I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems

From my introduction of Mei Mei Berssenbrugge in the 2008 Naropa Summer Writing Program:

Early on in my writing practice, I encountered Berssenbrugge’s poem, “The Retired Architect,” where she writes:

t“Now, when my work expresses loss or failure, I no longer say, get rid of that.”

It’s a surprisingly pragmatic sentence in a poetry that invokes the page as an alternate plane for inquiries into language, art and consciousness. At the level of the sentence, Berssenbrugge’s alogic operates in multiple dimensions of time by inviting us to experience simultaneity. In “Four Year Old Girl,” she writes:

t“Time enters, cell to cell of the line between yellow and bloodred in a petal.”

Time seems to enter into the cell of the line between the color of a petal, which in some way makes the poem a flower and each word, between yellow and bloodred in the light spectrum, a sort of sunset-orange.

Such kaleidoscopes happen often in Berssenbrugge’s poetry and are reminiscent of the morphogenetic field of time in developmental biology, but instead of cells responding to discrete biochemical signals leading to structures or organs, words are responding within the mutable units of the sentence leading to the poem’s multiple body.

Now, when my work expresses loss or failure, I no longer say, get rid of that.

Berssenbrugge, like so many poets of her generation, investigates perception; also the relationships among world (matter); image (thought, art)and symbol(word,name). Early on, her poetry becomes discursive, long-lined; almost prose. It concerns itself with light, color, landscape, bodies, shadows, in short, artists' materials. I like the floating almost fog-like consciousness of many of the poems collected here (indeed, one poem is titled Fog); they permeate, insinuate but don’t exactly locate or substantiate. In many ways, the exact opposite or complement of mathematical precision, yet steeped in notions of biology, geology, and astrophysics. Her poetry has an astronomical ambiance. It floats between earth and sky, always located elsewhere yet coming to ground. In a way, it resembles light itself, neither here nor there but transiting through, moving onwards and outwards, away, never returning unless reflected (in the mirror). Memory also plays an important role in Berssenbrugge's poetry, but hers is not a journalistic memory that records experience but rather memory as the agency that holds the world intact (in an image).
Another of Berssenbrugge’s preoccupations is space, its arrangement and ordering; the eye’s rearrangement of space; also the spatial (and thus, emotional) relations between one thing and another. Where something is placed or occurs is consequential, since it determines or at least affects how the eye of the I “sees” it. Space and perspective affect the intensity, dimension and proximity of thoughts/emotions.
Intriguingly, Berssenbrugge’s poetry manages to be ungraspable (and in this, quasi-hallucinatory) yet, at the same time, grounded and material. Although I often have no idea what her poems exactly mean, a phrase will engender a notion or an experience in my mind, so that in some indefinable way, I know what she’s talking about.

How badly do I WANT Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (to be my best friend)? SOOOOOOOO badly.

Those earlier collections are hard to get your little mitts on, and this New and Selected shows her work from over 30 years and nine collections. Her long lines and precise diction gives her abstract philosophical moments grounding through images. My oh my how I want to be her sometimes. That's all for now. Read it. Love it.

I Love Artists brings together a selection of poems from eight of Berssenbrugge's previous collections, including: n  Summits Move With The Tiden, n  Random Possessionn, n  The Heat Birdn, n  Empathyn, n  Sphericityn, n  Endocrinologyn, n  Four-Year-Old Girln, and n  Nestn
In addition, this selection includes a number of new poems...

From n  Summits Move With The Tiden (1974)...

Tang tang tang tang tang tang tang
ting ting ting ting ting
I eat a goat

bite into the flesh
of the spirit of the island

brown-eyed spirit flies
into emptiness
like an empty goat skull

odor of sea shells.

- Aegean, pg. 3

From n  Random Possessionn (1979)...

My great-grandfather dozed after drinking
hot liwuor in his dark room full of books
When she entered to wake him without knocking
as she did every night being the first grandchild
he was dead. One fur sleeve touched the floor
Once he carried her in his big sleeve through
cold halls to the kitchen where they were burning
straw. His daughter took her smelling of wormwood
behind the fireplace to feed. It wasn't the same robe
he died in, bu the same colour and cloth. My mother
really can't remember the smell of lynx, herbs
against moths, nor the slowness of his step
which must have been told.

- Chronicle, pg. 6

From n  The Heat Birdn (1983)...

A critic objects to their "misterian" qualities
I look it up and don't find it, which must relate
to the mysteres in religions. Stepping
across stones in the river, which covers
my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle
the meadow to gain height. There is a din
of big wings. A crow loops over and over
me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing
by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird
I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called
an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap
like old asphalt and white stones dumped

- The Heat Bird, 1, pg. 15

From n  Empathyn (1989)...

I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living objects and persons you use take on,
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself.
First the table is the table. In blue light
or in electric light, it has no pathos. Then light separates
from the human content, a violet-coloured net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet ice plant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.

Such emotions are interruptions in landscape and in logic
brought on by a longing for direct experience, as if her memory of experience
were the trace of herself. Especially now, when things have been flying apart in all directions,
she will consider her hotel lobby the inert state of a form. It is the location
of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doors are the relation state,
space behind them being a ground of water or the figure of water. Now,
she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about them into a thought
in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside
the elevator via a blue Cadillac into a long tracking shot. You linger
over your hand at the table. The light becomes a gold wing on the table. She sees
opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinite,
but it is a style that has got the future wrong.

- Texas, pg. 26-27

From n  Sphericityn (1993)...

I did not know beforehand what would count for me as a new colour. Its beauty is an analysis
of things I believe in or experience, but seems to alter events very little. The significance of a bird
flying from grapes in a store relates to the beauty of the colour of the translucency of grapes.
There is a space among some objects on a table that reminded her of a person, the way the bird reminded her,
a sense of the ideal of the space she would be able to see. Beauty can look like this around objects.
A plastic bag on a bush, moving slightly, makes an alcove, a glove or mist, holding the hill.
Time can look like this. The plane of yourself separates from the plane of space between objects,
an ordered succession a person apprehends, in order to be reminded.

- Ideal, 1, pg. 65

From n  Endocrinologyn (1997)...

The bird watches a man and woman dance. He touches her stomach. There's circulation around her
in intercapillary space, empty or hollow, in relation to organs. A virus transfers firefly genes
to a tobacco plant. The plant glows in the dark. How much evolution derives from "something in the air,"
not a square of light above a niche in a white wall. Light, your intestines. Fluid, lines of light. As if,
when you think about something, it already has a frame that's a priori. Think before that moment, freedom is inside there.
Think before the man and woman, their freedom of an animal among silvery trees. Which trunks light hits is an endocrine
permutation, a state of being or a physical state. Hormones are molecules, material, invisible. Their flow is random,
mesh through which a body is sensed, not an image. The form of her body is important,
as how she is here, though there's no physical evidence of her physical suffering.

- Endocrinology, pg. 68

From n  Four-Year-Old Girln (1998)...

The "genotype" is her genetic constitution.
The "phenotype" is the observable expression of the genotype as structural and biochemical traits.
Genetic disease is extreme genetic change, against a background of normal variability.
Within the conventional unit we call subjectivity due to individual particulars, what is happening?
She believes she is herself, which isn't complete madness, it's belief.
The problem is not to turn the subject, the effect of the genes, into an entity.
Between her and the displaced gene is another relation, the effect of meaning.
The meaning she's conscious of is contingent, a surface of water in an uninhabited world, existing as our eyes and ears.
You wouldn't think of her form by thinking about water.
You can go in, if you don't encounter anything.
Though we call heavy sense impressions stress, all impression creates limitation.
I believe opaque inheritance accounts for the limits of her memory.
The mental impulse is a thought and a molecule tied together, like sides of a coin.
A girl says sweetly, it's time you begin to look after me, so I may seem lovable to myself.
She's inspired to change the genotype, because the cell's memory outlives the cell.
It's memory that builds some matter around itself, like time.

- The Four Year Old Girl, 1, pg. 83

From n  Nestn (2003)...

Increasingly in our world, forgiveness is asked for, granted, withheld, face-to-face or below the surface, like low combustion, and I need to elucidate the chain of oxidation.

You fill around the open space of our being here, tensile welds, not empty in the sense, a weld yields.

The pathetic story is removed from calculation.

Yet, banality in identifying with others is no cause for pathos to dissolve.

So, I continue to calculate my house, its significance as a holding place for something to look at (image, word), building would illustrate.

I saw, when a building falls, interior remains interior.

Then, individuals acquire that same size.

Also, the innateness of being a witness annexes size, by seeing putting you next to.

I mean, immense size.

One folds in and re-opens to outside, not "as if" building for someone afraid of heights, who strains long, structural tresses of light, trying to wear out an image.

- Safety, pg. 125

From New Poems...

I go to her house and walk with her as she draws me or knits, so it's not one-on-one exactly, blue tattooed stars on her feet.

I pull the knitted garment over my head to my ankles.

Even if a detail resists all significance or function, it's not useless, precisely.

I describe what could happen, what a person probably or possibly does in a situation.

Nothing prevents what happens from according with what's probable, necessary.

A chance occurrence is remarkable, when it appears to happen by design.

- I Love Artists, 1, pg. 129

from Irises

You place sixteen girls in a meadow and always fill it. They're everyone, the world, implicit promise.
Her image of you, a transparency on her desire, is like a contact print of irises on film.
Their shallow space implies expansion within it of irises and shadows against a blue wall.
So, she proposes a soul of fine-grained material, in order to hold this promise,
like ghosts above a pond taking on heat, blurring its register over itself. Remembering
an insect would be, as if you looked into a shallow box of insects and their shadows.
If I dream I see light on a new bud in the woods, this is feeling used as thought,
beautiful because of my attempt to contain it.

This person is incorrigible in how things seem to her, that the body is responsible
for actions we share with brutes, for example: reflex, light reflected from a wolf
in the eyes of a sheep exciting flight. If feeling is thinking, insecurity accompanying
her flight has no parallel in a sheep. Her feeling for a fog of wild cherry in wet woods
is an appearance. Its reality is exhausted by how the fog seems. A screen of dogwood
on a ridge, like a person in front of blue mountains, can appear sinister, implicitly
shadow and breath. Her sheer imagining above the pond is like blood in a dragonfly wing,
because some blood must flow in a wing that appears to be glass. Girls fill the stage.
For a still moment, we see the world as implicit promise, something human that leaves the body at death and goes off on its own. The more wispy the mind, as at the green edge
of a dogwood blossom, the more fit to catch sight of such an invisible entity as “parallel,”
its distinct substance capable of having all mountains thought away and still being around.

Sun lights a man walking out a green door and the scale of him against the door.
How sunlight fills the apple tree is how the body carries the weight of appearances
to her.
When her feeling about his feeling for her goes, his appearance becomes very heavy.
Because something human will leave the body, the beauty, as of proportions between leaves
proceeding backward from the growing point of a vine, acquires its privilege from one who feels it,
not beauty's actual transparency. The transparency of a leaf against the size it will attain
along any vector of the stem, like iris shadows on a wall, has the fluidity of a veil,
not opaque
size, nor relative fluidity, as of a green petal to a crimson petal, a child turned wrong inside her.

*

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is one of my favorite poets, a poet whose work you really have to sit with and be prepared to spend days on a single poem. I think the title of the collection could have been better, could have come from another piece, but this is otherwise a great, full collection to spend some time with.

With the obvious exception of Transtromer, I think I just don't like collections very much?

No one digresses with such restraint compassion and no one meanders more intellectually than Mei-Mei. A very necessary book that should be digested slowly like an exquisite meal.