simple notations, or my prognosis
I borrowed Anselm Berrigan’s Some Notes on My Programming from a friend. He’s a New York poet and Art Director of the The Poetry Project, someone I consider a fine pilot of language who emerged with a long family history of poetry and art. This book, the title of which screams of a fierce dig-n-find job into his language-mind, holds about 30 diverse pieces that tend to center around an introspective speaker or collective voice. I instinctively search for the appropriate file in which to throw his writing, but it won’t fit. It’s like trying to fit the offspring of a giraffe and a sparrow through an automated slaughter-house built for oinkers. There are clutching moments that turn sharply in voice and focus that drove me to view this introspective journey in relation to society and the world at large, like his piece ‘I know, it’s an instant movie.’
why do you sing to me like I’m you my gone and dead singer
o train I could run through a shocked public face
Or his ‘Anti-preening poem’:
trying to get past in private
in public one is fucked fluidly
This is a theme driven home frequently, danced upon and around and spliced between more distant and general images and satirical political messages like ‘The autobiography of Donald Rumsfeld.’ Movement on the page is used as irregularly, which makes the book as a whole feel like a well-measured and balanced array of thoughts taken from a snapshot of Berrigan’s mind. I have yet to encounter such a wide spectrum of voices, images and style crammed into one book like this. The overarching aura I come away with is a struggle between the freedom of identity and its inevitable return to residual, past, and external influences like the media and politics. The title poem struck the tip of this notion:
spread your hands to build a bubble around the latest
phony peace plan you’re looking sewn on again
This collection of poetry could be the unified interpretation of Berrigan vs. Berrigan’s mind vs. schizophrenic external universe, or it could just be
the need to produce
one word
after another
4 comments:
I think that this book of poems sounds particularly interesting. Mainly because it sounds like the author, Mr. Berrigan, has done something that is quite unique and very difficult. He has made complete confusion and change into something cohesive. What I mean is that its very hard to make a lot of very different poems sound like they belong to the same collected work, in this case a book, without it feeling slapped together or rather irrelevant. If Mr. Berrigan has in fact done this I would like to definitely read his work. I also like the idea of the individual verses what society, media, and politics make us into, or attempt to categorize us as.
Just wanted to stop in and say thanks for posting on my site. I wanted to respond to your comments, but I also don't want to hijack your blog.
But the long and short of it is that I agree with what you said, and yes, I have watched Feast...gory goodness.
I plan on adding you to my links, but probably won't get to it till tomorrow.
Cheers.
I'm plodding through (Berrigan’s mother) Alice Notley’s new book, Alma, or The Dead Women, and I think that putting the two in conversation with each other is interesting. Notley’s work defies categorization as well—feeling simultaneously like prose poetry, flash fiction, journal-writing, automatic writing, trance writing… written from the perspective of a heroin junkie (from what I can tell so far… the book is 345 pages long, it’s taking a bit of time to get through) the writing slips in and out of conversation and thought, dialogue and commentary. It has the fragmented feel of Berrigan’s work as well, using caesuras for visual pauses, softer line breaks—on a side note, I’ve noticed this a lot lately. Everyone from Carol Mirakove to Andrea Brady (of whom I noticed you spoke in an earlier post) is playing with this quite formal, alexandrin/Anglo-Saxon verse idea of the caesura—which I find intriguing. A few excerpts to whet your appetite:
from HEIGHT: CREEPER OKAY
everything they did a long time ago yesterday is absolved. It is the way it is today. You don’t have to do it what was planned yesterday. don’t go to Iraq because he says so leave it enter the gully of primary affection are covered with broken if you remember but not broken if you don’t it is just that.
…i don’t want you to have a feeling towards me. Alma says, let’s just nothing.
Beautiful. Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Alma-Dead-Women-Alice-Notley/dp/1887123725/ref=sr_1_1/002-2822964-3222467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177632530&sr=8-1
oh hell. the spacing of the poem excerpt got all mucked up because I don't understand html tags. well, you get the idea. and now you HAVE to check it out, as my lame attempt at transcription has failed.
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