Anselm Berrigan Interview at Sonora Review

Interviews are abounding! Next on our radar is Anselm Berrigan talking to Gabe Dozal for Sonora Review. They move from De Kooning to Joanne Kyger ("[s]he just made the wire be part of the room"); to poetic statements, intentions, and rectangle poems; to imitations of Jim Brodey; the NBA; and much more. An excerpt:

GD: I like that your work is willing to meander and take its time. And it’s porous too, it allows subjects to come and go. I feel like they aren’t afraid to wander around, I never feel there is fear in your poetic voice or the voice of your poems. I’ve only read a few of the new rectangle poems in the BOMB and they’re exciting for their language and form.

AB: Thank you. The rectangle poems, writing them, was this really bizarre thing at first that became joyous. It was so illogical and unpressured a thing to be doing, and then at the same time the form was clear and demanding in its own way. I loved writing them. I wrote them all out in public in different places.

GD: I often try and skirt intention when I’m writing, like I don’t want to talk or write about myself directly. Ashbery said once, and I’m paraphrasing: “I wouldn’t want to bore people with my own life.” What role does intention play when you’re writing/drafting?

AB: An undefined role. I wrote some poems recently that are direct imitations of some of Jim Brodey’s work — specifically his “Panda Breath” poems, a lot of which are published in a book called Heart of the Breath, that came out posthumously. He’d name each poem after a friend, a hero or personal icon of some kind. So I wrote five poems in his form, which he chose to look like a kind of academic poem as he saw it maybe 30-35 years ago, but in which he’d try to explode the academic line, and I called them all “Jim Brodey”. So that’s a very specific set of intentions, right?

Read on right here.