The classification most frequently ascribed to Ted Berrigan is “second-generation New York School”—as if the defining feature of his poetry is his having rolled into town a little too late to break into the ultimate literary cool-kid clique alongside John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest. Berrigan admired and learned from them all, and, reading his poems, it’s easy to identify moments that seem Kochian, O’Haraian, Ashberian—hell, sometimes he steals their lines outright. But he integrates them in a way that suggests polyphony, not slavish imitation, welcoming different voices to create a kind of euphoric, experimental mix tape shot through with personal feeling.

It’s not always clear who the person behind those feelings is, which is to Berrigan’s advantage: it lets him have personality without a psyche—at least the sort of psyche that led his more mainstream contemporaries to write confessions about the dark recesses of their hearts. Rather, he comes off as an extroverted host: in “­Tambourine Life,” for example, he channels the poet ­Guillaume Apollinaire, the folk singer Huddie Ledbetter, the countercultural comedian Paul Krassner, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and Tarzan of the Apes.

When you do hear a voice that sounds like it belongs to Berrigan, you get the sense that he spends his time scampering around the city or writing at high speed in his apartment, fueled by Pepsi and pills as people drift in and out. “Hello Lee / Mr. Lee Crabtree / of The Fugs / just came in,” he writes, greeting his friend both in life and in poetry. Not that all of his guests get stable identities, as when Berrigan riffs on a Mad Lib: “I am in love with / (fill in name of person in room).” That parenthetical is a form of inclusion, even as it constitutes a sophisticated joke about the nature of poetic address and the fickleness of feeling.

Describing the name-dropping and playfulness in Berrigan’s poetry can make it sound like so much candy—delicious but not necessarily good for you—or, worse, like a series of chatty valentines to an in-crowd. But his poems are as probing as they are fun, as inviting as they are ­specific, and as fresh today as they must have felt over forty years ago, when John Ashbery wrote that Berrigan’s sonnets “feel like what tomorrow is going to be like.” When Berrigan brings in all the...