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Poetic Profile

Anselm Berrigan

General Questions 

1. Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I was born in Chicago in 1972, and grew up in the East Village of New York City where I am presently growing down. Because my parents were/are poets and so many of the (daily) large number of visitors were poets, I’d have to say that poetry and writing were a large part of the mix. I did not really read poetry or write anything until I left home and started college in Buffalo, though. But I could read very early on, and was reading newspapers and certain novels and lot of comic books and mythology (Greek, Norse) before I was a teenager. I didn’t write a poem until I was nearly 19.

2. Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

I’m very open to influence; am easy that way even if the surface doesn’t always show it. This allows me to enjoy a lot of different kinds of things and let influence creep in on different levels. Music and song lyrics have been in my head since I was a little kid, and I think my writing has been heavily influenced by all of it. My brother and I were into rap in the mid-eighties, for instance, and he (Eddie) has gotten me into old country blues from the early 20^th century in recent years. There was a very distinct period in my mind in the mid-nineties where I was trying to figure out how to write poems that would work the way I imagined Sonic Youth’s songs to work – having the basic frame of a pop song and then gutting it with distortion and noise….the song “Diamond Sea” is a great example of that. I used to love putting it on the jukebox in this one bar in San Francisco and watching the bartenders and customers lose their minds as this beautiful song slowly turned into total chaos. It’s an eighteen-minute song, and someone would usually pull the plug 12-15 minutes in. What a joy! Beethoven’s late string quartets amaze me, and I’m lately getting to know Charlie Parker and Maria Callas.

I’m totally influenced by messiness (though certainly not exclusively), and that has drawn me to painters like Jackson Pollack, Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and poets like Coleridge. I think I’m used to there being something on the floor that could be picked up, but maybe it actually looks interesting there so you throw something else next to it. Watching cut flowers die over the course of a few days gives me a strange sense of wonder….I think I’m truly a product of New York City. I can be moved by the way a garbage truck rolls down the street in the middle of the night undoing the various arrangements of trash left out on the curb. In terms of basic influence I’d also say that I’m influenced by individuals, not movements or schools. In recent years the work of Kevin Davies and Harryette Mullen has been very important to me, and I’m right now starting to go back to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry after a conversation with my mother about his exuberance, even when writing about total horrors.  I am also reading a lot of history books, and am curious to see if that has any visible effect on my work down the line.

3. When did you ‘become’ a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?

I started writing poetry after spending about a year-and-a-half working on the student newspaper at SUNY-Buffalo. The paper came out three times a week in a circulation of 12,000; there was a lot of work to be done. I started off writing news stories, which was interesting and sometimes scary (I had to write the initial story about a murdered student once, and it was gut-wrenching work). The writing started to feel limiting after a while, leading me to record reviews and some very short fiction as well as keeping a notebook. One day, I shit you not, I broke a line in my notebook rather than extending it across the page, and felt this full body rush. That was it. That was May of 1991, and I’ve been writing poetry ever since.

4. Where were you educated? Was this important?

My education began at home. Our parents were and are great conversationalists with intense, interesting minds. We were not pushed or pressured in any way. I could read by 4. School mostly felt like a kind of obstacle course by comparison, and then the social dynamics really kicked in during high school and sort of overwhelmed me. Eddie and I went entirely to public schools in New York City, and then to SUNY colleges. I have very mixed feelings about my formal education. I am totally grateful for having been well-educated, for the most part. I stank at science, and had so much work in high school sometimes that I think I stopped reading for a few years outside of what I had to do for school. I went to Stuyvesant High School, and they really work your ass off there. I hated it. I also hated the fact that I was so quiet and nerdy-looking that I had hardly any friends in school. Plus it was my first experience at a school where the majority of kids were white, and while I didn’t quite process it then, it hit home once I got up to Buffalo, which felt completely segregated in many ways and totally freaked me out. Entering high school was like walking into a crowded vacuum, and I didn’t know what to do for two years. Then I joined the track team, if you can believe that, and started making some friends. Running in circles saved my sorry ass. I eventually wound up in Brooklyn College’s MFA program, after swearing off school for a few years, in order to find out if I liked teaching (I do, but not enough to do it all the time) and have some conversations with Allen Ginsberg, who taught there right up until he became too sick. I realized while there that I had learned how to be a better student because I was less defensive about what I didn’t know and totally excited by subjects I knew nothing about, like Augustan Literature. I think I had to work some crappy jobs in San Francisco for a couple of years in order to focus on poetry and instill my mind with a sense of discipline towards its own processes before I could become a better reader and listener. When I was in college I was really kind of re-learning how to relate to people my age. I never dealt with the Poetics program, or took any classes with the poets there, with the exception of an Epic Literature class taught by Carl Dennis. I got a C! But I spent so much time working at the newspaper I often blew off papers and finals. I just didn’t care enough about grades to give up time with my friends, who were really drawing me out as a person, in the best ways possible as far as I was concerned.

5. You come from a very illustrious family poetically. How were you able to find your own way and become a poet of note unique from those influences?

I haven’t! HA! I’m just a derivative hack! I don’t know, actually; it’s an interesting question. I figured out at one point around 1998 or so that I probably had more of a subconscious sense of how to do things in a poem when I first began than I could have realized. I say this because I was reading my father’s poetry, in particular, here and there for a couple of years before I started writing. I was reading my mother’s books and my stepfather’s (the British poet Douglas Oliver) too, but my Dad had died when I was ten, and I read his poems looking for information about him. So it makes sense that when I started writing I actually had a sense for where and how a line might break, and an instinct towards using the whole page as a field. But I also had instincts that led me away from the family. When I started writing I went to a library and took out a bunch of poetry books. Did I take out a lot of New York School stuff, or work by family friends? No. I took out Eliot, Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas and Amy Lowell! I wound up getting the most of Dickinson and Hughes, though I was a little shocked at the fact that I seemed to understand what was happening in The Wasteland. I couldn’t articulate a damn thing about it, but I wasn’t trying to either.

A big thing that happened though, was that I moved to San Francisco when I finished at Buffalo. I wanted to make sure that poetry was the center of my life, and I wanted to go to a city where I didn’t know anyone at all to do so. I had great luck and timing, because a number of really interesting young poets were around at the same time, and I met them and started intensely interacting with their work. I hate making lists, but this is a group of writers who helped me, without them knowing it, come into myself. Writers as various as Dale Smith, Renee Gladman and Katy Lederer. Many, many more than I could name. I never worried much about sounding like my parents, though occasionally other people worried on my behalf. My stepfather has actually been a bigger recent influence.

It’s worth mentioning that my family let a lot of people into their lives. Because of that, I eventually developed a very long mental list of poets, artists, musicians, thinkers, historical figures, cranks, etc. and started making my way through what elements of their work I could find. It’s hard to remain artistically narrow when you’re open to differences. And I remember, on a similar note, attending a reading by June Jordan in San Francisco when I was 22, and hearing her tell a questioner after the reading, upon being asked about advice to young writers, “read everything. Imitate the things you like.” I thought that was very practical. At a certain point when publishing seemed to be possible, I decided that I would never submit work anywhere unsolicited. With one or two exceptions over the last thirteen years or so, that is still the case. It was the one concession I made in my mind to the family-thing. I didn’t want to be published unless there was a real connection between the editor/publisher and the work. Beyond that it is all in the writing.

6. The Poetry Project in New York is going through a rebirth. What is your vision for this institution?

A combination of things. I want to maintain its relative economic stability, and make sure it has a long future. At the moment I think that’s the case, but the fear is always around the corner. One of the ironies of the Project is that fact that it is thought of as having this kind of wild, contentious past, which is true to an extent, but it was also a by-product of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program and fully-funded or nearly fully-funded by the federal government at its inception. Forty years later the Project is almost entirely self-sufficient, with a much larger, broader community around it, and it seems to be much more narrowly perceived than ever before by those who see it from a distance. There are certain internal aspects of the Project that I am working on changing, but those are not so interesting, I think, unless one has a passion for arts administration.

Artistically I think the challenge for the Project is to maintain its commitment to creating time and space for a lot of these freaky poets to present their work. The Project has always been a kind of extension of The New American Poetry and its outgrowths, with a particular focus on The New York School and the Beats and a general level of support for performance-oriented work and experimentation. I tend to believe that many poets are synthesizing a wide range of aesthetics these days, and resisting artificial and insular allegiances to particular styles. The Project needs to keep up with that and support many different poets. At the same time, the programming is selective, and subject to the individual sensibilities of our various coordinators (currently Corina Copp, Prageeta Sharma, Regie Cabico and myself) It’s a funny line to walk, because there are so many poets out there, and only so many slots for readings, plus there’s a long-standing element of our community that still remembers the days when the Project was much smaller, the only venue in town, and one could follow the work of a handful of poets very closely through their frequent readings. And on top of that, all generalizations about poetry and poets can be punctured fairly easily, though the trend continues unabated. It’s a trip, sometimes, to think about where the Project fits into the relatively unmapped and growing larger poetry world. There are some folks who see the Project as this elitst, ivory tower, and then there are folks who think the Project is filled with horrible hippies and willful obscurantists. It’s all true, of course, and I am, in fact, a vicious nepotist, but we seem to be rolling along and lots of good work is being done, so fuck it. I’ve been thinking a little bit lately of that description of O’Hara’s poetry by Ashbery in terms of the poetry and art world in the 1950s: too hip for the squares and too square for the hipsters.

It’s very interesting to me, finally, to note that more and more poets seem to come out of the woodwork every week, while large publishers have essentially given up on poetry. And they should. They do it poorly, they don’t know how to distribute it, and, mainly, poetry is unmarketable. It doesn’t want to be sold. When Jewel sells a gazillion books of poetry it’s her name that is being sold. We are at a point where poetry is almost totally underground, while being more popular than ever in this country. But because poetry is basically a non-commodity it is often used and discarded, as when that guy Curtis White writes The Middle Mind and bitches about American intellectual complacency by basing his argument around the work of Wallace Stevens and then declaring poetry to be irrelevant. What a genius. With all that kind of bullshit flying around, no one quite sure what to make of all the work being done, and a dearth of critics, the Poetry Project, in my mind, can be a stabilizing entity, a place where one simply can go and engage with people practicing and absorbing the art. And you don’t even need to talk to anyone at a reading to do that.

6) What is your favorite food?

Mexican.

7) Sports team or Activity?

Alas, I am a Yankee fan, which is a bit like rooting for General Electric (in the 1950s it was U.S. Steel). My dad tried to get me into the Red Sox, but the poet Harris Schiff took me to Yankee Stadium in 1979, and I was smitten. I liked Reggie Jackson, and really like the fact that they had a guy named Bucky on their team. I was amazed when all that trouble with Ron Artest running after that fan who chucked his beer at him broke out. I went to a Yankee-Red Sox game in 1986 and watched the entire Red Sox team jump into the left field stands to get Jim Rice’s hat back from a crazy fan who swiped it and then said something nasty and racist to him. Within 24 hours it was history, but sports media wasn’t as hysterical and vast as it is now. My favorite activity, other than going to places I’ve never been, is taking a long walk in a city or in the country. I fucked up my ankles running cross-country in college for a few weeks, and so running causes me some pain if I don’t have a soft enough surface under me. I also like to communicate telepathically with animals and birds.

8) Vacation spot.

Uh, I don’t know. I keep finding myself going to places like Chicago, Buffalo and Milwaukee in the dead of winter, so I might be the wrong person to ask. Jamaica Bay in Queens is pretty great, if you like birds.

9) Curse word.

I like to curse. Fuck and all of its variations are deeply ingrained in my language-mind. I think fuckface is one of the funniest terms of all time.

Craft Questions:

1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

Both. It’s both. If I have more time to sit and work at my leisure, it becomes more organic. I need to be able to practice writing poems in one shot, say, or most of a poem in one shot. If I am doing serious job-work all the time, then I wind up compiling information and material and snatches of things over a period of time and then working with that. Basically, my processes are somewhat dictated by how much time I have to put in at whatever job I have. Working at the Project has made my practice become much more deliberate, which is not necessarily a bad thing. And as I get involved with longer poems, that sense of pace becomes more useful than not. I’ve always had this relationship with desperation when writing. There’s always a point for me with each new work where I feel as if I’ve never written a thing before and have no idea what I am doing. Sometimes I enjoy it, and other times it makes me feel nuts. I’ve been stitching poems together a lot over the past few years, particularly since 9/11. I am too inside of it to totally process what that means, but I know it is true.

In terms of form, I often let the form develop as I go through a piece. If I’m stitching something together I’m more likely to adapt a form or formal device to the piece. I’ve been using long lines and syllable counts in the last year, for instance. And I get involved with a very long piece or series I tend to have a formal structure that I can enter in to while I’m going along, such as the kind of window-form in Zero Star Hotel.

2. Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

At this point I need to have no one around I could potentially talk to or be distracted by in order to write. I can write with lots of people around, as long as they are strangers. I write everything down in notebooks, and then type it up. I cannot compose while typing. I can write anywhere, but I do like to write on trains and buses, and I sometimes like to write in bars. I like to have a lot swirling around me, which does make it hard to sit in a room and write. I tend to use whatever is in front of me as a kind of cue, so empty walls, say, can be tough. I had this one job working in a windowless office, and I used to write in it, but the poems often had nothing in them because there was nothing in the room to see. It was a ridiculous job. I was supposed to answer the phone, but the number was unlisted. I was supposed to let people in, but the door was locked and no one knew we were there.

3. In the balance between found language and created language where does you work fall?

I could be a pain in the ass and say that all language is found and all language is created, but I’ll spare you that even though I just said it. I’d say it is something like 85/15 created/found. I’ll take a little from here, a little from there, but I like to come up with my own combinations as much I can. My mind is a just a little too blank sometimes. I often think that there are no words in my head until I write them down.