page showed up. I think he thought he only liked the second and third pages, but I didn’t understand if that was a true or false memory of mine. I found the first page and we decided to keep all three pages.

Was it his decision not to use it in the book or did you not want it?

It was his decision. It wasn’t appropriate, finally. It was too long. The book was only 24 pages. So that would’ve been excessive.

When you read the piece now, how do you feel about it?

I find it very generous to me and to all the other people that are mentioned. He keeps showing these groups of poets in these different pieces, lineages, and naming names nobody knows yet. John Godfrey’s in there, and Merrill Gilfillan. We were all 25 years old. There’s a place in “Teaching with the School Teachers” where he’s telling the teachers, why don’t you use some poets that your students might be interested in? He names younger Black poets, like David Henderson. He’s like, “Show them these people.”

At that point, he was the older generation, because he was 11 years older than I was. He thought he might get more teaching jobs, but there weren’t any. They want to give the teaching jobs to clean-cut people who write things that are the absolute opposite of “get the money.” I mean, Get the Money! is aesthetically radical all the time in different ways. Now everybody says they’re very radical, but they’re not radical at all because they don’t understand anything about radical form. That it actually comes from the spirit. That you actually don’t care about it while you’re doing it. And probably the most important thing, that it comes of itself. You have to be involved in poetry as an activity for itself and you have to be doing it for it. You can’t do it because you’re a professor.

“Teaching with the School Teachers” is seemingly a report on giving a seminar to schoolteachers about teaching poetry, but it reads like he’s making a piece of something he otherwise has to write for a paid gig.

That’s another piece that happened when I was getting together with him. He couldn’t write anything without making his own work. He could never do anything just because someone asked him to in an official capacity.

Edmund Berrigan: We called this book Get the Money! partly because the theme resonates throughout the pieces, but I think there’s also this choice not to take other work. “Get the money,” as much as it’s a tagline, is also a survival mechanism. I’d be interested to hear more about what that meant for dad, especially as things got harder in the later years.

AN: When I met Ted, he was a teacher. He had a position at the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa. [Big Table editor] Paul Carroll had recommended him based on “Tambourine Life,” which had been in The Young American Poets (1968) anthology, edited by Paul. I think Ted anticipated having these writer-in-residence jobs and he had another one at Ann Arbor. But then he lost that one because they gave it to Joseph Brodsky. We split up and went to New York separately and he wasn’t working. Then he was working a little bit at Yale. He was still getting teaching work. Then he was invited to Buffalo for the summer and asked me to come with him. We were ever after together. He taught a course that summer that Charles Olson had inaugurated on modern mythology that Jack Clarke would’ve given, but Jack was away.

After that, the bottom fell out; we had no money and were wandering around wondering how to get money. I got pregnant with Anselm and simultaneously Ted got the job in Chicago in 1971. We went to Chicago and then to England, and he got the job at the University of Essex. Eddie was born in ’74. We went back to Chicago and then Ted got sick. But I had postpartum depression and I was unhappy. He decided I needed to be in New York, and the subtext to that was he needed to be in New York too. We went to New York but he was always sick afterwards. He taught at City College in 1982.

EB: He also went to Boulder in ’80. Allen Ginsberg had brought him in to help solve the tensions from the Naropa Poetry Wars.

AN: He was invited to solve the Naropa Poetry Wars because we were friends with both the Ed Dorn and Tom Clark side, and the Allen and Anne Waldman side. We hung out with all of them. Ted said to me, “But of course I’m only on Allen’s side. I will always be on Allen’s side. It doesn’t matter what the cause is or what the circumstances are.”

EB: Why was that?

AN: Because I am on Allen’s side too, because he’s the president of poetry.

EB: Why do you think dad became this aesthetically radical person, considering that he came from a working-class background in Providence, then he was in the army, and then he was in Tulsa? Then suddenly he’s this guy writing sonnets. How did that radicalism manifest?

AN: He couldn’t be a writer without totally giving himself to it. To give himself to it, he had to not do all these other things that involved getting jobs. He didn’t know how not to do it, although he tried from time to time. But it’s hard to even know what being a poet is.

Where does he get his idea of how to be a poet?

He took speed and his brain started working. He needed speed and it’s documented in the section from the “’60s Journals.” He needed to have his mind changed. He needed to take drugs and not be the person in Rhode Island. The first thing he did to get out of Rhode Island was to join the army. He went to Korea and he had some leaves in Japan. Then he went to Tulsa and started meeting poets. They were very young poets. It wasn’t just Ron and Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard; it was also David Bearden. I think there were a couple of others and they were closer to his age. But it was a university. It wasn’t like the one he’d gone to for a few months, Providence College.

Does this encounter with speed start in Tulsa or does it start in New York?

It started in Tulsa a bit, but really in New York. But they were taking drugs in Tulsa. There were people that would come through with peyote.

It’s interesting you mention peyote, because speed seems to be the consciousness alterer for Ted; he’s obviously trying hallucinogens, but they don’t seem primary for him.

He took a lot of acid at a certain point and he smoked a lot of hash. But it was speed that gave you energy. Life energy, energy to “get the money,” as well as write poems. But there’s a point where it stops working and you try to get it to work again and it doesn’t. He went off it in ’72 when I was pregnant with Anselm and stayed off it for a few years. He had to go through this process of getting his energy back. He could always go teach, because that was easy in a way. But he couldn’t write. That’s a good time to write prose. I think some of the prose writing was done then, but a lot of it that was done later in New York for the Poetry Project Newsletter when Greg Masters was the editor.

When did he start to get sick?

He got hepatitis in 1975. He went to the vets’ hospital in Chicago and was told he had alcohol hepatitis, which neither he nor I ever quite believed. He moved to New York ahead of us. He had to take the plane because he was too sick to take the car trip. So, I took the car trip with Anselm and Edmund and some friends who were moving; we had our stuff in the U-Haul. We went to New York and we landed in our friend Marion Farrier’s apartment. We stayed there for some weeks, then we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, then we found our apartment on St. Mark’s Place. Ted went to the veterans’ hospital in New York and they told him the same stuff, and that there was no cure. He didn’t try to do anything about it because he wasn’t told there was anything he could do. It would obviously be to stop drinking, but he wasn’t drinking. He would say, “I take speed.” And they would say, “Speed’s not part of it.”

They didn’t know what hepatitis C was back then, right?

No, they hadn’t isolated the virus. I think when Ted started to sense he was going to die, he started organizing his prose works and he organized them that way. It’s possible I did it, but I think he did. I sometimes can’t remember whether I did things after he died or whether he did them before he died. But he didn’t know what disease he had. He had to get it all out of his own sense of what was going on inside his body. So, the last year of his life he started organizing things.

He had some sense he was dying, then?

It wasn’t articulated much until the last few months. I started to articulate it to myself sometime during the last six to eight months. After his mother died in ’82, he started talking in a certain way. He seemed to be putting things in order and I perceived that there was something wrong.

How did Ted feel existentially near the end of his life?

The last poem he wrote was addressed to me and it’s called “This Will Be Her Shining Hour.” It’s a six-page love poem. He still had a lot of love. There are poems for the kids. There’s a group of poems he wrote after his last book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988). They’re like “last poems” and he knows it. They’re very loving. We went through a lot of changes those last few months. He was trying to make a shape out of his life. He was writing these really nice poems. I think he assessed and knew what he had done. He was really happy with A Certain Slant of Sunlight.

He sensed that he had accomplished some of what he had set out to accomplish?

I’m not sure he set out to accomplish anything. I don’t know if that’s what you do when you’re a poet; it’s just this thing you do. It’s who you are, and everybody’s trying to keep you from being that person. Society is more and more constructed toward keeping you from being that, and the MFA programs are part of the construction. You can’t get to that life. You do it because the world needs culture. But it doesn’t know it needs poetry, and it doesn’t know what poetry is. But the world has poetry inside itself all the time. All it has to do is take some time for it. I’m giving the world its future, as far as I’m concerned.

Let’s talk about the book in terms of the object we’ve made because, editorially, it reflects a pre-computer, pre-internet life. It goes against the grain for me to, say, not regularize serial commas in a book. But I know you wanted to reflect the originals as much as possible, in a way that doesn’t reflect how things are made now in publishing.

EB: All of Ted’s aesthetics are pre-computer. Our challenge was, if we regularized everything, we would lose a lot of his nuances and a lot of the freedom he created for himself by breaking those rules or pursuing his own vision of whether those questions mattered. There are places where we chose not to match modern conventions because we wanted to make sure we preserved the uniqueness of dad’s approach to language, to formatting. There was always some level of intention behind those choices and the irregularity of those choices.

AN: Individuality is very hard with the computer. The computer does not admit of it.

Thinking of the innovation of form in Ted’s prose, using collage and cut-up techniques, deliberate misattributions, etc., is he suspicious of the standard forms or just deliberately breaking them?

He liked the standard forms. He would say he cared about the form of the novel and he cared about all these forms, but he couldn’t write like that. He would get too giddy if he tried; he would reach a state of hilarity, if he tried a standard form. When he was sentimental, when he was profound, he was always working out in his own form. But he respected all of the forms that he’s not using.

Is some of his innovation based on, “Well, I can’t do that, but I could do it this way”?

No. There’s not a thought process. It’s like, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to write one of these, and it turns out to be a work by me. Rather than a work that looks like the one I was looking at before, it will turn out to be a work by me.”

Are there things about Ted that aren’t captured by his writing?

One of the reasons I fell in love with him was because he was funny. One time, Eileen Myles came over and she and I were sitting in the front room of the apartment and Ted was in bed. He had been asleep, and this would happen often: people would walk through where he was sleeping. She and I were talking, and then he just started talking. It was his voice from the other room playing to us and everything he said was funny. Then I started waiting and I turned my ear toward where he was in bed and Eileen was just watching us. Somewhere she said, “Alice really enjoyed him.” It was a sentence where she caught something about our relationship, but also about him. He could make himself be quite enjoyable.

Was it hard being married to someone who was so charismatic, someone you had to share with a whole universe of people?

AN: Well, we couldn’t have any of the money we had to get, unless all these people came. And a lot of them really did like me. I was young and good-looking. So, no, I didn’t mind. I was always learning from them.

EB: The people who were coming by were great people too, people like Anselm Hollo, who was an old friend of mom’s, or people like Andrei Codrescu; you met a lot of these people right away.

AN: I met Anselm Hollo before Ted did. I met Andrei in 1971. Our friends, Steve Carey and his brother Tom, would come over. They were great people, and we all liked each other. I was making breakthroughs and people were recognizing that. I was doing things as a so-called woman poet that nobody had done yet. Ted was proud of that. We traded works a lot. I always wrote a lot. A lot didn’t seem to me to be good enough and I would give him pages that he would make into poems. I can find a lot of poems he wrote after we got together that contain lines by me. He would give me titles because I couldn’t title anything. He would also tell me where the poem ended, because I was never completely clear where the poem ended. I would write a long thing and then he would say, “Why don’t you end it here?” I’d see I could end it there and it would be great.

We critiqued each other a lot but there was a point where he said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing in this book.” That was Alice Ordered Me to Be Made (1975). That was my first really different book that was not in his aesthetic. He wasn’t criticizing me. It was all the poems I wrote in a particular year that was traumatic for me because my father died, but I don’t really say that. Ted said, “I would put the poems in this order, but I say this with some hesitancy because I don’t understand what you’re doing.” And that was OK. He was really interested. He could never figure out whether I was following in the tradition of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, or of Philip Whalen, and actually I was making something compounded of both of them and I wasn’t going to follow one or the other. He couldn’t help me that way.

EB: What’s Get the Money! like for you in particular? One reason I love A Certain Slant of Sunlight—aside from the fact it’s an amazing and unique book—is I remember some of it. Nick, as an editor, is seeing this all from a distance. Anselm and I see some of it from a distance, but it’s a distance very close to our heart, but you lived a lot of this while it was happening. Is this a different experience for you, being part of this book?

AN: Well, I’ve stepped back to let you do it. That’s been pleasure to not be the principal managerial person involved. Partly because my energies are different and I’m older, but I like watching you do it. As for the works themselves—and I’m quite conscious of the passage of time—I’m so happy. I was never sure they all stood up. But they all stand up. It’s so different from what everybody else is presenting as how to talk about poetry and how to relate to poetry. All young poets should read this book. I remember talking to Anselm about it and saying, “This could change everything if people would just pay attention to it.”

As a closer, how do you think Ted would feel about Eddie and Anselm becoming these very individual and well-respected poets?

I think he would be totally amused and bemused. He would be something mused.