"Words on Poetry," reviews of poets by Miriam Sagan from the Santa Fe New Mexican.
| previous page
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, I Love Artists

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s I Love Artists (University of California Press) is her new and selected poems, spanning her entire poetic career. As such, it functions as an overview of thought, theme, and preoccupations. Berssenbrugge’s work is known for its abstract handling of poetic concerns, as well as an emphasis on perception. That is, what is being expressed or described is not more important than how it is expressed or described. The collection opens with early work selected from such books as Summits Move with the Tide (1974) and The Heat Bird (1983). Although the voice is distinctly Berssenbrugge’s, the form is a tight kind of free verse, in stanzas. In the title poem “The Heat Bird“ there is an encounter with an ordinary rural scene that also has grandeur and a kind of terror:

There is a curving belly. The cow’s head is away from me
It’s corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation
hasn’t identified my bird
(....)
It’s a buzzard with a little red head. You say
that’s good. They’re not so scarce anymore. It should
have been more afraid of me.

By Empathy (1989), the lines are getting longer and the poems resemble more of a square block. Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge once said her form was influenced by the wide horizons of New Mexico, and indeed at times the poems resemble not only vast skylines but the monoliths of mesas placed against them. And there are moments of sudden shift in the poems. In “Alakanak Break-Up”, a philosophical musing on the nature of motion and pattern is interrupted by the emotional statement: “Anyone who is all right would not be coming in covered with fog.” Or, in “Fog,”—“They counted her more accurate and more inaccurate memories as black and white stones.”

Very long lines now completely dominate the poems, and indeed have become the poet’s signature. The volume is well-designed to present these lines fully, as if they were lines of weaving of abstract grids by Agnes Martin. And the level of abstraction increases in that the poems contain both a “she” and an occasional “I” without the reader ever knowing completely if they are versions of the same. The most the poet will say is: “She is not the name of a person, nor there of a place, but they are connected with names” and “Why science does not use a word like she or there is why the hand cannot make a sharp edge in the sand.”

The book Endocrinology (1997) is represented by disembodied images of embodiment. From this point on in Berssenbrugge’s work, images of the body’s systems, interiority, and functioning become part of the vocabulary. The poet says: “Because she’s in a body, it makes decisions.” The goddess Kali is the muse for the poem of the same name—a destructive feminine force, maternal, yet violent. And yet maybe these attributes are a projection: “Black means she’s unknown by people full of ignorance, since it stands for their ignorance.” This poem takes certain material examined by other contemporary women poets and deals with it in a way wholly representative of the poet. Red flowers, black birds, witches, destructive female energy that includes rebirth and nuance—the archetypes are combined with the language of science, with emotional reserve, and yet a poetic transcendence. Some of these themes surface again, but more gently, in the poem “Nest” which begins “My mother tongue, Chinese, has an immemorial history before me.” And ends with a maternal optimism: “In this, daughter, you see more than I did at your age, because you see me.”

In the poem “Permanent Home” from Nest (2003) the poet describes “Knowledge as lintel, band beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance.” But this distance seems mitigated at the end of the poem where “Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.” The new poems which follow are also a strong addition.

Essentially, these poems are demanding. They demand that the reader give up preconceptions and enter their construct. What they return is a poetic view that is more than thinking outside the box but in a universe where there is no box--but instead language, reflection, and ultimately beauty.

back to top