Anselm Berrigan, Pregrets

 

Pregrets

a century of drawing, endorsed on spine
by the scary amp code for pre-photo
graphic childhood, bystander to a con-
versation (see: religion), micro pigment
ink for waterproof and fade proof lines
sticking out of things, influenced largely
by commercials for plastic toys, forcing
order, Whisp Lou Do (all cutoffs available
via screen in foreground) 0 84511 306
44 8, dark salmon cushion chained to
Its couch, interviews hopefully plunged
Into process, but (a conjunction) no
Loyalty to spatial incidence (produced
as compress), typed arrow, anti-being
in the room, all parentheticals put on
erasure alert, bubble’s imitation voice
speaks out from photo dream the other
night, losing lizard count forty-one to
fifteen, fantasy baseball, “your second
wife”, liquid net, desire for stuffed goat
to make appearance bound to observer

It only took me a couple of years to get around to New York City poet and editor Anselm Berrigan’s prior collection, Something For Everybody (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], so I thought I should be a bit more attentive to his latest, Pregrets (New York NY: Black Square Editions, 2021). Organized in four sections, the book-length suite Pregrets is comprised of seventy-five poems in total, each of which are no longer than a page in length. Most of the poems in Pregrets are set underneath the title “Pregrets,” with occasional further title-variations popping up along the way: “Pregrets vs. Egrets,” “Pregrets (beginning with two clauses by Clarice Lispector),” “Re to Pre to De, “Greggrets,” “Megrets” and “Freegrets III,” with a handful of “Degrets” and Egrets” thrown in as well, for good measure. In certain ways, Pregrets is composed as a single, endless expansiveness of text, pushing further and further along a singular prompt. “upsided down self-portrait by elder daughter / sees through the scaffolding of his and his / conceptions,” he writes, a third of the way through the collection, in a further of his “Pregrets” pieces. Pregrets offers a particular train of thought speeding through the regret of an action prior to the action itself, the small moments and scatterings of the “pre-regret.” The ongoingness of the line and the lyric, the end of one poem potentially stitching up neatly against the opening of the subsequent poem, is reminiscent of Darren Wershler’s now-infamous The Tapeworm Foundry: And or the Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000), or even the more recent beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) by Vancouver poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong [see my review of such here], both of which offer a single book-length line. Given Berrigan’s line is simultaneously continuous and segmented into individual pieces, as well as the collaged nature of his lyric, the effect allows for multiple readings and possibilities across the poems. What do the scatterings of Berrigan’s poems offer the reader? “your line drawing is the purest & most direct / translation of my emotion,” he writes, mid-way through the collection to open one of his “Pregrets” pieces. He writes everything going on around his immediate, as a way to write a shape around his thinking, and his thinking self. He writes a multitude of possibilities, one that allows the reader to sit within the framework of his poems and attempt to see the larger structure at play. And what a structure it is.