Anselm Berrigan

Kudos to Wave Books for producing such a lovely book.

Though written as a single stanza, Anselm Berrigan’s "Notes from Irrelavance" has many fitful stops-and-starts. Mr. Berrigan probably wrote in bursts, and then just continued on the same line, perhaps days later, with a new line of thought.

I both liked and disliked the poem. I found myself nodding in agreement with some of Mr. Berrigan’s observations; only to then shake my head in disgust at others. I’ve no patience with poetry that is self-referential, that needs an accompanying concordance, or footnotes, to explain the reference. What to make of:

…The
Tartar and The Venetian
contend in a stupor of
disquiet above the bitched-out
illusion in which,
along with a green slim
vase, I am constantly
hiding my torso in
front of our bloodshot
field of vision.

Contrast this with the clarity of this pointed observation:

That’s probably a point
of real stupidity on my
part, some haphazard
bus ride of fancy so as
to extend a sentence,
but there’s at least a
germ of truth in there
infecting my psyche.

Contrast THAT with a line so dense I could not parse it:

And yet I do not trust
the sanity of my vessel,
nor that of metaphor,
built across time to be
diminished by speed’s
freezing of the body in
place, as like or so being
near to and no less
against while with and
in relation to being seen,
everywhere, or, more
precisely, anywhere.

All-in-all, I’d say that Notes from Irrelevance is definitely worth reading, since there are some fine observations about living in a digital age; and about Mr. Berrigan’s remembrances (I especially enjoyed the section where, at age eight, he gets lost and only makes it home because a kind stranger gets him on the right bus); and because there are some beautifully crafted sentences. But I would not recommend working too hard on the poem, since much of it is personal to the poet, not universal, and simply doesn’t apply… (mais)

[book:Notes From Irrelevance|11175859] by [author:Anselm Berrigan|110691] is an 80-page poem which I read and reread over several sittings. In the interest of transparency, I'll state that I won the book through LibraryThing, but the experience of reading it would have been well worth the price of the book. I need to reread it at least one more time before I can feel like I've even begun to digest it. I found it soothing and provocative, with fragmented jumps that were sometimes irritating but more often woke me up and moved me to greater focus and attention to both the work before me and the world around me.

The book gives glimpses of the poet's experience of the world and himself in it. The language reflects and refracts this experience and recreates it, creating a resonance in the reader allowing both a brief connection with the poet and a new connection with the world and her experience of it.

I found the work exhilarating. I strongly recommend it to all lovers of language.… (mais)

This was a bit of a slog for me. I'm generally of the opinion that poetry should be short, an encapsulated emotion rendered into beautiful language. The strength of a poem comes from fitting a lot of stuff in a small space. "Notes from Irrelevance," seems to be trying to go for the same content-per-line density (sorry, that comes off as sounds really stuffy and pretentious) as a much shorter poem, making it difficult, as far as I'm concerned, to really get much out of. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned when it comes to poetry, but this was just a little too much.… (mais)