Poetry. "A brooding intellect injected into the effusive lyricism of the New York School makes Berrigan's famous parentage—he is the son of poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley—an inheritance he self-awarely transforms. Berrigan is not so much undoing intellectualism as trying to wear it lightly, and lyricize it in ways that may at first resemble the work of Ron Padgett, but comes closer to the more sublimated pleasures of John Ashbery: 'Do I have to slip into a box/ To prove my disinterest in watching my step?' Berrigan posits a kind of detachment that can co-exist with a heavily marked social calendar ('the phone never rings I never get it when it does'), yet is wryly aware that as a poet 'you can get a medal for running in circles, that's integrity for you,' and thus balances the sometime solemnity of art with a 'dramatic life" that can "instantly trivialize anything.' At the tender age of 26, Berrigan is a master of the exuberant, and reading the book straight through can somewhat diminish the quirky insights and intense subjectivity of the individual poems. Yet the pathos of '8/1/97'; the slower, intimate, tenderness of 'To what end is what we got...'; and the formal quatrains that appear at the end of the sprawling poem 'Ghost Town'—'To be as strange as what/ The heart contains as method/ Of departure it makes sense/ To shake when approaching'—evidence an impressive tonal range. An exciting debut that taunts its own allure—'Catullus didn't/ Have to go down on the mic'—Berrigan's book is a rare, beautiful keeper"—Publishers Weekly.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Anselm Berrigan is the author of six books of poetry, most recently NOTES FROM IRRELEVANCE (Wave Books, 2011) and FREE CELL (City Lights Publishers, 2009). Other books include TO HELL WITH SLEEP (Letter Machine Editions, 2009), SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING (Edge Books, 2006), and ZERO STAR HOTEL (Edge Books, 2002). 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 (University of California Press, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2011). A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published THE 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, and also currently teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received two grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he grew up, with his wife, the poet Karen Weiser, and their daughter Sylvie.
Reviews and Other Links
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