Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing in 1947, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an American father who was the son of Dutch immigrants. Her family moved to the United States when she was a year old and she grew up in Massachusetts, earning a BA from Reed College in 1969. She moved to New York City in the early 1970s and received an MFA from Columbia University in 1973.

Berssenbrugge became deeply engaged and influenced by the movements of abstract visual arts, the New York School, and the Language poets, developing a poetic practice which seems to draw on all of these different aspects simultaneously. As the Academy of American Poets says of Berssenbrugge’s work:

“Characteristic of her style is a lush mix of abstract language, collaged images, cultural and political investigation, and unexpected shifts between the meditative and the particular.”

Berssenbrugge has published more than a dozen collections of poetry. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two American Book Awards, and honours from the Western States Art Foundation and the Asian American Writers Workshop.

She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico, where she has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Links:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/berssenbrugge/
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/mei-mei-berssenbrugge
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mei-mei-berssenbrugge
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berssenbrugge.php


My below poems was inspired by the last line from Berssenbrugge’s “Alakanak Break-Up” which is included in the anthology.


~ - ~

the initial colour of the tundra

it is the initial colour of the tundra
low alpha diversity
beyond the tree-line
where i am patchy
with very poor resiliency
against the rising reach

my black expanse
unshifting in months
of total darkness
where dead vegetation
and peat accumulates
frigid air

it is the initial colour of the tundra
frozen in your russian red
book i know i
should never have come here
bare and dirty ankle
-deep in boggy ground

my high latitudes
cowing among the moss and grasses
gently holding lichen against the dampened skin
i am vagile vertebrate
gyrfalcon, bewick's swan
the lesser white-fronted bird

it is the initial colour of the tundra
low beta diversity
as the permafrost thaws
just enough to let it
tend to the acidic over-saturated
groves which still remain inside my lungs

Paul Hoover

Born in Harrisonburg, Virginia in 1946 Paul Hoover is not only the editor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (which this blog is dedicated to), but also the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, a book of literary essays, and a novel.  He co-translated volumes of poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (from German) and Nguyen Trai (from Vietnamese) and is editor, with Maxine Chernoff, of the literary magazine New American Writing.

Apart from this work as a poet and editor, he has also worked as a scriptwriter and served as curator of a poetry series at the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco from 2007 to 2011.

His many honours include the PEN/USA Translation Award, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, the Frederick Bock Award from Poetry, the Carl Sandberg Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A former professor at Columbia College Chicago, he founded the Columbia Poetry Review. He currently teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Mill Valley, California.

Links:
http://www.paulhooverpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/ (Hoover’s blog)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/paul-hoover
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hoover

The below poem is inspired by a line from Hoover’s “Heart’s Ease”, which serves as its title and thematic starting point.

~ - ~

A thinking is prepared for the reader who breaks

It’s a messy scene like a bomb site with pieces of scattered human consciousness all over the floor where preconception collided with novelty of thought. You wonder if that’s what they liked to call de-constructivist and if Derrida in a trench coat like Columbo in the 70s would come around soon to inspect the scene. 
Question to the mourning widow: “What were you thinking?” “He was reading,” she cried. “But what were you thinking?” “This and that, you know how thoughts fly.”
It’s a messy scene like a bomb site with pieces of scattered human consciousness all over the floor where a particular type of stubborn presumption collided with the unexpected.
“They all thought he would make it through the night.”
In the interrogation cell: “What kind of text was it?” “He was reading,” she cried. “Inspector, everything was as usual. His life insurance wasn’t even that much.”
You wonder if that’s what they liked to call de-constructivist.
Question (aside): “Who prepared it for him – whodunit? howcatchem?”
A messy scene like a bomb site with pieces of shattered human consciousness all over the floor.

Diane Ward

Diane Ward was born in 1956 in Washington, D.C. Her work is often associated with the Language movement and deals frequently with the relationship between men and women, as well as the charged emotions that lie beneath seemingly casual things. Ward considers Gertrude Stein and conceptual art as one of her main influences: “I realized that poetry could be like drawing, it could be thinking itself, a conceptual activity, and not just an end product.”

Ward has published more than a dozen collections of poetry. Her honours include a California Arts Council Artists Fellowship in Literature and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry which she won at the age of 18. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ward
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ward.php
http://pippoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/diane-ward.html

My below poem took its inspiration from Ward’s “Immediate Content Recognition” – using the title as a starting point for a poem about human relationships in the age of interactive technology.


~ - ~

automatic content recognition

i am over there | by now used
to this out-of-body experience
contained | neatly tied down to the circuit board
i am locked behind touch-screen interface | muted | yellow | back-lid
i am identified | managed | monetized | screened
real time interactivity with the content is now enabled
i am enhanced without the need for any manual cue
the viewer can use its companion device
i am accessed | fully automated | shared
with friends family and online communities
i am ridden | dragged into branded virtual space
to offer more immersive event-based experiences with deeper
engagement and higher stickiness
i am popped up | framed | autocompleted
providing instantaneous identity to spearhead consumption
i am hand-held | fitted | fully responsive | enabled
with no need for mutual consent
i am limited only by your imagination
to another level | here
insert the plug

Alice Notley

It is hard to put Alice Notley into a box. Throughout the four decades of her extraordinary career her style has continued to shift and turn. Active in the New York poetry scene in the 1960s and 70s and indeed married to Ted Berrigan for more than 10 years, she is often associated with the Second Generation of New York School poets. But her work can also be found to reveal darker, almost mystical tendencies at one point while displaying a light, disjunctive style bordering on language poetry at other times. Her later work has a particular focus on book-length projects and often features narrative and character-centred forms.

Notley is the author of over 25 books of poetry. Her many awards include the San Francisco Poetry Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Notley currently lives in Paris.

Links:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/notley/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Notley.php
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/alice-notley
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/alice-notley


My below poem took its initial inspiration from Notley’s “Beginning with a stain”.

~ - ~

beginning with a borrowing

beginning
with a borrowing
a wording
a spacing
a lining
a sentencing

words are
for uses
on the plains:
mother’s yellow handbag
sister’s silver bracelets abandoned in the drawer of the old room
brother’s battered travel case (blue)
father’s dark and heavy coat

words are
for uses
on the rules:
i steht fuer ich
went steht fuer vergangenheit
away steht fuer fernweh
forever fuer romantik

words are
for uses
on her own:
beginning
with a borrowing
a wording
a spacing
a lining
a sentencing

William Corbett

William Corbett grew up in in Pennsylvania and Connecticut and attended Lafayette College before moving to Boston’s South End with his wife the psychologist Beverly Mitchell. Until their move to Brooklyn in 2012, their house was known as a kind of literary salon for artists, poets, and writers in Boston and Corbett played an important part in the literary scene of the city.

As the Poetry Foundation notes, “Corbett’s poetry is influenced by the history and geography of New England, his personal friendships with poets and artists, visual art, and daily experience.” Corbett sees himself as “a poet of landscape, weather and consciousness.”

In relation to this Hoover quotes Corbett:

“I seek to make poems that are clear as a cloudless fall morning – the reader ought to be able to see freshly what’s right in front of him and into the distance for miles. My endeavour is to make the everyday memorable, to discover and declare the value in what’s considered ordinary. The language I like best is plain and ringing, clean and accurate as a well-driven nail.”

Corbett has published more than 10 collections of poetry in addition to several collections of essays and prose. Over the years, he has also edited a number of literary journals and magazines including Fire Exit, The Boston Eagle, Ploughshares, Agni, and Grand Street. In 1999, Corbett founded Pressed Wafer Press, a small press devoted to poetry, essays, and art writing. He has taught writing for over twenty years at MIT, and also held teaching jobs at Harvard and Emerson.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-corbett
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-corbett
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnqdqg-z6Pg (video of a Harvard University panel discussion of Corbett’s significance for the Boston literary scene)


My below poem is a response to William Corbett’s poem of the same title – and then it isn’t.

I found myself struggling to respond to his work as it seems to have an almost “realist”, narrative tendency and frequently deals with nature (in a broader sense). It isn’t something I usually do myself. I therefore started off with a rough narrative text about my own experience of “nature” in everyday life. I then decided to rework the text to achieve a less realist, denser piece.

~ - ~

Cold Lunch
From the office I walk down the three blocks to Ramshorn Graveyard in the January drizzle of my lunch time break. The wind dies down a little when I step into the sheltered green space behind the old church. On three sides the graveyard is enclosed by the high walls of former office buildings. They are luxury lifestyle apartments now. I walk underneath the branches of the trees, planted close to the dirty gravel path which runs around the little cemetery. The air is cool and clear. The hectic streets of Central Glasgow seem far away when I am here. I balance on the curb stones of the path where the ground got soft and muddy with the heavy winter rain. But the grass is long and soft in this ancient space. Patient timeless nature. I watch it wave and ripple as the wind passes over the flat ground. The gravestones here are many centuries old, reminders of the city’s glorious merchant history. Their flat surfaces have now sunken deep into the green. Sometimes split, often overgrown with moss they lie there helplessly. Overtaken now by living things. It is hard to read the names engraved into the stone. Moss embellishes each letter as dust and water gathers in the groves of the words.

Cold Lunch – minus 1 degree
About walking. About dying.
About stepping. About enclosing.
About being. About walking.
About planting. About running.
About being. About seeming.
About being. About balancing.
About getting. About being.
About watching. About waving.
About rippling. About passing.
About being. About having.
About sinking. About splitting.
About overgrowing. About lying.
About overtaking. About being.
About engraving. About embellishing.
About gathering (in the groves of words).


Cold Lunch – minus 2 degrees
down to in of.
down when into behind.
on by of.
now.
underneath of to around.
and.
of when here.
on of where and with.
but and in.
.
and as over.
here of.
now into.
often with there.
now by.
to into.
as and in of.

Wanda Coleman

Known as Los Angeles’ “unofficial poet laureate”, Wanda Coleman grew up in the Watts neighbourhood of the city in relative poverty. Her father ran a sign shop during the day, working at night as a janitor at RCA Victor Records while her mother worked as a seamstress.

Her poetry often deals with the “burdens of poverty and race” as she herself – as a black woman in the South West - often found herself as “a minority within a minority within a minority – racially, sexually, regionally” (Hoover).

In his 1999 review, Alistair Paterson, Editor of Poetry New Zealand said of Coleman’s work:

“Coleman’s poetry, politically aware, darkly humorous, sensual and iconoclastic, presents a remarkable talent developed throughout a difficult life. [...] It’s the kind of poetry other writers can use as a yardstick for measuring their work—it sets a standard and demonstrates what a beautiful, adaptable, usable language colloquial English is.”

Coleman published more than a dozen collections of poetry. She received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Price for her collection Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998) In addition to her poetry Coleman also worked as a magazine editor, journalist, as well as an Emmy-winning scriptwriter. She lived in Los Angeles until her death in 2013.

Links:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/wanda-coleman
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wanda-coleman
http://www.thenation.com/article/remembering-wanda-coleman/ (obituary in The National)

My poem below was inspired by the style of Coleman’s “the ISM” and her general willingness to address social topics such as poverty and racism.


~ - ~

Home

I moved into the cupboard under the stairs for pure romance
I kept neatly to my side of the bed
I crawled up the walls with the mice when it was bed time
smoothed my back flirtatiously against the mouldy foam

I boiled my sweet scented bath water in the kitchen kettle
I let the fan heater melt my broken toes
I stuck thin foil across each of the period windows
kept the bucket carefully underneath the hole

I got this amazing deal in a sought-after area
I was so lucky to pay the price
my postcode reflects my inner-most conscience
I need to be here. I need to be here. I need to buy

But you know, in London
You are never really home
There is always something going
When are you ever really home?

John Yau

John Yau was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, one year after his parents emigrated from China. He studied at Bard College and received his B.A. in 1972 and his M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 1977.

The Poetry Foundation says of Yau’s work which is often situated on the borderline between poetry and prose:

“He is known for his attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface in his work. In poems that frequently pun, trope, and play with the English language, Yau offers complicated, sometimes competing versions of the legacy of his dual heritages—as Chinese, American, poet, and artist.”

In addition to his work as a poet he also is also a renowned art critic. His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Times.

Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France.

He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University. He lives in New York City.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-yau
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/john-yau
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Yau.php
https://vimeo.com/24242350 (video interview)

My poem below is a response to Yau’s “Chinese Villanelle”. I chose to write a villanelle myself.

~ - ~

A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2

poetry is just a silly thing I do sometimes
it’s not that I particularly care
it doesn’t change the world or shift the fucking paradigm

the others spent their nights with darts or prime
time show food for the telly stare
poetry is just a silly thing I do sometimes

art is nothing but weird pointless pantomime
for people with John Lewis tableware
it doesn’t change the world or shift the fucking paradigm

those leftist plebs longing for the social climb
everyone knows politics is never fair
poetry is just a silly thing I do sometimes

what’s the point of fancy words in verse and rhyme
your wit won’t get you or anyone anywhere
it doesn’t change the world or shift the fucking paradigm

in a deep dark pit of raging fury is where I’m
on those days it’s damn hard to bear
poetry is just a silly thing I do sometimes
it doesn’t change the world or shift the fucking paradigm