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WORK TITLE: areerome In Alone
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/anselm-berrigan * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm_Berrigan * http://www.wavepoetry.com/collections/authors/products/anselm-berrigan * https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/2013/04/23/flyer-profile-anselm-berrigan/ * https://www.brown.ge
u/academics/literary-arts/writers-online/authors/anselm-berrigan
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1972, Chicago, IL; son of Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan (both poets); married Karen Weiser (a poet).
EDUCATION:SUNY Buffalo, B.A.;Brooklyn College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and educator. St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, New York, NY, artistic director, 2003-07; Bard College, Red Hook, NY, artistic director or summer MFA program; Brooklyn, College, Brooklyn, NY, adjunct teacher. Also taught writing Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Pratt Institute, New York; and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, Boulder, CO.
AWARDS:
New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry, 2007; two grants from the Fund for Poetry.
WRITINGS
Also author of chapbooks, including They Beat Me Over the Head With a Sack (chapbook),1998; Have a Good One, 2008; To Hell with Sleep, 2009; and Strangers in the Nest. Also author of Pictures for Private Devotion (CD; reading poems/no music/ narrow house), 2003.
SIDELIGHTS
Anselm Berrigan is a writer and poet who grew up in New York City . As a poet he followed in the footsteps of his parents, the poets Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. His brother, Edmund Berrigan is also a poet. Commenting on how he composes his poetry in an interview with Fayetteville Flyer Online contributor Matthew Henriksen, Bergen noted: “I’ve tried a lot of different methods of composition in the past twenty years. Sometimes I can find a formal vehicle to ride out for awhile, and a long poem might come from the practice of reentering a space that’s repeating on the level of form. I get to these points where I start to feel dumb, and I try to find a way to rebuild my writing routine and force myself to break up whatever patterns I think I’ve fallen into.” He is the coeditor of two volumes of his father’s poetry: The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan.
Free Cell and Notes from Irrelevance
Berrigan is also the author of both chapbooks and full-length books of poetry. His 2009 collection of poems titled Free Cell, is made up of the poems “Have a Good One,” which contains ninety-six poems in all; “Let Us Sample Protection Together,” the product of a collaboration with composer David First; and “To Hell with Sleep.” “His his poems have a kind of slacker cool and political awareness,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor An Internet Bookwatch contributor noted the collection’s “verbal rhythm serves as the perfect counterpoint to the thought-provoking commentary in this excellent collection.”
For his collection titled Notes from Irrelevance Berrigan took the tact of deciding to fill an entire book with his writings and made the effort to write as often as he could over a long time period. He did not began to type up the writings until the notebook was completely filled. “Only after typing it all up did I come to the conclusion that I had a single poem,” Berrigan noted in an interview with the Conversant Web site contributor Andy Fitch. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: Notes from Irrelevance “reads like the manifesto of a poet who would never admit he’s writing one.”
Come in Alone
Bergen’s 2016 collection of poems titled Come in Alone features Berrigan using rectangular spacial configurations to present his poems, making it so the reader can start at any point in the poems and read them as the words form a continuous loop. The rectangular poems are place around the borders of the pages with the center of the pages remaining blank. The poems continue to reflect Berrigan’s wide ranging interests and style. He writes about daily life and politics as well as poetic theory and various abstractions. Bergen “welcomes both the mundane and weirdly personal detritus into his lines,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
The collection’s opening long poem is titled “Have a Good One“ and features Berrigan making various observations both personal in nature and about general observations. Each page of the poem is punctuated or titled with the phrase “Have a Good One.” Bergen writes: “Stop telling me/ I look tired./ I know what/ I look like./ Tell me/ how I feel”; “The problem of free will/ is not that it does or does not/exist, but that it’s pointless.”
“This is a highly innovative collection that deeply understands the form it has chosen, and it is definitely worth your attention beyond mere curiosity.” wrote New Pages Web site contributor Ryo Yamaguchi. Writing for the Hypeallergenic Web site, Jon Curley, remarked: “Cryptically and compellingly, Come In Alone beckons you to enter it, take hold of it, spin it, and never leave it alone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Chicago Review, autumn, 2006, Jordan Davis, review of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, p. 353.
Internet Bookwatch, November, 2009 , review of Free Cell.
Publishers Weekly Oct. 24, 2005, review of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, p. 41.
Publishers Weekly, October 19, 2009, review of Free Cell, p. 39.
Publishers Weekly July 25, 2011, review of Notes from Irrelevance, p. 32.
Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2016, review of Come In Alone, p. 92.
World Literature Today, November-December, 2006, Michael Leddy, review of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, p. 70.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets Web site, https://www.poets.org/ (February 17, 2017), author profile.
Fayetteville Flyer Online, https://www.fayettevilleflyer.com/ (April 23, 2013), Matthew Henriksen, “Flyer Profile: Anelm Berrigan.”
Hyperallergic, http://hyperallergic.com/ (July 9, 2016), Jon Curley, “Square Deal: Anelm Berrigan’s Come in Alone.
New Pages, http://www.newpages.com/ (May 2, 2016), Ryo Yamaguchi, review of Come in Alone.
Poetry Project Web site, https://www.poetryproject.org/ (February 17, 2017), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (February 19, 2016), Patrick James Dunagan, review of Come in Alone.*
Anselm Berrigan was born in 1972 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Brooklyn College. He is the son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan.
He is the author of five books of poetry: Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999), and coeditor with Alice Notley and his brother Edmund Berrigan, of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2011).
He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry in 2007 and has received two grants from the Fund for Poetry.
From 2003 to 2007 he was artistic director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is cochair of writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and also teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. He lives in New York City.
Anselm Berrigan‘s books of poetry include Primitive State, a long, demented fortune cookie list published by Edge Books this past autumn, and Come In Alone, a book of rectangles just out from Wave Books. He’s the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, a part-time teacher, a former Artistic Director of The Poetry Project, and a person who likes to lean on the radiator by the lights in back of the parish hall.
Poet Anselm Berrigan is the author of three books, Some Notes on My Programming (2006), Zero Star Hotel (2002), and Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999), as well as of several chapbooks, including Strangers In the Nest, In the Dream Hole (with Edmund Berrigan), and They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack. A CD of his poetry, Pictures for Private Devotion, was released in 2003 through Narrow House Records. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan, he coedited the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Previously artistic director and coordinator of the Wednesday Night Reading Series of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, he has taught writing at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, and Naropa University. He currently teaches in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Andy Fitch with Anselm Berrigan
Anselm Berrigan
Anselm Berrigan
Along with Cristiana Baik, Andy Fitch is assembling the Letter Machine Editions Book of Interviews, which also includes interviews conducted by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. This talk will be published in that collection, due for late 2014 release.
Andy Fitch: Can we start with the Free Cell acknowledgments page? Here this 2009 City Lights collection goes out of its way to present Edge Books as your “primary publisher,” and even offers a brief timeline of Rod Smith’s founding of the press. What type of gesture did you wish to make with this acknowledgement? Why align oneself as a writer in this way? Did you want to demonstrate ongoing loyalty to a hardworking small-press publisher who gave you crucial early support? Do you appreciate the art-world model of a gallery cultivating/representing its selected “stable”? Can the symbiotic models of family-hood, of civic citizenship (both of which I hope we’ll discuss in detail later) extend to the relation between poet and publisher?
Anselm Berrigan: The acknowledgment of Edge Books was actually Garrett Caples’ idea. He’d gotten the go-ahead to edit a new line of poetry books for City Lights, and wanted to make sure the prior publishing relationships of the poets he intended to work with were recognized. I think in my case, because I’d primarily been published by Edge up to that point, Garrett wanted to make sure that Edge got some particular attention. He is very respectful of the work that Rod Smith has done with Edge. In fact, Garrett initially asked if I was interested in doing a kind of selected poems volume from the Edge books and other things, but I had plenty of new work and, anyway, the earlier books were and are still in print. So that didn’t feel necessary. I wouldn’t liken my relationship with Edge to a gallery model, mainly because I don’t really know what the gallery situation is like beyond a certain point. I have friends who are artists, and my cousin Will Yackulic, who I’m very close with, is a wonderful artist and works with a few galleries. But I don’t ask him what that’s like. The economics are obvious enough, anyway, and it’s clear to me that I don’t have to deal with that kind of stress. I can just deal with the special kinds of stress that come with poetry’s relatively puny economics. I’ve had very good relationships with my publishers, and they have all been poets themselves, which tends to keep things fluid.
AF: I’ll hope that we can discuss a variety of projects, including Free Cell’s various parts, Notes from Irrelevance and the forthcoming Primitive State. But first, since you clearly value the art of arrangement, could you arrange these various pieces before us? Are there ways in which this diverse array of recent books can be said to comprise a composite/kaleidoscopic whole—a catalog of different tonalities, forms of inquiry, phases of life? Or does approaching these books as discrete, self-contained entities make more sense? Your work consistently flouts reductive distinctions between an “experimental” and a “confessional” poetics. But, along the lines of this Free Cell excerpt, “Explanation befits a mirrored / version of me, so I / move on,” can we trace the autobiographical through your writing’s ongoing, always evolving desire to move on?
AB: Free Cell is made of three poems: “Have A Good One,” which also happens to be ninety-six poems, and which was written between 2004 and 2007; “Let Us Sample Protection Together,” which came out of a collaboration with the composer David First, and was written in the summer of 2008; and “To Hell With Sleep,” which was written very quickly in December of 2007 and maybe worked on a bit in early 2008. Notes from Irrelevance was written over a three-month period in late 2009, then typed up and worked on across 2010. Primitive State was actually written in the fall of 2008, but it’s taken a long time to get the arrangement to a place where I could consider it ready to go as a whole thing. I decided it was done last year (2013), but every time I read through it I get the urge to tinker with it a bit more. I can’t quite see them as a composite whole—I view all of my writing as part of an ongoing body of work, but that’s not something I’m looking to project onto the works as they’re sent into whatever version of the public they might reach. So I think taking the books as discrete entities is to the point. They’re not dependent on one another, at least outwardly, though they are by and large long poems. I don’t think I could have written Notes from Irrelevance without having gone through the experience of working on Primitive State, but is there really any way that could tangibly come across? I doubt it. They’re quite different.
It’s easier for me to have a feeling for the autobiographical as it works across all these pieces than it is to articulate that feeling as an arc or progression. That may be because the first three books of mine each contain a number of explicitly autobiographical poems, and by the time I was working on “Have A Good One” I was starting to treat autobiographical material in very short order—as glimpses, to borrow the word from Willem de Kooning’s usage (“content is a glimpse”). I was also working at the Poetry Project as Artistic Director for the duration of that poem’s making, and the poem became a working space I could go to in order to narrow myself down to artist, as opposed to playing host, organizer, fund-raiser, administrator, liaison to the public. All those roles were still on at the same time, so it’s not really like the writing was a method of escape. It was more a practice of de-consolidation and assessment, maybe. But even that take only gets at a little bit of what goes on across one’s own practice during any given spread of time. The single biggest autobiographical moment marked by the writing is clearly the birth of my first daughter, Sylvie, in late 2007. “To Hell With Sleep” is an instant response to her entering our lives and completely altering our relationships to time and need. Any writing from that point on had to happen fast, or so it seemed, if it was going to happen at all. And any sense of routine was upended, which was useful. Working at the Poetry Project slowed my practice down way too much. It was a good period for listening to what others were doing, but it wasn’t easy to let myself make sets of rapid decisions with materials while all that listening was happening. At some point after Sylvie’s birth I was desperate to have some kind of routine again, and not turn stupid, as in narrow-minded, which is a fear of mine. Primitive State and Notes from Irrelevance separately come out of those impulses in different ways.
AF: One more general question, before I ask about specific books, concerns the identification of your work (by reviewers, by you in interviews, by the poetic-subject of these projects) with New York City. Certainly your Lower Manhattan youthful experiences (getting lost on the walk home from “Eileen’s,” buying fake acid in Washington Square and such) speak to an immersive urban existence in a way that many subsequent New York transplants only can envy. You capture the nonchalant grace of New York’s over-saturated, moment-to-moment simultaneity, both in descriptive flourishes (such as, “They were getting in their hula hoop reps in November bikinis twenty feet away from a crowd gawking at a red-tailed hawk eating freshly killed pigeon in a Tompkins Square dutch elm”), and in more elliptical yet resonant motifs (such as “Backs in touch,” which may have nothing to do with this, yet, for me, evokes the subconscious animal comforts provided even on a cramped subway commute). Still, as someone who for a decade felt fully devoted to New York life, though who now lives just as happily in rural environs, and prefers to visit other cities, I’ve grown skeptical of most New York-essentializing formulations. Can you tell me something about why I, why everyone, still should care particularly about New York? Or, as an alternate way of approaching this question: Do you sense that the ecologies of other cities and other settings could have influenced your poetics as profoundly as New York has?
AB: Well, I envy being able to take a walk in the woods at a moment’s notice. If I lived for a long enough stretch somewhere else, that place would get into the writing too. In fact, I started writing in Buffalo, where I lived while in college, and really took it on in San Francisco. I lived there for a few years just before it became prohibitively expensive due to the tech boom, and a lot of my initial impulses and ideas about poetry were worked out there. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Mojave Valley and along the Hudson Valley too—this feels significant, despite the intermittence. I have no interest in making anyone feel some type of way about New York. Nobody needs to care about it. It’s a big source of material, but anywhere might be. I despised New York as a teenager and was very happy to leave. When I turn to memory zones from growing up here the colors tend to be gray, the environment threatening and my sense of being is heavily weighed upon. If I focus on my family there’s much more lightness, but I get a lot of memory hits outside on the streets by myself and those memory flashes tend to be stark and cutting, and somehow available.
That said, New York is where I’m from, and it’s where we live and work, and where my kids are starting to grow up, and those are evolving, concrete aspects of my experience that I rely upon at times to give me some ground. Otherwise I might just float into a permanent head- and sound-trip, and I mostly don’t want to do that. I’ve also lived here long enough (in the same neighborhood, the East Village of Manhattan, that I grew up in) to have some understanding of what the longer-term development of a neighborhood and its adjacent neighborhoods can make happen, and that’s been getting to the surface of my writing more often in recent years. But I understand it best in terms of this one neighborhood, and there’s a need on my part to be particular about the given environment without giving in to local boundaries. It might be nice to upend it all and go somewhere else, but that would have to actually happen. I remember being in Istanbul for a few weeks in 1993—it felt very familiar to me in some ways that probably have to do with having grown up in a massive, crowded, churning international city, and it was also an extraordinarily different environment in so many respects. Every now and then I wonder what it would be like to live there for a good long while.
AF: If we look more closely now at Notes from Irrelevance, I wonder if we can contextualize its emphasis on particular local place within a broader practice of citationality, incorporation, assimilation. This book continually allows for the intrusion of mundane physical fact, of overheard or recollected soundscapes (as mapped, so it seems, by Joy Division, The Doors and Biz Markie, just to name a few), of echoed poetic precedents (Lyn Hejinian, Dante, Whitman, Eliot’s Prufrock). There are moments in which the book’s “I” seems to think by means of pure description—starting off, at least, like Emerson’s transparent eyeball. Here’s one of my favorites: “I find myself walking / through Williamsburg, / Brooklyn, where I lived / some ten to thirteen yrs / ago, in an Italian pocket / by the Lorimer St L / station, feelings as if / some gnawing vitality / is sheathed in plexiglas / around me, and there’s / the possibility of seeing / some neon reflecting / off the sheaths that / have a passing contour / similar to dust on a / contact lens mixing with / bastardized specks of light / pretending to signal an / acid recidivism, but that’s / about as far as it gets, “it” / being my impulse to be / in some state of intensity / or drive that’s rarely ever / been a true encasement / for my measure.” Yet that turn away from some sort of ecstatic, transparent or psychedelic consciousness of place interests me as much as the preceding description. Just as verbs and nouns often exchange roles in this book, oscillating between fluidity and stasis, Notes from Irrelevance will evoke a Paterson-like conflation of persona and city, but then calmly walk away in the opposite direction. Early on, this book offers the clarifying/obfuscating claim that “Carlos Berrigan / would have a certain ring / for umps on demand.” Here is the question: I know that you value bringing in the city in all its teeming multitudes; I know that your stitching-together of immediate urban particulars foregrounds an intricate collaging of overheard cultural and literary references, yet you also seem suspicious of any self-monumentalizing poetics that would privilege, glamorize, celebrate its own prodigious scope; so how do you (how can we) continually expand your sensitivities to the broadest possible range of evanescent experience without making everything ultimately about “you”? How can you keep the city an animal or environmental presence, not an anthropomorphized self or self-reflection? And why did a Schuyler-esque skinny-poem form seem fitting amid these tensions of scope and scale?
AB: I’ll take the last part of the question first. The poem was written in a small sketchbook. I wrote to the edge of the page and that determined the breaks, to an extent, in that I typed up the notebook using the page-edge as indicator of where to put the breaks. That process put the short line in play, and I worked the edges of the lines to get a kind of speed-of-turning going across what were, for me, longer articulations of thought. I’d always wanted to try the skinny-column form, and Schuyler’s work is an indirect influence on that desire, certainly. But the direct force behind my interest was Eileen Myles, specifically her book Not Me, and some of her subsequent books, because of what registered to me as an angular quickness of tone that has this forceful and nonetheless flexible capacity to it running down her columns. To be clear about the process by which this poem came to be, I should tell you that I did not write the poem knowing that I was writing a long poem, or even a single poem. I made a decision to fill a notebook and write as often as I could over an extended period of time, while not typing any of it up until the notebook was finished. Only after typing it all up did I come to the conclusion that I had a single poem. The first typed draft actually had gaps marking where one passage or sketch ended and another began. I made a conscious decision to close those gaps and run everything together once I had a sense there was a real shape to it all. Maybe knowing this helps address the other parts of your question—it’s difficult for me to answer questions that lean towards poetics without talking about how the work happens. It’s not that I’m especially suspicious of any self-monumentalizing poetics. I’m suspicious of all poetics, period. It’s painful to think about, actually, albeit in a mostly minor way (who cares about that kind of pain?). The writing that turned out as Notes from Irrelevance came from forcing myself to extend my individual thoughts as writing. I was concerned that I couldn’t carry a thought, and I had also started reading literary prose very heavily, because the novel had opened back up to me as vehicle I could read through after feeling claustrophobic in novels for over a decade. So each instance of writing was an exercise in pushing for extra clauses while keeping an ear out. I had no overriding thematic sense going, no concrete underpinnings that were supposed to tie it all together. The writing had to happen fast because there wasn’t much time available to write on any given day. So some of the turns and intrusions you mention probably come out of the by-play of focused extension in a given moment, and the sense of starting from scratch each time I sat down to work. As for the part about keeping it from being all about me: There’s a trust I have in the working of the materials that takes over. I did at a certain point realize I was reasserting, for myself, a strong first person in Notes, and that I had a need to reconstitute “myself” that way. I felt like I’d receded somewhat in the years prior, in my writing and in my life, and that was a problem—a personal problem, no doubt, and maybe an imaginary one, but a problem nonetheless. But I don’t think most people would read Notes and decide it’s all about me and that’s that. I could be wrong. In general, I think the question of whether an “I” is too present or too absent in a given body of work is not terribly interesting.
AF: Well, the “I” in Notes from Irrelevance often tantalizes with its elegant, introspective, quasi-psychoanalytic or therapeutic (both for itself and others) formulations. Yet, at the same time, the book continually evades any sense of thoughts recollected in tranquility, of conclusive epiphanic pronouncements. And in the book’s juxtapositions of coherent-seeming photographs and chaotic-seeming memories, in its announcement that “I am most / certainly engaged to a / dissolution of image, / even as I wield my own / anti-program in glossy / fashion,” a question arises for me about the propulsive nature of the sentence. For a preceding interview you emphasized, in relation to Notes from Irrelevance, the importance of prose, of sentences. Do sentences allow you to project something like a reflective self, even as you keep moving on and beyond, Proteus-like, in a way that poetic lines do not? Do sentences provide this book with distinctive possibilities of closure, traction, propulsion—perhaps all at the same time?
AB: I think so. Working with the sentence, at least as an imagined unit of composition channeled through short and fast lines, let me get away from cutting too quickly and being overrun by fragments. I’ve got no truck with fragments, but they’re tricky to work with en masse, and my writing had bent to the point where I could generate fragmented phrasing without trying—no computers or scissors necessary. I wanted to follow my logic down some different pathways, and the sentence turned into a vehicle for that task. It turned out my sentence-logic was battier than my fragment-logic, actually. I was reading a lot of prose—novels by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, To the Lighthouse, Nightwood, the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler and this super-messy great Allen Ginsberg poem “Television was that Baby Crawling Toward the Death Chamber,” all of which felt helpful, if not overtly related. Then there was this strange book by Villem Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, which seemed to provoke a need to consider self-image in material terms. At some point it felt necessary to utilize my visual sense, and the moments that do some city-description often came out of a need to go to that sense. I really wanted to try and describe what it’s like to stand in the middle of First Avenue and see several miles up the avenue, because you can on a clear enough day, but you can’t stop because you’re in the middle of the street and cars are coming. I couldn’t write that standing there waiting to get hit by a taxi, so it had to come in a micro-degree of reflection. I also wanted to be able to access the present while writing in the present, and to use present sense-registration without watering it down by slowing it down, and that’s very difficult. Sensation is layered and works faster than its replay can handle, and one is aware of that while writing, so something else may get in there and tamper with the whole works, and that’s writing. So the description, such as it is, is unlikely to be rational. I let myself go with that, and kept the writing in something like sentences. I forgot a lot of what I’d written as I moved further into the notebook. I was deliberately trying not to go back to what had been put down, in order to maintain a feeling of being unsettled, although I don’t know if I would’ve put it that way at the time. It may have weirdly become a foray into rhetoric, about which I only know what I’ve experienced live.
AF: One last question about Notes for Irrelevance. “Solitude” here often appears as a balm. But it’s a solitude again quite far from that imagined by Wordsworth—for example in the lines “O solitude / as a public refuge and / backwards tumble through / demi-historical banners / of Them Who Was Alive.” Can you describe the sense of solitude put forth in this book and your other books? Can you speak to the implications of a poet performing solitude? You have used the phrase “crowded anonymity” before. Here could we place that phrase not just in the context of New York life, but in terms of the rhetorical question “Couldn’t the perception / of rules, orders, tricks / and brainwashing be / more sensitively addressed / in the public arena?” Do your own personal forms of solitude and public display somehow harmoniously enhance each other? Do you see them as divergent possibilities that simply (by arbitrary necessity of birth, of place) have been forced together?
AB: I guess the real division for me is between solitude and privacy, and I’m not sure that the latter exists without a strong assertion of collective control, since it’s so dependent on what others do (unless you’re rich, or unambiguously non-descript, if such a thing is possible). I take solitude as an aloneness in mind, or a belief in that prospect. Privacy seems to be more about not wanting to be fucked with. Fat chance. So no, I’m not talking about the Wordsworth version of solitude. Solitude for me, in physical manifestation, tends to last a few minutes or less, often enough. Solitude from even my own sense of duty. This is impossible and probably sounds idiotic, but there you go. In Notes this is all tied in to being in a family, becoming a parent, being a political creature, being part of various communities, being a person in a city of millions and so taking solitude in doses while being a body in public spaces—the matter of self-image. The question about rules, orders, tricks and brainwashing came out of a desire to level the parts of any conversation in which the cynicism of the American public is routinely assumed, but not really taken on. I think people tend to be cynical about many things, including and especially the ways they’re governed, and while that cynicism is subject to excoriation and manipulation it’s also useful at times because, as I heard Carl Rakosi put it once, it’s a way to keep from being tricked. So let’s put all that on the table and begin speaking from our collective mistrust as a kind of common ground. I mean, that’s happening very specifically in certain quarters regarding specific issues, but I was thinking of a massive address. Those lines are followed up by other lines, so the thought doesn’t just stop at “public arena,” or at least I don’t think it does.
AF: More broadly, from this topic of solitude, could we discuss a poetics of fatherhood and/or parenthood that runs through your recent work? This could go any number of ways. Again, in relation to solitude, I think of parenthood as potentially isolating for an otherwise publicly engaged New York poet, even as the immersive relationship you trace between yourself, Karen and your children speaks to solitude’s apparent opposite. So we could talk more about solitude in relation to family, community, polis. Or we could place a poetics of fatherhood in relation to a contemporary poetics of motherhood (in works by Karen herself, by Cathy Wagner, Danielle Pafunda and many others). We could look at similarities and differences in representations of female embodiment, of masculine affect. I’m not a dad, so I’ll let you steer us how you see fit.
AB: I would think having or having had a father or fathers or an absent father or a father-like figure or a mother or mothers or a mother-as-father or an institution-as-parent would all necessarily contribute to whatever a poetics of fatherhood might be. Otherwise it’s just another bunch of fathers founding something. A poetics of fatherhood would have to be seriously fucked up by nature, somehow. That’s about as much as I can say about that right now. Whatever is happening to me goes into my poems on some level. That’s one thing I get from Frank O’Hara, which I’d say he got from other places, and which many other artists before and after him have taken on and converted according to the materials and means available to them. Being a parent would have to get into the work; it would be folly to keep it out. Keeping it out would just become a fact of the work anyway, to anyone paying attention, starting with me. But the way into any larger point of content, for me, is often through diction, and having kids throws all this vocabulary back at you, much of which is alienating and redundant. And I do mean “back” at you—shit you thought you’d gotten around, maybe, in terms of how you have to deal with marketing language, medical language, moral language. Your reading material changes. The way people talk to you changes. Your interface with the medical world changes because you’re dealing with doctors way more often, or at least I was (I’m very doctor-phobic). Money takes on another weight because you have to get a new batch of stuff. The colors are terrible around that stuff, by the way. Baby-gear stores have the worst palettes. There’s a big turn-around later, because the baby starts walking and talking and being interested in colors and shapes and sensations in ways that can be astonishing, because the interest is so focused and new, so to speak. You spend months talking about purple. Kids are really easy to get material from. If you don’t bother to make it too affected, which is not always easy, and you don’t telegraph the source every time, you can get some great things out of them. It’s often gap-closing material, as in something-needs-to-go-here, but that’s often what I’m looking for. My mom says she just wrote when Eddie and I were there in the same room with her. Apparently we were not as intrusive as my kids seem to be, although I find that hard to believe.
Ok, there’s one other thing I can say about this: I have not found parenting to be isolating when it comes to writing, though I can easily see how it could be for someone else. I’ve practiced writing fast for a long time, and I’ve practiced writing from a relatively empty head. I don’t need much to start. These things have helped me adapt to some of the ways that parenting reinvents your relationship with time. I stopped typing material up right away. I’ll write for months before typing anything, and I came to realize I had often been too hard on the material when I went to type it up too quickly.
AF: So parenthood shapes not only your explicitly stated content, of course, but also your implicit points of entry and methods of inquiry for a project. Primitive State, with its own unique way of showcasing the sentence, as well as with its interspersed account of a “she” often grasping at new forms of physical, social and grammatical consciousness, made me think of the sentence as an emergent appendage, an ancient technology and a desperate, clawing reach all at once. The opening line “…touch the art…” here stuck with me. Bhanu Kapil and I recently discussed the sentence as a means of touch. You mention somewhere that parenthood has prompted 80% of your internalized arguments to silence themselves. Has it also given you access to how “primitive” infantile desires and pleasures can shape even the most detached, scientific sentence-based prose?
AB: That line “…touch the art…” is on the cover of a children’s book the Met museum published. I don’t think it’s the title. I think it’s a selling point. The book reproduces paintings from their collection and makes some details three-dimensional, like a Raphael angel gets a red feather for a wing. So yeah, literal touch is right there, and Sylvie ripped that wing right out at some point. I saw that sentence staring back at me one night while I was working on what would become Primitive State, and eventually it presented itself as a way to open the thing. I think your take on the sentence as having those three qualities gets close to where I was at with Primitive State, which began from a need for a fixed routine and another feeling that my ability to form sentences with any variance had narrowed. The problem with being able to write fast is that it doesn’t always work. It’s like having a pitch you can’t always command, to borrow some baseball terms. I’ve had to build a practice around the sense that no particular way of working is ever going to cut it for very long, and waiting around for inspiration to strike would mean writing about once a year. I was wholly dissatisfied with my ability to get anything going for months after writing “To Hell With Sleep,” and gave myself the assignment to write at least ten discrete sentences every night, and not type them up—to write them when everyone else was asleep, and to focus on making them distinct from one another without thinking about progression or continuity. Varying lengths, structures, subjects, speakers, tonalities and so forth. Once I got going it became clear that I needed to write 1,000 of these sentences. So there was emergence, by way of having a systematic approach to working with a new, for me, unit of composition (and it was an older, ordinary unit). Plus I was trying to retrain my mind, so the consciousness involved with making a work wasn’t there at the outset. And I was very desperate because I thought my brain might be shriveling. Lack of sleep can make you feel that way over long periods of time.
AF: Though to return to the ellipses from Primitive State’s opening line: In many ways, your artful arrangement of this book’s 1000 discrete sentences echoes late-twentieth-century accounts of formal/interpretive tensions posed by grid paintings. Grids, like your phrases with ellipses on either side, can be said to exemplify the centripetal pressures of an abstract art cut off from all external context, or the centrifugal pressures of a Cartesian coordinate system spreading out endlessly forever. “All stuffed animals in room staring beyond,” for instance, makes me think of both a minuscule Buddhistic emptiness and a maximal Pascalian terror before the abyss. And then grid paintings can be considered either subtractive (starting from a single canvas, subsequently divided into ever smaller sections) or additive (starting with one modular unit which gets multiplied countless times, producing a final shape only through this cumulative process), just as your line “By not thinking I resist prefiguring an arrangement” could stand as extracted, self-sufficient, totalizing summary of this book project, or as one incremental, incantatory step amid the allover, aleatory process. Grids, however, seem to get a bad rap in this book, often presented as something to be avoided or resisted. Grids of time (workdays) and place (Manhattan) certainly come to mind—along with grid-embracing/grid-avoiding artists like Joe Brainard: as in your “I remember white roaches” line, or your lack of periods, recalling Brainard’s lack of page numbers. Can you put your Primitive State pursuits in relation to the grid?
AB: I relate Primitive State more particularly to the additive notion of the grid, in terms of your formulation. The ellipses around that opening line reappear irregularly but consistently throughout the poem, and offer a way to make a list within the overall structure of the piece, which itself is a form of list. I think the ellipses may let there be a sense that the formal opening and closing of the poem don’t necessarily mark its boundaries. That the internal listing-mechanism just keeps going. One interesting point of difficulty with that piece was moving it over from being a kind of self-training mechanism into a work that had its own shape. That wasn’t my intention at the outset, but it became apparent that the poem could have a life outside of its initial framework, as I discovered by reading it in public a few times. I could ride its rhythms, and the tone was just pulled back enough to maintain a deadpan openness without having to linger in any one spot. The order has been impossible to settle on, but that’s the nature of having so many moving parts, I suppose. I say all this because the ellipses came about as a way to handle a line of material that runs through the poem and manifests itself in sentences that mostly function as little lists. It may be that the lists inside a list simulate some aspect of a grid. I’d made a decision for about five seconds during the writing of Primitive State that I wasn’t an artist who worked with grids, that I was much more of a gestural artist, and I might have even said so in an indirect way somewhere in the piece. But it was a temporary feeling, built out of reducing everything to grid vs. gesture, just to tease out a funny (to me) painting binary, and I think what you mean by grid I might otherwise state as system. Building a piece out of a routine is not too far from working out of a systemic approach to a form—working serially, or repeating the contours of a shape, or recombining a set of materials and so forth. My poem “Zero Star Hotel” has the look of a grid from an aerial view. But I was only conscious of it as a formal system that let me be all over the place on a single page while I was writing it, because that’s what I needed it to be in order to write at all after the death of my stepfather in 2000. I should tell you that I read from Primitive State at a reading in Tulsa a few years ago, and preceded it by reading from Brainard’s I Remember. The reading was part of a conference on the “Tulsa School”—my father, Joe, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup. A pleasurable, odd experience. I’d never been to a poetry conference that wasn’t a marathon reading. Anyway, my mother was there, and after the reading she told me that Primitive State sounded like my version of I Remember with all the “I Remembers” taken out. Which is funny, because most of the lines in Primitive State are not recounted memories. But that formal structure, which is very basic when it comes down to it (line/space/line/space et al.) bends itself toward a surface of regulation, and I did want to know what working in that space could be like.
AF: I have my own private lineage of grid-like projects, many of which come from or from around New York, such as Brainard’s I Remember, James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life, Lewis Warsh’s The Origin of the World, Stephen Shore’s “American Surfaces” show, Jonas Mekas’ spliced film collages, Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, Renee Gladman’s sentence-based investigations and Mónica de la Torre’s recent collection Four. I also think of prose projects by Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman. Your ten-sentences-per-night assignment recalls Harry Mathews’ Twenty Lines a Day. Or when I read “Echoes, echo suppressants” I hear Gertrude Stein’s “Roast potatoes / Roast potatoes for.” Your “beans on toast” line seems to pick up on Hoa Nguyen’s recent book. Can you offer some specific formative reading/artistic experiences that helped to inform Primitive State, and discuss how this project’s particular structure allows you to explore new possibilities of poetic elasticity?
AB: I’d written a poem called “Pictures for Private Devotion,” in Zero Star Hotel, that on first glance is formally close to Primitive State, though it’s much shorter—three pages. That poem came out of working with usable lines from discarded poems, and thinking a bit about something Lewis Warsh said in an interview about the art being in the arrangement when working with discrete, smaller units. I think Lewis was talking specifically about the poems that went into The Origin of the World, and I do see that book as informing the decision to make Primitive State go on in its form, along with some poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, in particular her poem “The New Boys,” which I published in The Brooklyn Rail. The Robert Bresson book Notes on the Cinematographer, which is a collection of notes from the field logs he kept while making his films, impacted me a great deal, though it’s hard to talk about that book. Bresson’s notes are very tightly drawn, and the space around each note feels like a little encasement. I was not aware of David Markson’s writings when Primitive State was happening, but I did read a bunch of his books while I was revising it. I don’t think there’s a direct parallel, but I devoured those books, and reading them (I’m thinking of This Is Not A Novel, Reader’s Block and Vanishing Point) helped me work out some arrangement problems, none of which I can remember now, thankfully. Oh, and there’s a book called Voices of Baseball that’s basically a book of quotes broken up into subject-chapters that is one of my favorite books of all time. I started reading that book when I was ten or twelve, and I’ve read it dozens of times. That’s one of the first books I remember getting a sense of structural pleasure from.
AF: Going back, now, to Free Cell, specifically the long “Have A Good One” cycle, could you talk a bit about the distinction between a poetic series that provides moments of rest, of silence between its lyric passages, and a series that incessantly encourages/orders us to “Have a good one”?
AB: To even recognize the difference between a short poem that sits on its own page and a scroll or run of short poems that keep coming, you have to commit as a reader to listening for the spaces between poems. It can’t just be a quick visual acknowledgment of incremental spatial differences. The end of the poem has to give out into the space around it, and be gone. Maybe the space sends you back through the poem again, but that’s another order of experience. “Have A Good One” had to be crowded, and the title phrase had to be a way in and a way out of the poem-parts. “Have a good one” is something usually said by someone going in the other direction, leaving, having finished a transaction. It’s a phrase for strangers, often enough, and hopefully in the poem it sets off the poems from one another as little episodes of consciousness made into adjacent shapes.
AF: I’m especially interested here in your ability to hold together so many vague emotional states and elliptical utterances (Creeley-esque sometimes, as in: “Don’t mind seeming / like I might / if pushed”) within a galvanizing long-poem’s forward thrust. Your individual units do not project a more typical lyric self-importance, yet the prodigious bricolage never loses its footing for the reader. “Have A Good One” seems to evade any need for narcissistic or transcendent poetic identity, but still to give us the personal history of a (sometimes) particular body.
AB: I’m glad you think it doesn’t lose its footing. I wrote the poem across a period when my footing felt shaky in several respects. It’s very much a poem provoked by the War on Terror, for me, underneath those emotional states and utterances, and the occasional discrete memory-shape. I don’t know that it reads that way to anyone in particular. But there is something corrosive and insane about being told by political authorities to assume a permanent condition of fear, to treat daily life as the battlefront at all times and to go shopping as a way of taking responsibility for doing your part. And the same authorities also don’t care if you respond rhetorically with an argument, if you disagree, or even if you organize around your disagreement. You’re free to disagree. The disagreement will be co-opted by the fact of the freedom, which is in fact a retractable privilege. Bush seemed to understand that, to me. He referred to the anti-war movement that sprang up to object to invading Iraq as a “focus group,” which was a way of saying “I don’t care,” or “so what.” Or “Have a good one,” I suppose. I was also writing those pieces as a way of patching together a practice. Organizing the Poetry Project had become consuming. I was struggling to concentrate, and the language felt broken to me. I had to stop writing chronologically into the sketchbook, actually, to get any kind of fluidity going. I would write somewhere, stop, and next time open to some other page and write and keep flipping around—writing underneath the same title each time but dispensing with an orderly kind of order. It felt like the only way to start from nowhere each time I started again.
AF: One non-literary model that came to me was Robert Schumann’s many-part compositions, such as Papillons and Carnaval, which survey a wide range of tonalities—including, even in the sweetest compositions, those of anger and violence. Could you describe the evolving place of anger, aggression, violence in your work?
AB: Gosh. I don’t know if I know how to do that. Description almost always changes course as soon as I start trying to describe anything, unless I’m talking live, and even then a change is always on the verge of taking over, which is probably why I respond to digressive works very strongly. Someone I knew in college once pointed out to me that I often used violent metaphors to write about music (I wrote music reviews back then, before I started writing poems, and then alongside the poetry for a little while). I’d write something like, “listening to Helmet feels like having a wall of bricks dropped onto your head, and you like it,” or “the guitarist’s head was bobbing so hard it popped off and rolled into the crowd.” That’s silly, but illustrates the point. This person, by the way, was attempting to come onto me by pointing this tendency out, so I noted it and stayed away. I’m getting blood drawn regularly now, to treat a genetic condition that causes iron to build up in my bloodstream and gradually form deposits in various places, and so I go get a half-liter of blood taken out every week or two. I keep wondering if it bothers me to see the needle go in, and I do resist looking, but then the site of my blood coursing out and filling this flabby bag doesn’t bother me at all. Seeing someone else bloodied is very hard though. So it’s possible that I have a degree of tolerance for violence that is self-directed, but am very intolerant of violence directed toward others. I could locate anger as a useful form of energy, and a basic human response that needed to be examined, starting very young, and I have a bad temper that I try not to let out. Generalizing about this is not terribly helpful though—there are so many forms of violence, and I don’t know that we’re very good as a species at doing more than cataloging them sometimes. I know I’m not talking about my work right now, but in my work and in my life there is an ongoing inward tension between turning to and turning away from violence, and that’s the only way I can discuss it at the moment.
AF: On a related note, throughout “Have a Good One” you consistently seem to be quitting something (jobs, drinking—or quitting your recent quitting itself, starting anew). I remember John Lydon once saying profound things about quitting. Can you offer your own theory/endorsement/poetics of quitting? Here we also could discuss the incomplete, the indefinite, the approximate. For instance, in “To Hell With Sleep,” staggered poetic lines combine to illustrate a calculus. The poem’s shape might seem to curve, but in fact only can offer a sequence of minute adjustments in rectilinear indentation. The “almost” of poetic process eclipses the “exactness” of poetic image.
AB: Quitting is often about extracting yourself from a bad situation, and not necessarily a matter of giving up or preserving a mind frame. Referring to jobs, relationships, associations, etc. But inside a piece of work, I see no reason why one shouldn’t be able to say “fuck it” at some point, or at several points, but keep going with the work. Quitting a line of order or content or an idea or what have you. The shape of a work is not necessarily dependent on one’s idea of aesthetic consistency, or loyalty to a manner of progression or a source. In “To Hell With Sleep,” anyway, I was writing through an ongoing relatively sleep-deprived consciousness, and so staggering the indentations made more sense to me than working with the composure a perfectly straight left margin gives off. But I wasn’t out of control in the writing, and did arrange the indentations to appear symmetrical. I also needed the form to be drawn tightly enough to give me a sense of contours to work with—it’s very hard to finish a thought, or even begin one, when you aren’t getting much sleep, as I imagine you know. The writing felt like working across a set of gaps that wouldn’t recede, and what was needed was a steady line of material pulled from multiple sensory sources to fill those gaps, which were almost always appearing mid-phrase. It was fucked up. That was not collage, though. It was collaboration.
AF: Hmm I’ve read several times you describing the need to clear your head before you can write. For me, “To Hell With Sleep” seems to emerge most explicitly from such a clearing of the head. But, as a closing gesture, could you describe what it was like to “clear your head” for this project, and, more broadly for your writing practice, can you parse that phrase in relation to the terms inspiration, accommodation, improvisation, meditation?
AB: It was cleared parasitically—by Sylvie in her newborn form. It was not possible, as I was saying before, to do much thinking in those early weeks beyond certain thoughts such as “will she ever stop crying?” and “did I just break her?” and “those two minutes were really nice” and so forth. I had this funny exchange with Cathy Wagner a few summers ago, where she semi-accused me of not being truthful in saying that I didn’t deliberately work with irony (sorry, Cathy). “To Hell With Sleep!” she said. But I didn’t think of the title as ironic. I thought of it as the opposite of a complaint, and so quite literal. New parents bitch all the time about not sleeping, and when you’re about to become a parent people who have kids are prone to taunting you by telling you you’ll never sleep again. So to me the title was a polite, micro-level “fuck you” and a statement of purpose underscoring a cracked poem about learning how to perceive your own function-ability when the baby has arrived and conquered you with its vast immobility. I didn’t have the title right away, though it eventually served as a little proof for me that I could still work. For me, the head-clearing has become a momentary state to begin with, a place to start from. I had a dream a long time ago that a giant Godzilla-sized pencil was erasing downtown Brooklyn, slowly and thoroughly, and I got out of its way by cutting down a side street and circling around behind it, at which point I found myself invisibly inside a zone of white space onto which these amorphous abstract color shapes started popping into view any time I tried to think. So I think of the head-clearing as getting to a place where the words appear on the page and in the head at the same time, at the outset. And then everything else starts pouring in.
Anselm Berrigan’s books of poetry include Notes from Irrelevance, Free Cell, To Hell With Sleep, Some Notes on My Programming and Zero Star Hotel. Loading, a collaboration with painter Jonathan Allen, was published in 2013 by Brooklyn Arts Press. Primitive State is forthcoming in 2014 from Edge Books. Other recent publications include: Sure Shot, a chapbook from Overpass Books; Anselm’s Half/Anna’s Half, a dos-y-dos chapbook with Anna Moschovakis from New Lights Press’s “This Is Your Last Chapbook” series; and Skasers, with John Coletti, from Flowers & Cream. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, former Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan.
Anselm Berrigan is the author of seven books of poetry: Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). His chapbooks include Pregrets (Vagabond Press, 2014), and Sure Shot (Overpass, 2013). He is the current poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published Selected Poems of Steve Carey (2009) and Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen (2002). From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.
Anselm Berrigan
Poet Details
b. 1972
The son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan and stepson of poet Douglas Oliver, Anselm Berrigan earned a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Brooklyn College. His collections of poetry include Integrity & Dramatic Life (1999), Zero Star Hotel (2002), Some Notes on My Programming (2006), and Free Cell (2009). He coedited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005) with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan.
Anselm Berrigan’s poetry makes associative leaps of personal and political observation. Keith Taylor, reviewing Free Cell for arborweb (Ann Arbor online), noted that Berrigan “comes back to the basic elements of American speech and the direct representation of emotion, an attitude he seems to trust even as he forces us to challenge the prejudices of our own experience with language.” In a review on Octopus Magazine online, Noah Eli Gordon compared Berrigan’s work to that of Philip Whalen, noting that an “approach … based on exploring and mapping myriad states of consciousness, from those unexamined in our daily routines to those brought on by Rimbaud’s dictum of forceful derangement, is foundational for Zero Star Hotel.”
Berrigan was the recipient of a 2007 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He directed the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church from 2003 to 2007 and is cochair of the graduate writing program at Bard College.
Anselm Berrigan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anselm Berrigan in New York in 2005
Anselm Berrigan (born 1972 in Chicago, Illinois) is a poet and teacher.[1]
Contents
1 Life and Work
2 Selected bibliography
3 External links
4 Citations
5 References
Life and Work
Anselm Berrigan grew up in New York City, where he currently resides with his wife, poet Karen Weiser [2] From 2003 to 2007, he served as artistic director at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. He is the brother of poet and musician Edmund Berrigan, half-brother of Kate Berrigan and scientist David Berrigan, son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan, and stepson of the late English poet and prose writer Douglas Oliver. He has also lived in Buffalo, New York at the "Ranch" and was known lovingly as "Anton" in San Francisco, California. He is a co-chair of the writing program at the Bard College summer MFA program and an adjunct teacher at Brooklyn College. He has also taught writing at Wesleyan University, Rutgers University, Pratt Institute and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. His newest works are a book-length poem called Notes From Irrelevance (2011), Sure Shot (2013), and Loading (2013), which was done in collaboration with artist Jonathan Allen.
Selected bibliography
They Beat Me Over the Head With a Sack, a chapbook published in 1998.
Integrity & Dramatic Life. , a full-length collection published by Edge Books in 1999.
Zero Star Hotel, a full-length collection published by Edge Books in 2002.
"Pictures for Private Devotion", a CD (reading poems/no music/ narrow house), released in 2003.
Some Notes on My Programming, a full-length collection published in 2006.
Have a Good One, a chapbook published in 2008.
To Hell With Sleep, a perfect-bound chapbook published in 2009.
Free Cell published by City Lights in 2009. ISBN 978-0-87286-502-0.
Notes From Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011)
Sure Shot by Overpass Books in 2013.
LOADING with Jonathan E. Allen by Brooklyn Arts Press in 2013. ISBN 978-1-936767-28-1.
Primitive State published by Edge Books in 2015 (with a cover by painter Marley Freeman).
Flyer Profile: Anselm Berrigan
By Matthew Henriksen • 0 Comments
April 23, 2013
113 67
Anselm Berrigan
Courtesy
This is the second in a series of interviews profiling authors and poets scheduled to appear at The Burning Chair Readings’ Ozark Small Press Poetry Festival set for April 26-27 at Nightbird Books in Fayetteville.
The festival is a celebration of newly-released issues of two Fayetteville-based, hand-bound poetry magazines – Cannibal and Bestoned: The New Metaphysick – and will include readings from 21 poets, eight from the Ozark region and 13 from as far away as New York City and Denver.
Cannibal, edited by Katy and Matthew Henriksen, originated in a Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment in 2007 and moved with them to their current apartment behind Nightbird Books. Bestoned is a new magazine edited by C. Violet Eaton, a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop who currently lives in north Fayetteville.
Anselm Berrigan, one of the featured readers, answered a few questions via email for Matthew Henriksen. Berrigan is the author of several books, including “Notes from Irrelevance” (Wave), “Free Cell” (City Lights), and “Zero Star Hotel” (Edge). He is the Poetry Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, former Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, and co-editor of “The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.” He lives in New York City.
Plenty of poets spend a few years living in New York City, but you grew up there and seem unlikely ever to leave. What aspects of the city matter to you most as a poet?
Ozark Small-Press Poetry Festival
When: April 26-27, 7-10 p.m.
Where: Nightbird Books, 205 W. Dickson Street
Admission: Free
More info: Facebook event page
These days the kind of crowded anonymity I can have in the city is appealing. With small kids in a relatively small apartment there’s not a lot of space-time to get consistent work done at home, so I do a lot of work outside. I look for places where I can be alone but in a crowd, with lines of sensation/input available when I need them. I’ve lived in Buffalo and San Francisco, and I’ve spent regular time in the Mojave Valley, Paris, France, & north of New York on the Hudson River, where I work every summer. So I have a sense of other locations, and I’ve gotten different senses of the scale of nature from all of them. The thing that really comes through for me in New York though is the range of voices all around, and the spread of diction, tone, and paces of speech. There’s never a lack of materials, which means I don’t have to think too much to get things going.
I think we see lots of poets now reigning in some of their intelligence, deflected with irony or submerged in metaphor or dense language. You don’t hold back with your brain, and you go straight after some of the grittier aspects of survival. Do you think poems have an obligation to confront social conflicts or to help people sort out their problems? Or is it more personal?
I don’t think poems have any obligations. An individual might feel obligated to speak to or through what’s putting the heaviest pressure on their existence – and the work by others I tend to be most interested in is work that takes on the world in its present motions and doesn’t look to simplify those conditions, including the joyful ones (which is not the same thing as working minimally or honing in on something momentary or looking inward, for me; those are instances of amplification). While I feel some allegiance to the Lawrence Ferlingetti notion of the poet as a gadfly to the state (any state of power might qualify as a state, say, to keep that notion expansive), I don’t think subject matter and/or concept or righteousness alone provide any guarantee for writing to take a poetic shape. I’m drawn to work that finds its limits with some liveliness and prosody and either makes those limits useful or blows through them.
Your poems involve seemingly anything that might cross your mind in the course of a day, from fantasy baseball to philosophy, and your word choice takes surprising leaps from street talk to dense cerebral abstractions. And the pacing is fast. Nevertheless, the delivery feels natural. Could you talk a little about how you compose?
I’ve tried a lot of different methods of composition in the past twenty years. Sometimes I can find a formal vehicle to ride out for awhile, and a long poem might come from the practice of reentering a space that’s repeating on the level of form. I get to these points where I start to feel dumb, and I try to find a way to rebuild my writing routine and force myself to break up whatever patterns I think I’ve fallen into. That happens about once a year. The long poem Notes from Irrelevance was written out of writing fast every day, feeling desperate to get anything done at all, but also pushing the material through longer articulations. Extending lines of thought by refusing to stop where I might have stopped before, and adding a few more clauses instead. I have two daughters, who are two and five right now. In order to keep working at a steady pace I found myself writing by hand more often, and typing much less. Filling a notebook over the course of weeks and months before typing any of it up. This has made generating material quickly become something I’ve been practicing for several years, and I feel much freer right now, compositionally, than I have in a long time. I wait longer to type up and edit the material I have, and somewhat surprisingly I have discovered that I’m too hard on the work when I go to “finish” it too quickly. This also has to do with the fact that I try to clear my head out when I start to write – to not have an idea, or to only have something like a title or a phrase at the top of a page that suggests a tonal space to begin from, unless I’ve worked myself into a state of formal extension (a longer piece). While I look for a range of things to respond to in the writing and through it, I am not interested in having a project or pushing a style or being part of an aesthetic group. I lose purchase on those surfaces.
You have published books with Edge, City Lights, and Wave Books, and Letter Machine Editions, and you have worked with worked with countless poets as the former Director of the Poetry Project, as the Poetry Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and as a guy who shows up at lots of readings. Why does engaging in a larger poetic community matter to you?
“The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan”
Courtesy
Partly out of the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of experiencing other people’s work live; partly because I need to give readings to find out what my work is doing, so it has seemed reasonably fair to be available to others as a body in the room when possible, or as an organizer when I was doing that heavily; & partly because I grew up with the reality and fairly transparent complexity of an active poetic/artistic community around me, and I felt some responsibility to it when I moved back to New York City in 1996 after having been away for seven years. It also seemed, at that time, like the various poetic circles in the city were socially and aesthetically cloistered, and I saw an opening towards bridging scenes that didn’t, on their own, seem as interesting to me as they could be if occasionally forced to relate more intimately. But I was also just lonely, too, I think. Editing for The Brooklyn Rail puts me in touch with work I might not otherwise get to, and that can be useful.
You grew up in a household dedicated to poetry, and both you and your brother are now poets. You married a poet. Most of your friends are poets. Do you ever want to get out?
No! Actually, more than half of my friends are not poets at this point. So it’s not that bad. & I’m one of those odd people who like the family. But I came to poetry on my own. I didn’t read it much growing up. I didn’t know what to do with myself when I left home and found myself in college in Buffalo in 1989. I got interested in journalism, and that led to writing about music. That led to keeping a notebook, starting in on weird little stories, and then one day in May of 1991, breaking a line instead of following some phrasing into a sentence. Breaking the line made this, like, electric opening in my brain, and I recognized on the spot that poetry was what I wanted to be doing. I felt, and still feel, called upon. I couldn’t otherwise assert myself. All the social stuff and readings and everything could fall away, and that feeling wouldn’t change. I’m sure no one wants to hear this kind of thing in this day and age, but that’s what it is for me.
LC control no.: no2003054471
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3602.E7635
Personal name heading:
Berrigan, Anselm
Birth date: 1972
Found in: Zero star hotel, c2002: t.p. (Anselm Berrigan)
The collected poems of Ted Berrigan, c2005: CIP t.p (Anselm
Berrigan) p. [52] (b. 1972 in Chicago)
Free cell, 2009: ECIP t.p. (Anselm Berrigan) data view
(former Poetry Project director ... son of Ted Berrigan
and Alice Notley)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
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Washington, DC 20540
Come In Alone
Publishers Weekly. 263.16 (Apr. 18, 2016): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Come In Alone
Anselm Berrigan. Wave (Consortium, dist.), $ 18 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-940696-29-4
Berrigan (Primitive State) dispenses with linearity in a perception-shuffling book that, on the fly, instructs its audience on how to read it. Composed entirely of margin-hugging, rectangular poems that can be read starting at any point and loop without end, this collection is a rare breakthrough in form. "I wanted to get hold of I," Berrigan writes in words circling the blank center of the page, "put it in the center of the space ghost because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side, I got to the anatomy & I feel myself almost getting flustered I really could never get hold of it since I have no preference or so called sense of it." Form aside, the language here will be familiar to Betrigan's readers. Figuration, abstraction, daily life, politics, and theory collide without respite, as Berrigan's alternately deadpan, ironically neo-romantic, and insistently heady tones switch on and off, phrase by phrase. What makes this book such a fascinating object is that Berrigan has conceived of a way for the physical book object to exist in a manner of which digital books may not be capable. As Berrigan's language loops on, endlessly recontextualized, what results is a kind of commentary though form, the creation of an expanse through physical limitation. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Come In Alone." Publishers Weekly, 18 Apr. 2016, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450361272&it=r&asid=4ecf90f448364fb8128f957ae8cc1412. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450361272
Notes from Irrelevance
Publishers Weekly. 258.30 (July 25, 2011): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Notes from Irrelevance
Anselm Berrigan. Wave (Consortium, dist.), $16 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-933517-54-4
Stirring cosmic observations and succinct "micro-meanings" in the same pot, Berrigan creates a single poem that reads like the manifesto of a poet who would never admit he's writing one. "I don't think it works," he says, "to/plead for a voice out of/the monolith to make/clear what you sense, feel, know to be happening." If we read this as a statement against finding one's voice in poetry via the Muse, elsewhere Berrigan is even more literal about his aesthetics: "On the/ question of influence/I seem to have forgotten/all the names, places,/objects, friends, failures,/experiences that might/ make up the requisite list." By Berrigan's own admission, then, he is "influenced by, potentially,/anything." This is proven throughout the poem, as the poet welcomes both the mundane and weirdly personal detritus of the age of information into his lines, touching on early termination fees and an anonymous comment he read about his father, poet Ted Berrigan, online. The poem serves as a snapshot of the complexity of day-to-day life, 2011-style. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Notes from Irrelevance." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2011, p. 32. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA262884775&it=r&asid=5530a7b6f70a431f5959d5c049126cad. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A262884775
Free Cell
Publishers Weekly. 256.42 (Oct. 19, 2009): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Free Cell
Anselm Berrigan. City Lights (Consortium, dist.), $13.95 (120p) ISBN 978-0-87286-502-0
Berrigan's fourth collection, and the second volume in City Lights' new Spotlight Series, is composed of three poems or sequences. The first and longest, "Have a Good One," is an extended series of seemingly flippant personal and public observations ("Stop telling me/ I look tired.// I know what/ I look like.// Tell me/ how I feel"; "The problem of free will/ is not that it does or does not/exist, but that it's pointless") punctuated (or titled) with the phrase "Have a Good One," which appears at least once per page. Berrigan (Some Notes on My Programming) may have learned some of his disjunctive sprawl and spontaneity from his famous poet parents, Alice Notley and especially Ted Berrigan, but his poems have a kind of slacker cool and political awareness all his own: "You are// what your// record says// you are," he reminds. Next comes the book's only shortish poem, "Let Us Sample Protection Together," in which "The room stares back from its things." The book concludes with "To Hell with Sleep," another skittery romp through Berrigan's associative haze. While he isn't reinventing poetry, he is carrying his parents' tradition of poetry as a way of life, a community, proudly into the 21st century. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Free Cell." Publishers Weekly, 19 Oct. 2009, p. 39. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA210440942&it=r&asid=bfd8983cda7edf15e5627fd24711abcb. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A210440942
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Publishers Weekly. 252.42 (Oct. 24, 2005): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan EDITED BY ALICE NOTLEY, ANSELM BERRIGAN AND EDMUND BERRIGAN. Univ. of California, $49.95 (758p) ISBN 0-520-23986-5
More than 20 years in preparation, this is a major volume of 20th-century American poetry, bringing together everything that the Providence, R.I.-born Berrigan (1934-1983) would or could have published. Notley (Disobedience, etc.), Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons (both poets) have meticulously re-edited Berrigan's books--he took the book as a real unit of composition--incorporating late drafts and fixes, and carefully re-formatting his very intentionally spaced open field verse. Just as importantly, they have sifted out the chaff from the super-productive Berrigan's oeuvre. Most poetry readers know The Sonnets (1964), Berrigan's brilliant adaptation of Burroughsian cut-ups; they are as fresh, funny and targeted today as were 40 years ago. Fewer, though, know the 11 other books (and many more chapbooks) he published, each one deepening the addresses to friends, lovers, strangers and places (especially New York) around which he structured some very complex, very beautiful, often very delirious and very funny quarrels with people and language, with time and with space. Berrigan was a notoriously charismatic reader, teacher and participant in the community that developed around the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church; his persona has been cited as often as his poems. This book closes the gap once and for all. (Nov. 14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2005, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138178188&it=r&asid=acdb65b13ea7e79a3b9e9dbf098ee19c. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138178188
Ted Berrigan. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Michael Leddy
World Literature Today. 80.6 (November-December 2006): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Ted Berrigan. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Alice Notley, ed., with Anselm Berrigan & Edmund Berrigan. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2005. ix + 749 pages. $49.95. ISBN 0-520-23986-5
LABELS IN POETRY are seldom helpful and usually reductive. In recent American poetry, perhaps no label has been as reductive as that of "second-generation New York School," applied to poets as various as Joseph Ceravolo, Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, and Ted Berrigan. But things change. Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson are no longer "the Black Mountain poets" (were they ever?), and the publication of The Collected Poems affirms Ted Berrigan's identity, not as a belated follower or would-be member of a "school" but as, simply, an important and innovative American poet. Berrigan's poems present a distinctive voice that is the product of both appropriation and invention; no American poet is as adept at collaging found materials into a voice of his own. His work offers verbal wit, painterly abstraction, and tender pathos in ever-varying proportions.
The Collected Poems is the most recent in a series of posthumous publications--previously unpublished poems, interviews, presentations, journal excerpts, a new edition of The Sonnets, and a Selected Poems (see WLT 69:2, p. 364). The Collected Poems brings into focus all the elements of Berrigan's art: the dense bricolages of The Sonnets, the serial lyric reportage of "Tambourine Life" and "Things to Do in Providence," the domestic comedy of "Small Role Felicity" and "This Will Be Her Shining Hour," the eloquent sorrow of "Red Shift" and "A Certain Slant of Sunlight," the funny aphorisms and notations of the poems of "500 American Postcards." This volume lets one see Berrigan's movement into the possibilities of a poetic community: he begins on his own, reconstructing his early unsatisfactory poems with words lifted from elsewhere to make the rich and strange textures of The Sonnets. That landmark work enacts a poetics of poverty, the poet using available leftovers and borrowing whatever else is needed to make his poems. In Berrigan's final poetry project, "500 American Postcards," poems often begin with a phrase or line contributed, at Berrigan's invitation, by another poet (Steve Carey, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, among others), with Berrigan now at home in a community of like-minded, generous peers.
The Collected Poems, too, is the work of a community: it has the unusual distinction of being a family affair, edited by the poet Alice Notley (Berrigan's second wife) and their poet-sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan. Notley's notes illuminate the poems as no one else's could, often revealing the unexpected and unlikely origins of poems. (Who would have thought that "A Certain Slant of Sunlight" began with a word list and an assignment to write a poem using one word in each line?)
In Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, Keith Abbott recalls Ted Berrigan in a conversation about Frank O'Hara and legacies: "I want a Collected Ted Berrigan next, right after Frank's, just like his. I don't want to die but I do want that book." Twenty-three years after Ted Berrigan's death, the range of his poetic accomplishment is finally coming into view.
Michael Leddy
Eastern Illinois University
Leddy, Michael
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Leddy, Michael. "Ted Berrigan. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan." World Literature Today, vol. 80, no. 6, 2006, p. 70+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA155824418&it=r&asid=028e2c84be517132c0b616747feff20b. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A155824418
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
Jordan Davis
Chicago Review. 52.2-4 (Autumn 2006): p353.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Chicago
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/
Full Text:
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 749pp. $49.95
This is a story about a man who decided to be a poet. It took him ten years. First he met some other people who had decided to be poets and artists. Then he taught himself how to write by stealing other poets' lines. Then, having learned how to write (and incidentally creating a literary movement) he decided to write a major poem. Having achieved these goals, he started over, seeking a new shapeliness for his poetry. All the while, he sought and found many unexpected answers to his main concern: the problem of how to live.
Ted Berrigan was born on November 15, 1934 in Providence, Rhode Island, a few months after his parents were married. He served briefly in Korea, then studied at the University of Tulsa on the GI Bill. In Tulsa, he fell in with, or, depending on who tells the story, took over, a group of teenagers publishing a literary journal, The White Dove Review, which was printing work by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac. Within a few years Berrigan and many of his younger friends (including Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard) had moved en masse to New York.
Berrigan believed that becoming a poet was as intense an undertaking as becoming a doctor:
Survival is the hardest test for a poet [...] now, you can do various
other things for a living and write poetry, but it's very difficult to
do anything else much in that six or seven years when you are trying
to learn. When you are doing your pre-med and med school, you know,
your internship, so to speak. I mean, those people don't work, do
they, when they are doing that?
In New York, Berrigan supported himself by writing papers for undergraduates at Columbia. He read everything he could find, stealing books to read and then selling them for food and movie money. He wrote poems and composed a master's thesis on "The Problem of How to Live as Dealt with in Four Plays by George Bernard Shaw." One weekend he went to New Orleans, where he fell in love with and married a young woman named Sandra Alper. Her family disapproved and committed their daughter to a mental institution in Florida. Berrigan rescued her and, fleeing zigzag across the country, returned to New York. In the middle of this, he started writing, or as he put it, building, sonnets.
"I wanted to provide in The Sonnets a lot of material for footnotes so that scholars for one thousand years could check everything out," Berrigan once said, echoing Joyce. Scanning the annotations in the present edition, it's clear he was only half-joking. Alice Notley's introduction to the Collected Poems provides one of the best accounts of Berrigan's sources and methods (along with Padgett's "On The Sonnets" and Berrigan's "Sonnet Workshop"). Beyond Shakespeare, the work had various inspirations: William Carlos Williams's indictment of the form; Berrigan's discovery of Dadaist collage; Pound's Cantos; and Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. The notes--assembled by Notley and her two sons with Berrigan, Anselm and Edmund--illuminate many of the work's obscurities, from the "piercing pince-nez" (of Ezra Pound) and "dim frieze" (of Columbia's Butler Library) of the first sonnet through the Tempest allusion, O'Hara misprision, and private referents in the last of the seventy-nine poems.
While Berrigan's sonnets don't usually present the expected characteristics of the form (most notably rhyme), they do update the traditional expectation that the proposition in the first eight lines will be resolved in the last six. Berrigan's poems move rhetorically from descriptions of external phenomena in the octave to descriptions of internal noumena in the sestet. Throughout the sequence, he uses the volta, the turn from proposition to resolution, to shift momentum by disclosing the poem's autobiographical context at erratic intervals, creating a kind of pulp detective poetry.
The Sonnets can be, and certainly have been, read as an attempt to make the Cantos cohere, or as the strong precursor of Lyn Hejinian's recursive autobiography. But it's more in keeping with Berrigan's plagiarism-as-homage to see the work as a courtly exercise in personal canon formation. By the second poem in the sequence, he had begun quoting from John Ashbery, and quotations from and allusions to Ashbery, O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch pervade the work. Berrigan was a nimble thief who found new uses for the lines and processes he stole. From Ashbery's title "How Much Longer Shall I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher" he dropped the "Sepulcher" to introduce a kind of billboard in the middle of Sonnet II. From Koch's "You Were Wearing," Berrigan chose a "John Greenleaf Whittier tie-clip," and he turned Whittier into the running gag of Sonnet XXXI. And in Sonnet XXXVI, Berrigan's handily imitated O'Hara's I-do-this-I-do-that style:
It's 8:54 AM. in Brooklyn it's the 28th of July and
it's probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I'm
in Brooklyn I'm eating English muffins and drinking
pepsi and I'm thinking of how Brooklyn is New
York city too how odd I usually think of it as
something all its own like Bellows Falls like Little
Chute like Uijongbu
I never thought on the Williams-
burg bridge I'd come so much to Brooklyn
just to see lawyers and cops who don't even carry
guns taking my wife away and bringing her back
No
and I never thought Dick would be back at Gude's
beard shaved off long hair cut and Carol reading
his books when we were playing cribbage and
watching the sun come up over the Navy Yard
across the river
I think I was thinking when I was
ahead I'd be somewhere like Perry street erudite
dazzling slim and badly loved
contemplating my new book of poems
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough
In late winter 1963, while Berrigan was writing The Sonnets, his work drew the small notoriety of a censorship scandal. Padgett, an editor of Columbia's literary journal, gathered some of his friends' work, including three poems by Berrigan, for publication in the Review. Noticing the word fuck in the proofs, the publication's business manager alerted the Dean of Students, who, hypersensitive to appearances, passed the issue along to the already gray eminence Jacques Barzun. His pronouncement: the poems were "absolute trash." The administration gave the editors an ultimatum: withdraw the poems or be expelled. In response, Padgett and six others resigned from the journal and published the issue that April, by mimeograph, as The Censored Review. The story made the New York Post, Padgett appeared on the local TV news, and the 800-copy run of the review "sold out in about five minutes." Not one to let an opportunity pass, Berrigan started a mimeo of his own: C was printed monthly at first, on legal-sized paper, and distributed by mail to artists and writers the editors admired.
"FUCK COMMUNISM." Berrigan began "Tambourine Life" with yippie Paul Krassner's famous bumper sticker centered between the margins, the most visceral opening of any poem since Beowulf. A combination of otherworldly surliness and right-baiting obscenity, the line announces Berrigan's intention to capitalize on the attention he amassed in The Sonnets. He writes of "the snatches of virgins" and a character who "gets his gat and plugs his dad."
"What kind of person wrote this poem?" Berrigan asks. "That's really what you mean when you say who is speaking." In "Tambourine Life," Berrigan aims to make the answer as complicated and entertaining as possible. In the sixty-nine sections of "Tambourine Life," Berrigan's comic voice ranges from sarcasm to mock arrogance to deadpan absurdity, while his sincere plain-spoken voice is given over to adjectives such as lovely, beautiful, marvelous, and great. Oscillating between irony and sincerity in this way generates energy, a kind of alternating current of personal electromagnetism. The sections connect by an associative logic that is obvious in hindsight and impossible to anticipate. The section after "The Russian Revolution" opens with a line from a Patchen poem: "The apples are red again in Chandler's valley." In case the reader misses the connection, Berrigan riffs on the salient word: "redder for what happened there // never did know what it was / never did care." And so it goes, as Berrigan develops the persona he hinted at in The Sonnets.
Released from the idealized self of The Sonnets, Berrigan writes memorably about subjects including love, Band-Aids, the code of the west, animals, children's books, the incipient protest movement, sex, parenthood, poetry, money, more sex, and truth. Then, suddenly, death appears:
Now
in the middle of this
someone I love is dead
and I don't even know
"how"
I thought she belonged to me
How she filled my life when I felt empty!
How she fills me now!
Just four sections from the end, these lines transform the poem's giddy romp to an instantly sober, though no less electrified, carpe diem. This is the first of Berrigan's many remarkable elegies: "Ann Arbor Elegy," "Frank O'Hara," "People Who Died," "Memorial Day," "Old-fashioned Air," and "Last Poem."
While the discoveries of The Sonnets influenced later poets mainly on the theoretical level, the technique of "Tambourine Life" appears to have had an immediate practical effect. Of the poem, Kenneth Koch wrote, "It seemed in a way ahead of everything--absolutely casual, ordinary, and momentary-seeming [...] full of buoyancy, sweetness, and high spirits."
A masterpiece, though, can be a burden. In Berrigan's case, the temptation to repeat the formula must have been constant. Collected Poems includes several variations on "Tambourine Life." Memorial Day, a book-length elegiac poem written in collaboration with Anne Waldman, shares its episodic structure. The long sequence Train Ride accumulates its episodes over the course of a trip from New York to Providence, declaring "Out the Window / is / Out to Lunch!!" and "We could / bitch all our mutual / friends!!" The short, often terrific poems in Berrigan's 1970 collection In the Early Morning Rain sometimes seem like disconnected sections of another "Tambourine Life":
Someone who loves me calls me
& I just sit, listening
Someone who likes me wires me
to do something. I'll do it
Tomorrow.
Like the original, these later poems aim for pleasing shapes and statements, but the magic ratio of surliness to charm sometimes slips out of balance. The energy is off, and I suspect Berrigan knew it. He once said:
I'm not too interested in a collected works in which every poem is a
totally terrific and wonderful masterpiece, 'cause that's inhuman. I
like books in which every poem is a masterpiece. It's the John Ashbery
way to try and have a book in which every poem is really outstanding
and terrific. It's the Allen Ginsberg way not to worry about that, but
to get in everything that you have around that time that is related
and is above a certain level, that is, however fragmentary, or
overdone, alive!
Like many poets then and now, Berrigan did stints teaching writing. (In order, he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop--where he divorced Alper and married his student Notley--Michigan; Yale; Buffalo; Northeastern Illinois; Essex; Naropa; and the Stevens Institute of Technology.) Berrigan, however, didn't accept apprentices. As he pointed out in a talk at Naropa, "You can study under teachers, masters, add a little tradition to that word--but every individual has to make their own poems, their own story, make their own songs. You can't make perfect replicas of your master's works, so you flunk." The bodhisattva mode Berrigan embraced as pedagogy doesn't look likely to overturn the anxious correctional system Berrigan decried, at least not anytime soon. But changing the system single-handedly was probably never the goal; along with Krassner's "FUCK COMMUNISM," "Tambourine Life" also quotes Damon Runyon's "Get the money."
In her introduction, Notley mentions that the chief textual question she faced while assembling the Collected Poems was "what were we to do about the book-length sequence Easter Monday?" Written between 1972 and 1977, all the poems in the sequence appeared in print during Berrigan's lifetime, mainly in the collections Red Wagon and Nothing for You. Other poems appeared in various chapbooks. A series with the same title and bracket dates, but with a substantially different table of contents, is the next-to-last section of So Going Around Cities (1980). Berrigan did not settle on the final selection of forty-six poems until shortly before his death in 1983. Their appearance, in the Collected Poems, in this final arrangement is, along with the volumes excellent notes and introduction, the main reason readers ought to get their hands on the book immediately.
The Easter Monday poems have a character almost entirely different from anything else he wrote. A translation from Leopardi would appear to serve as their summary:
Your movements are really
Worth nothing nor is the world
Worth a sigh. Life is bitterness
And boredom; and that's all. The world's a mudhole.
It's about time you shut up.
There is no pull or push in these poems, no attempt to woo the reader or go for the laugh. Easter Monday is bleakly pure in its attention to ordinary life and the potential for despair, chaos, and anonymous death. A shot rings out in the third line of the first poem. The third poem ends with "cancer of the spine," the fourth with "And I'm the man who killed him." "Old-fashioned Air" ends with "And we are back where we started from, Lee, you & me, alive & well!" The poem was written, the notes reveal, after Berrigan learned of his friend Lee Crabtree's suicide.
If The Sonnets and "Tambourine Life" are bids for literary posterity and popular appeal, Easter Monday is born of spiritual ambition. Berrigan has stopped seeking approval. He has let go of his anxiety about what he expected of his life and his poetry:
God lies down
Here. Rattling of a shot, heard
From the first row. The president of the United States
And the Director of the FBI stand over
a dead mule. "Yes, it is nice to hear the fountain
With the green trees around it, as well as
People who need me." Quote Lovers of speech unquote. It's a nice
thought
& typical of a rat. And, it is far more elaborate
Than expected. And the thing is, we don't need that much money.
Berrigan, remarried and a new father again, honored his responsibilities ("People who need me") by setting achievable goals and clearing out the unnecessary--the unnecessary, in this case, being the enormous public persona (equal parts W.C. Fields and W.B. Yeats, as one friend put it) that he spent the previous decade assembling. That persona returns at the end of the sequence, in the anthology piece "Whitman in Black," only after Berrigan has purged all attempts to entertain and impress. In "Newtown," "The Ideal Family awaits distribution on / The Planet." "Swinburne & Watts-Dunton" is a semi-opaque account of steering himself back from dissolution, "Soviet Souvenir" an anxious reckoning with love. The renunciations culminated in "Narragansett Park," the first poem in the series written at 101 St. Mark's Place, Berrigan's last residence in New York:
The major planets are shifting (shivering?) but out of my natural
habit,
Self-kindness,
I play them
something Nashville something quality
and there is the too easy knell of the games chapel
The tempting scornful opposite
Cathedral virus and goof immunization:
The curves of the Spirit are not very interested in the conquest of
matter.
Color is the idiot's delight. I'm the curves, what's the matter? or
I'm the matter, the curves nag:
Call it Amber, it doesn't ride nor take to rider
Amber it doesn't make me want to pray, it makes me see color
as we fail to break through our clasped hands.
The whole is marked by the excitement and frustration of a working mind. Berrigan takes solace in the intimacy of "self-kindness" and "clasped hands," abandoning modernism's preoccupation with ideas and things for something like no feelings but in choices.
For Berrigan, the art of living was not a matter of extending the greatest average happiness over the longest possible lifespan (moral miserism). Rather, it was a matter of living in his feelings and those of everyone around him--of approaching as much and as often as possible a pure excited state in which a thing noticed becomes not a new toy but part of the furniture, equipment for living. What this meant for his poetics was that a line had to maintain a relation to the lines around it, as if the lines themselves were in conversation. A good line could be expected to recur in other conversations, sometimes as a reproach, sometimes as a remembrance, and sometimes just as a sound.
Davis, Jordan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Davis, Jordan. "The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan." Chicago Review, vol. 52, no. 2-4, 2006, p. 353+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA154563763&it=r&asid=0d5b2640cfb11dcdaff23a8b13ea1450. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A154563763
Free Cell
Internet Bookwatch. (Nov. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Free Cell
Anselm Berrigan
City Lights Publishers
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
9780872865020 $13.95 www.citylights.com
Free Cell is the latest collection of free-verse poetry from writing instructor and dedicated poet Anselm Berrigan. The words themselves revel in the freedom to assume any shape in this smoothly rolling collection of musings and insights. The natural flow of the verbal rhythm serves as the perfect counterpoint to the thought-provoking commentary in this excellent collection. "Frailty puckers up to present": Frailty puckers up to present / gibberish in the agri-fab / spamways, helicopter can't / swim, can't junk tribal / penance for living off natty / whims so many pairs of / pants deny in fever's dash. // The routine bites hard, ooze / a rapt factory heir teething / sway, ye olde time cleaners / spun off a granted project / of abeyance in the deep / trim that art savors, bent- / like, creaming dabbles."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Free Cell." Internet Bookwatch, Nov. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA212102382&it=r&asid=74114238469b30191523cd5912a91b62. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A212102382
Come In Alone
Image
Poetry
Anselm Berrigan
Wave Books
May 2016
ISBN-13: 9781940696294
Paperback
96pp
$18.00
Ryo Yamaguchi
I hate to focus so much on form, but in this review of Anselm Berrigan’s Come In Alone, form will take center stage. Or more accurately: form will frame the way we encounter Berrigan’s electric and vocally driven sensibilities. Because the very first thing you will notice when you open this book is the simple but profoundly innovative design, which runs all of the text as a border around an otherwise empty page. (You can look at sample pages here at the publisher’s website.)
This format might initially strike readers as gimmicky, but for as much as we talk about the space between the lines, about emptiness as a conditioning feature of poetics, I’m surprised I’ve never really encountered (even in the worlds of concrete or visual poetry) this simply conceived but radically reorienting layout, which does so much to give emptiness its primacy. Berrigan’s poems immediately force the reader to confront this emptiness as a powerful aesthetic force, and that alone is worth attention.
What the poems do after that, though, is even richer. When we first look at the page we don’t really get it, but then we catch the lines, literally in our peripheral vision, like little flashes of motion at the edges of our sight. This kind of flitting movement—compelled by the layout—commands Berrigan’s syntax as well, which pulses with vocal hisses and stutters across elisions, tmeses, abbreviations, slang, and other syllabic alterations. Here is an example (a note on citations: I will use arrows to indicate the margins on which the text is running):
[↑] sh sh sh sh sh [→] in the drone, the forensic archival feast, magnanimous hemorrhoid triumphal, overly, overly pre-[↓] sent, joy a mask, eco a mask, or or or or hepatitic imagination of used élan begets sentiment to be officious, a thing to be done [←] dinotopic. . . .
These lines are, no doubt, aurally driven, and “driven” is really an apt word—once you commit to the periphery and get comfortable there, you find yourself driving these poems, turning the book like a steering wheel in one continuous circle as you read along each margin. I highly suggest that you read this—as I did—in the most public and crowded places that you can; the profit in quizzical looks is quite satisfying.
But drive as you might, you never reach your destination: the poems never definitively end, instead cycling in perpetuity like a tape loop. You can stop reading whenever you want, but it never really feels like an end. Likewise, you never really begin these poems. You are compelled to start at the top left corner, but often that position is smack in the middle of a clause (though many of the poems do have a natural beginning there, often the clause starting just before, like a small grace note up the very top of the left margin. The effect is like winding back ever so slightly, then springing forward into the rotation of the poem):
[↑] so many [→] more people than today, there goes scale again, ape on fly in space, where here so little’s [↓] known, to a maybe’s delight, “my apple pie kicks ass,” wanting all gift-giving to come down on socks, plus giving up planning [←] to take over a world. . . .
Berrigan’s lines can be challengingly elliptical and his clauses densely packed, creating a difficulty that is exacerbated, no doubt, by the range of his ingredients, whether powerfully deep images, snippets of conversation or casual thoughts, memories, things overheard, and sometimes just fusillades of words and concepts (all irregularly punctuated, I might add). The effect can often be a delightful noise of too-many-channels-at-once, but it is also reminiscent of the wanderings of familiar New York poets like Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. And fairly often a more present signal does worm through, Berrigan clinging onto a thought, either as an inexorable throughline that makes up an entire poem, or in something a little more rhythmic, like this anaphoric example:
[↑] & it’s more fun to be a shambles [→] of a person, with or without character, than it used to be, now it’s more fun to be Brigadoon [↓] than it used to be, & it’s more fun to forestall doom than it used to be, it’s more fun to care specifically than it used to [←] to be. . . .
We can see in this unevenness—in the combination of both the elliptically random and the tenaciously held—a conceptual tension between evanescence and sustain. Formally, these poems remind me of a piece by the artist Bruce Nauman, “Going Around the Corner Piece,” in which you walk around a giant cube wired with video cameras and monitors at every corner in such a way that every time you turn one of them, you see yourself from behind in the next monitor as you slip around the corner—i.e., you are always watching yourself slip out of view.
These poems work in the same way. This stream-of-conscious is constantly banking around right angles—thoughts are constantly slipping out of view (albeit they can slip anywhere in these poems)—and yet there is this cumulative looping effect, an infinite spinning (again, around an utterly blank page) as of a platter of data or the incantations of a religious text. Berrigan hints self-reflexively at this balance (“elimination” and “holding”) in the last poem, which functions as a kind of ars poetica:
[←] it did one thing for me: eliminate composition, arrangements, relationships [↑] time, all this silly talk about the line, voice and form because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of I put it in the center [→] of the space ghost. . .
This is a highly innovative collection that deeply understands the form it has chosen, and it is definitely worth your attention beyond mere curiosity.
Review Posted on May 02, 2016 Last modified on May 04, 2016
Come In Alone by Anselm Berrigan
Reviewed By Patrick James Dunagan
February 19th, 2016
Anselm Berrigan has taken it upon himself to write a book of poetry well beyond any conventional parameters. Come in Alone operates outside of whatever categorical box you might attempt to place it in, whether that may be classical or contemporary, academic or experimental. This is undoubtedly poetry but it’s not a book of poems in any conventional sense. That is to say, it is not composed of individual poems per se, yet at the same time it is not quite a book-length poem any more than it is a serial poem à la Jack Spicer. Neither is it conceptual poetry despite this being the likely first thought one might have for attempting to categorize it.
Berrigan has successfully defined his own one-shot lyric form. Flip through Come in Alone at a glance and you’ll see a lot what look to be blank pages. Every page in fact is a box of blank white space framed by a square border composed of one continuous “line” of poetry squaring back upon itself. The line has no ending and no beginning. There are no end-stops, such as periods, and there are no page numbers. Without any indication given as to where in the line one might start reading, it might seemingly just as well be anywhere. As the line turns at abrupt right angles moving around the page’s border, unless you’re comfortable reading text running sideways down a page, then upside down across the bottom, and sidewise back up, the only manageable way to read the line is to rotate the page in a clockwise motion. In other words, to begin reading turn the book any which way you like and open at will.
At first this may appear to be rather cheeky, perhaps even a cheap shot at following Ezra Pound’s dictum: “Make it New.” Keep reading, however! The realization soon dawns that indeed Berrigan pulls off something else entirely. He manages nothing less than a fresh approach towards a redefinition of how a lyrical line of poetry looks and operates upon the page. He’s busted out of the confines of the line break while not surrendering himself to the otherwise unavoidably confined terrain of the prose poem. There are few, if any, annoying bells and whistles, nothing too flashy or over-stylized. The language may best be characterized as a cross between stream-of-consciousness and found, or overheard, fragmentary hits from off the everyday conversation of sidewalk and cafe.
Here’s one of Berrigan’s lines from a page taken at random, the right angle turn at the four corners is indicated by the inserted “|”, I begin a few words in from the “top” left of the page:
“[…] she detects more than me, but she may detect more than I believe | I give off, a relationship to no, internal, speaking, I know will not to hope to feel so known, projecting, as with | living, but I want you to know, not so much to be, being that, no matter what surface climbs | up to ride along, it’s a good mess, I get it that way, out on the skirts, the we who lives with me, from the off-center | wheel but deep, no new, she detects [etc.]”
AB jpeg
This strange continuously looping line of poetry allows for an endless series of variable readings. It is clearly understandable at one level as a love lyric in which the speaker of the poem wrangles over the promises and wishes of romantic pursuit caught up amid the daily struggles of any relationship. As such it operates well within the lineage of the poet-lover’s plaint straight from Petrarch, Dante and the Troubadours on down to Thomas Wyatt continuing to the current day. Yet without clear sequential ordering and structure, any syntactical sense nonetheless remains arbitrary at best. The otherwise stuttering oddities in sections of the line, such as “I give off, a relationship to no, internal, speaking, I know,” rather than mar or distract only contribute towards making multiple possible readings available. What would otherwise be met as nonsensical if presented in a more traditional form gains persuasive merit and rewards successive readings.
Every one of Berrigan’s lines simultaneously collapses inward while continually expanding outward. They head nowhere and everywhere in an infinite advance. The structural unit comes down to the singular word or, at times, phrase. Individual words and phrases connect up with each other from across the expanse of white upon the center of the page. The more often you read each line the more the contents of that line provoke as the eye begins to shuffle and rearrange, pick up at different “beginnings” of the line, constantly seeking new readings and alternate realizations of what’s happening. No one word or phrase is unavoidably tied to any other. The reading order of any one line gets reversed, distorted. And yet no page is ever a mere jumble of nonsensical randomness. After all, these lines are borders framing the whiteness of the empty page. It would appear Berrigan is courting his readers, encouraging them to get to work filling in that empty space. The page becomes a mirror. Write your own way across it. Disappear into the language. Reading becomes writing, more alive with every word.
Square Deal: Anselm Berrigan’s ‘Come In Alone’
Jon CurleyJuly 9, 2016
The formal inventiveness of this new volume by Anselm Berrigan is satisfying and maddening. The latter reaction, as it turns out, is a satisfying one in relation to this work and many challenging works of art on and off the page. To clarify: Come In Alone challenges the prim verticality of the page when formatting lines with a compositional field pared into descending, rectilinear parts without much variation in shape. Does Berrigan adopt an anarchic, sprawling pattern for these poems, spilling and splaying lines and phrases here and there? Oh, no—even more jarringly, these poems resemble perfect squares at the perimeter of the page. This recognizable construction, however, winds up conferring even wilder aesthetic, discursive, and intellectual implications and enactments, offering multiple potential readings.
Even if Berrigan didn’t opt for this particular format, his lines reveal the proverbial heresy of being paraphrased and resist being quoted extensively, without mutilating his meaning(s) or undercutting his method. I shall quote very sparingly in light of the potential risk of mis-rendering what is stated, suggested, and/or diversely inferred. Because the experiential weirdness of reading this book is so bracing, let me give one example of a line that starts on one side of the page and moves to another side (beginning another line?), and then establish some questions regarding the practice of this singular poetry and where it leaves the reader.
Reading the top line on a page:
in the break there’s little light, enough to break, what that’s off remains , steering the no light
I follow it past the corner and down the right side:
I was working out on it, broken loose, not like I saw myself, the tools are cheap, as in available…
The textures here merge physical and personal space of the poem, the inner and outer, into a Beckettian kind of negation and distortion, simultaneously inventing and dismantling identity and context. What is being narrated is too shadowy and scattershot to crystallize comprehension. But here’s the rub: any expectation of an ultimate and coherent perspective is a dead-end; Berrigan wants to power-drive an omnium gatherum of attitudes, objects, and fleeting scenarios through multiply loaded, the provisional frames that are manipulated by the closed-circuit yet endlessly looping arrangement of the poemsof each page. These frames are themselves manipulated by the looping arrangement of the poems. If the squares are stable geometries they nonetheless occasion dizziness and bewilderment. The expository mischief is so infectious and engaging that, despite being confused I am also delighted, and I find myself readily capable of being in those mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts beloved by English Romantics and generated so ardently by zany American poets like Anselm Berrigan. If the reader requires a key for coming to terms with this kind of poetry, it’s that phrase quoted above: “what that’s off remains.” The remainder is the mystery; that which is “off” or eccentric, angled from clear paths of consciousness or representation, is both the means of perception and what is being perceived.
Come in Alone (1)
Since Berrigan is inclined to negate—“the no light” above, the “no memories in museums” in another poem, “the no ships of no space” in another, it is important to state what these poems are not doing: they are not stuttering, not slurring, not blending, not commenting, and not stating, but instead sifting the atoms, the very nature of things (Hail, Lucretius!) without naturalizing a stable, sustained apprehension of materials and without pinning anything down. There might be an approximation of Berrigan’s ars poetica in the final poem but I shall leave the reader to look there after a proper gallivant through this volume’s scattered scavenger hunt.
Come in Alone (2)
Onwards to those necessary questions that perhaps lead us to think inside Berrigan’s box(es): What is the possible structural logic of these kinds of poems? When the centerpiece of a page, of a poem, is a blank, how should we fill it in? Or do we leave it empty? Does that space symbolize the openness of play and possibility or the menace of meaning’s abyss? In order to read these poems, one has to rotate the book, making the book a vehicle you drive and making you the steering column (exquisitely accentuating the book’s materiality and complementing the very material concerns of its contents). Should we rotate necessarily to the right or left? What if the words were to fall from their positions, the centrifugal force generated by rotation and reading not strong enough to sustain them? Can we envision what new combinations and fragments might occur if the poems altered their configurations? Will the words fall and the corners break? Let us heap questions upon questions onto these shapes in our midst. Cryptically and compellingly, Come In Alone beckons you to enter it, take hold of it, spin it, and never leave it alone.
Anselm Berrigan’s Come In Alone (2016) is published by Wave Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.