The sun got its new angel wings tee-shirt smudged with the sandbox’s finest demi-mud. This would render appearances partial, with a cornball’s incongruence. Sidewalk chalk radioactive Well, we’ll never write that letter to the lozenges, I mean that shrinkingpostcard on the way to Saturn Will someone please hand me my martini, so I can make it through this The awful ordeal? title Name there placed in the palm the of your natural action tremor off-centerrendering that floating green eye, well it floated off onto some bell somewhere Yesterday’s duck seemed to have three parents: a vulture a turkey, & a something a plastic shapelinessunaccountably signaling Dark Star Winged creatures suspend shyness & we were stabbed with permission all over & again, the assemblages of guilt frozen in dispossession Did that closet just murmur?“No mere solar beam can harm the lord of photosynthesis”“No barrier can stop one who dwells between all boundaries”“Welcome back to life, my former foes”“& be tied to the end of your string / flying in the air babes at night”
In Betweener
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- October 25, 2024
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“In Betweener” from DON’T FORGET TO LOVE ME: by Anselm Berrigan.
Published by Wave on September 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Anselm Berrigan.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Anselm Berrigan is the author of many books of poetry: Pregrets, (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm. A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber. From 2003-2007 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 teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program. Berrigan was granted an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2017, and was also awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2014. 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.
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