Anselm Berrigan’s latest kaleidoscopic collection is a tender and frenzied call for a much needed respite from the heaviness of life in the face of post-pandemic facelessness. Teetering on the edge of the blank page, flirting with the most sonorous of voids, Berrigan’s poems tell fragmented stories of the conflation between the intimate and the universal. The themes of childhood, family, love and loss converse with American culture, history and politics, more specifically at that particular time when grief had become an irreconcilable experience of seclusion in multitudes:

‘and the promise of unrecorded voices spiking the 21st century’s script

of a derailed collective nervous system, I hope to make it to 49’ (p. 19)

A perfect successor to the textual excess of Pregrets (2021), Don’t Forget to Love Me was composed in a spirit of rebellion. The poems, written by hand—an act of resistance in itself—at the height of the pandemic, translate the stutter of contemporary life that seems to have become the norm since 2020. Overbrimming from the six different parts that make up the collection, the poems explore the amalgamation of politics, discourse, information and technology as the poetic voice yearns more and more for the familiarity of the personal. The words overflow and misbehave, crossing line after line as if to combat the restrictions imposed by lockdown.

By alternating short, clipped segments and run-on lines, Anselm Berrigan successfully translates the sonorous crawl of the American language. He plays with the myriad possibilities offered by the word, the letter, or even punctuation and the page layout, in joyous but never trivial or flimsy bursts of speech and poetry. His practice of collage and intertextuality—most notably through dedications—furthers the collection’s endeavor to establish an inner dialogue between past and present, uncertainty and knowledge, closeness and distance.

From playful couplets contemplating the erosion of meaning—‘Photographs copy me too personally in nature / Do you really believe stability is stable’ (‘Press Conference’, p. 6)—to almost-aphorisms—‘The conversation between gratitude & irony is where realism goes to listen’ (‘from an ongoing untitled poem for Lewis Warsh’, p. 138)—Anselm Berrigan plays with references and forms as if trying to encompass and understand what culture means and amounts to, especially now that art—streamed, downloaded or only seen from a six-feet distance for months on end—has become a commodity for many:

‘I’d prefer being chaste by a bear

Or chatted up somewhere narrow minus eye contact

Dude dying in Dakota denies cause

Don’t remember to forget on purpose (motto of the exhumed whores & poets guild)

We just got our first seven stars from Himalayan Vision’ (p. 140)

In Don’t Forget to Love Me, Berrigan practices the art of the oblique, both playing with the demands of experimentation while at the same time making room for a sort of levity in his lyricism. The written word and the image communicate at a distance for the two-thirds of the collection, forcing the reader to wade through equivocal shores:

‘I started writing to be myself, now

I start by imagining someone else

don’t worry about pretending I’m not

trying to be you without finding myself

all over an advance on again’s plateau

the writing is the arrangement but

it (a pronoun) was never meant to begin

sleep on the couch & the monsters tower

walking single file away from destruction’ (p. 123)

Within the backwash of words, however, Berrigan often provides his reader with relief and sentiment in the form of a disarming breach, a respiration:

‘I’m told I don’t talk about

my feelings enough, but I know

on the inside how self-absorbed

I am, & the poets lets it flow

with buzzing fracked apology

incisions’ (p. 134)

Berrigan’s mastery of pace also embraces the collection’s obliqueness. His work on effects of acceleration and deceleration within the poems themselves allows him to detail his relationship to aging, death and more generally the passing of time, rendered all the more palpable by the pandemic:

‘The bird watchers tap their lenses

& canes. Junkie or blood donor I

say they thing they say to not me.

Everythink’s brilliant, when everyone’s

an idiot, language says, for itself

a unified idiocy with toes & guns

& no auntie-freedome masksss. Masks

& yoga pants. Skasers II: a proplosal.

A proplosive to insplosive cross-country

e-pithany for the abject glimpse that

powders love with scurrilous realist

anxiety. Mo fo mo.’ (p. 107)

At the end of the proverbial road of a language muffled by masks, sits the ultimate questioning—how to experience the present when it has already toppled into the future:

‘creep the verb your redux inflames, hiding around perimeters, I mean my

today I got told how oddly, sonic nearness, I’ll get paid for a few months next year

Blade Runner now takes place in the present, no, it takes place in absolute time

nowness as projection of a future, we like to bypass relative time in order

to fake the front, the surface, the hard soft face we can’t only cover with streams

of sounds affecting shapes that might be words, right about now I should prove

I can betray, fuck, acknowledge, ignore, assault, berate, love, abhor, obey, and die’ (p. 18)

However bleak a picture Berrigan paints of the dehumanizing and dehumanized post-2020 world, he nonetheless always manages to operate a return to a more embodied poetics, that offers a defense against the threat of annihilation: ‘the city surrendered itself to me, I survive only because I live within this reversal,’ (p. 18)

In a moving plea for the de-commodification of life and love, the collection ends on a ‘Poem Inspired by Everything,’ a boisterous homage to New York’s stubbornness:

‘My own powdered transparent gloves

make my fingers look desiccated—a thought

parallel to a fuzzy pink gasmask sported by

a fellow strolling by twenty feet away, fifty

masks for seventy bucks at the stationary

store on A, if you ask, grayish blue and intent

a whole other present, my idea of a sentence:

a summary of daily briefings delivered by

rainbow buntings, the horseshoe bar selling

drinks to go to a politely spaced line, & when

the drawn, I mean dawn, distracted from its

game of catch with figure & ground, speaks

I just keep listening to this fish, aghast at

the split fins I and we call legs. I hear sitting

in these fins, sunlight a costume of horizontal

neon bars, early pandemic bloom lines coming

through cracks the clouds briefly perform’ (p. 170)

Don’t Forget to Love Me is also a craftsman’s reflection on his work, in the form of a relentless observation of the writing self:

‘The barrier to my left, not the margin, which is also a barrier, may not appreciate my handwriting or general presence

Why would someone write something like that?

Well I’m not someone & I only write like when I’m grieving

Which is almost always, with intermittence, & inner mittens’ (p. 123-124)

When it comes to form, as the collection progresses the lines almost seem to sway, as if struggling to stay on the page. Almost ready to tilt and spill, they converse with Berrigan’s punctuation scheme that constantly upsets the precarious balance of the discourse, rendering it all the more susceptible to the surges of sounds:

‘                  Trope trophies

         for the unearned

                          the un-urned?

(the disambiguation

fairy don’t

         stop by

                                                  (but I like

no more)

                                   being an adjunct  ) (p. 116)

Language, signs and sounds all end up converging in lines of a rare delicateness, in which the quiet hope of healing seems to float within a space left vacant precisely for it, between words, between lines, between poems, so that the reader may experience it fully. In many ways, then, Don’t Forget to Love Me is a collection about letting oneself look and see—or even seize—the minute details that life invariably offers, even at its most unmoored point, and experiencing ‘the intensity of a repeated feeling’ (p. 16):

‘                                        certain shopping carts

                                                                  may contain fire escapes

*****

             “Of the societal construct that is dinosaurs” —from a fantasy basketball text thread

*****

                talk about a thing

                with great separation

                    between definition

& understanding

( finger

rolling

in    space

next

to     ear )’ (p. 13)

Anselm Berrigan’s Don’t Forget to Love Me gradually reconciles the poetic voice with the possibility of beauty in a once senseless, anesthetized world. He invites us to let go of our need to make things make sense, and to embrace the caressing chaos of the American yawp.