Wry Press: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail + Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light

 

Longer than any bed sheet called tugging but it happens here too
All the snow on the mountain
As if the hero feared the question nobody could answer (how we’ve seen that before)
Said
“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’”
Forged when the world was young breath and flower, when Arizona, “sweetie,” when melts in your mouth
To float on cliff and sea you ride sniffer and trout
Lance, he came to me last night – like good freak folk to my bed
To kill and be king – (is that all F is for?) (For ‘Twenty, that first sip feeling) searched or
Scale in the back of the tree – lightning –
To be the land and the land in your dream (“The Book of Lancelot”)

I’m intrigued by these recent full-size chapbook publications by Colorado publisher Wry Press [see their write-up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics], each produced in an edition of one hundred copies: Noah Ross’ The Holy Grail (No. 19, 2025) and Sandy Berrigan’s light oh light (No. 16, 2024). Sleek and uncomplicated, each title produced sans author biography or anything extraneous, each a small by the front denoting publisher, date, number. Otherwise, the poems simply begin, and then end, and that is enough. I’ve encountered the work of Berkeley, California-based poet, editor and bookseller Noah Ross before, having gone through his second full-length title, Active Reception (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], and I’ve even heard tell he’s a new full-length, either out or forthcoming, with Krupskaya, which is exciting. He also wrote the preface to Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman, by the late San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) (Nightboat Books, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Ross’ chapbook-sequence The Holy Grail seems a play, or at least an echo or throwback, to Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail (San Francisco CA: White Rabbit, 1964), seven poems on the Arthurian legend, offering a similar poem-per-character, two pages per: “The Book of Gawain,” “The Book of Percival,” “The Book of Lancelot,” “The Book of Guinevere,” “The Book of Merlin,” “The Book of Galahad” and “The Book of The Death of Arthur.” Published sixty-one years after Spicer’s legendary sequence, Ross’ pattern echoes Spicer’s, offering long lines clustered and sectioned, not rewriting or even updating but offering his own flavour to even Spicer’s take on the legend, furthering a Queer underlay to the text as a whole. This is an expansive, ambitious project, an ambitious poem, to dare to translate a work by Jack Spicer, one well known, but perhaps fading from view, as the years roll along (oh, to be able to compare, but of course I have two separate editions of Spicer’s Collected my library, neither of which I can find). I like Ross’ long lyric sentences, his long lyric thought-stretches, stretching the mythology by stitching in other elements, other patterns, across this chapbook-length quilt. Or, as “The Book of Percival” ends: “The difference between two forms and the backside bring it: / A statue won’t lift your stiff member, no voice / Not today, not ever is it yours [.]”

Kandinsky 

I entered a dream world
of color and fire
Day and night
garden and field
egg and dragonfly
Flag and football
This form a science fiction.

Sandy Berrigan is a name I’d heard there and here over the years, but been otherwise unaware of. The web page for the title offers that this title is “the first publication of a series of fragments written during the 1980s; mental refractions of a W.S. Merwin reading in Hawaii, or abstracted, glancing impressions of both artworks & visitors on a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Light and thought both solid & fleeting, chiseled into words which dissolve in ‘light clear air’.” Known as the first wife of American New York School poet Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), the publisher’s site also offers that she “recently moved to the Bay Area after many years in Albion, Ca. Author of Daily Rites (Telephone Books, 1974), and Summer Sleeper (Telephone Books, 1981), she has also over the years self-published a number of other rare & fugitive works, occasionally featuring artwork by painter George Schneeman.” As stated, the poems here that hold dates hold in the mid-1980s, and offer the suggestion that this manuscript sits as a kind of lost classic, something Ottawa chapbook publisher Cameron Anstee was doing as well, through publishing (and re-publishing) some items by the since-late Ottawa poet William Hawkins through his Apt. 9 Press, or even my own publication of a 1970s-era Neil Flowers title through above/ground press. Referencing artwork by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), New York-based poet, choreographer and dancer Kenneth King and American poet M.S. Merwin (1927-2019) (“At the Merwin Reading,” dated November 14, 1985, Maui), the poems here speak to conversation, to community; they delight in their precise small moments, crafted with enormous care and casual ease. “My kisses have the taste of fruit / That would melt in your heart / So then you would disdain me / Farewell.” The publication of this particular title suggests that Berrigan’s work deserves more attention, whether the publication of a new full-length title of previously uncollected work, or even a selected or collected poems; something to gather and acknowledge the work she has done across her writing life. Or, as the poem “From A Letter To Kenneth King,” a piece dated “June 22, 1987,” ends:

We also just said goodbye.
Let us continue to talk.