Poetry. Anselm Berrigan gives us a fresh dose of his discordant mind music. TO HELL WITH SLEEP was written by the poet in the first months after the birth of his daughter, mostly during brief periods of time when he was half-awake or less so, letting the poetry be unthought within its vehicle of eight seven-line slanting stanzas per session, of which there were nine. The impulse driving the writing was to let sounds-turning-toward-words follow from the intensified state of consciousness the arrival of this baby initiated. No prescience, reflection, computer tricks, formal appropriation, or plotting of any kind was used in the writing of this work. Joy, fear, humor, sound, bafflement and recognition-in-exchange-for-recognition were the instruments. Other Anselm Berrigan titles available from SPD are SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING, ZERO STAR HOTEL, and INTEGRITY & DRAMATIC LIFE.
Author Hometown: NEW YORK, NY USA
About the author: 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:
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