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