Anselm Berrigan

In his latest collection, Don't Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan is at his most intimate, allowing us to tag along through the immediate histories of present moments in poems that were primarily written at the height of the pandemic. In reading these poems, we are permitted to witness their creation, as Berrigan pivots between semiotic slippage and shrewd assertions, letting the form of each poem take shape as it will, a surprise of sound and sight. In one poem he writes that "poetry / contains / multiple / unresolvable questions / A T / TH E / SLAME / TLIME" and later reminds us "there are / no accidents / in poetry / either." With the same acerbic wit found in Berrigan's previous work, Don't Forget to Love Me is an apogee of politics, pathos, and poetics.

“The political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality.” —Boston GlobeAnselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics—and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences—these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life. For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast aboutFor bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believesIn me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out glidingBy storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s feltIn the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmareRhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking outA line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . . Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.

“The political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality.” —Boston GlobeAnselm Berrigan’s eighth collection of poems, Something for Everybody, is exactly as its title describes. Wide-ranging in forms, densities, and aesthetics—and written from numerous collaborations, prompts, and influences—these poems express poetry’s astonishing possibilities. At the same time, they evince this sin- gular poet’s consciousness in the here and now, as a family and community member looking at the seams of public life. For consciousness the world is décor: sentences cast aboutFor bodies in the exuberant wobble factory Q-Bert believesIn me in the dark to pass out and check yourself out glidingBy storefront windows searching for a feeling no one’s feltIn the last twelve seconds lathered with coeval nightmareRhetoric of sociable extinction bashful as a wraith eking outA line of image extract to sprinkle on a plenty reeling mind. . . Anselm Berrigan is the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding , I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009), and is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Come In Alone and Primitive State. From 2003 to 2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is Co-Chair, Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College.

"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."--Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe "Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." --Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects In Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page. pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into corners Anselm Berrigan 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 (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 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 of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

"For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality."--Michael Brodeur, Boston Globe "Anselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry." --Virginia Konchan, Galatea Resurrects In Come in Alone, Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the poems act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page. pre-labor stress with all-star fatigue as day glo habit turning exquisite grime into corners Anselm Berrigan 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 (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). From 2003 to 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 of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program, and also teaches part-time at Brooklyn College. He was awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and in 2014 he was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City, where he also grew up.

"A vortex, a nexus, and a weather system all to himself."? Small Press Traffic

The second volume of our City Lights Spotlight Poetry series, Free Cell is the latest book of poems from New York-based poet Anselm Berrigan, one of the most influential American poets under the age of forty. In a departure from his previous work, Free Cell consists of two experimental suites, "Have a Good One" and "To Hell with Sleep," connected by a central poem. The former director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, Anselm Berrigan is the son of poets Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. He is the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.