Anselm Berrigan, Pregrets
Anselm Berrigan lives in New York City, where he has spent 31 of his 42 years. He started writing poems in 1991 and hasn't looked back. He has worked primarily as a foot messenger, temporary worker, copy machine operator, editor, teacher, and doer of various jobs at The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church. He is currently working on a new set of self-imposed detours while faking a living as a part-time teacher and being raised by his two young daughters.
Note for poems: I get an odd kind of pleasure from writing longhand underneath pre-selected titles, titles that seem to imply or propose a tonal space from which to begin generating and/or arranging material. A small show of drawings, prints and paintings by Jasper Johns at the Museum of Modern Art titled Regrets made me curious to try that word as a title this past spring, and the term Pregrets – the fantasy or fact of getting ready to feel sorrow or distress, the attendant humors such a frame might provoke, the probability of not landing in the predetermined spot, the derangement of proposed memories – popped into place after awhile and eventually took over as the primary term to work under. As the process of writing these poems is on-going, I don’t have a further assessment to make of their makes, and don’t want to force one out just yet, out of fear of stopping the vehicle before it ends on its own terms. I can say that I’m relying heavily on what I consider internalized collagist wiring to make relatively quick decisions about what gets into the poems.
Anselm Berrigan, Pregrets
44pp. 2014. ISBN 978-1-922181-29-9
dB series 1 (November 2014): 10 collections of poetry edited by Pam Brown, designed by Chris Edwards.