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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Photo: Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Kiki Smith and U.L.A.E.
My first experience of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s writing was hearing her read at an event I hosted for the New York City Opera called “The Color of Sound: A Conversation on Music and the Visual Arts.” She was magic. I was instantly reminded of all those old poets endlessly calling on their muses, because suddenly I knew precisely what they were talking about. And I understood: theirs was, after all, no dusty literary convention. As Berssenbrugge spoke her poetry, she was transformed—as though the words came through her from another place. The audience, hypnotized, bent forward to catch the meanings in her soft voice. She read two poems that were completely different from each other, and although I cannot remember the words of either, I can still easily invoke the vivid and distinct experience of each: in the first, perhaps because of her facial expression, I imagined that she had become her poem and for the first time saw her as a person who was also ethereal. As she read the second, I remembered Homer and how he was said to sing his verse. And so I began to wonder if and how we are all, perhaps, connected to some collective historic past.
Putting together a book of selected poems (I Love Artists came out from the University of California Press in 2006) was for Berssenbrugge what discovering how to keep a collection of wildly dissimilar rare butterflies alive and beautiful inside a glass case would be for me.
Berssenbrugge says of herself that she is not someone who can act in groups and that her publishing until now—or as she would call it, “expressing poetry in the world”—has been very personal and consequently chiefly done in collaboration with small, forward-looking presses: Burning Deck, Station Hill and, most recently, Kelsey Street Press. Working with a university press was thus a challenge, and interesting to her.
Certainly interviewing Berssenbrugge was a challenge, and interesting to me, not least because for her, as for many other artists, her work does not really exist in the realm of conversation and is itself the best, truest articulation of her intent. Or as Berssenbrugge herself might express it: poetry is an engagement beyond emotion, discovered, not made. Unsurprisingly, her answers were often figurative, seemingly isolated vignettes, or little stories designed to illustrate particular aspects of what an experience or thought might mean to her. It was not until I began to transcribe that I understood the natural metaphorical congruency in everything that she had to say.
