Don't Forget to Love Me

Anselm Berrigan is the author of many books of poetry: Pregrets, (BlackSquare Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm. A member of the subpress publishing collective, he has published books by Hoa Nguyen, Steve Carey, Adam DeGraff, and Brendan Lorber.  From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where he also hosted the Wednesday Night Reading Series for four years. He teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program. Berrigan was granted an Individual Artists Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in 2017, and was also awarded a 2015 Process Space Residency by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a Robert Rauschenberg Residency by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2014. He was a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellow in Poetry for 2007, and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry.

• THEORIES OF INFLUENCEIn BetweenerPress conferenceBinge Better“I would like to have a pounce of pigeons”The Other Shoe Issue“She’s feeding the local birds”yes , I knew that I always wouldTheories of InfluenceProof (“everything you are gone slightly mad…”)Poem in the Manner of CivilizationWobble Factory“broken noseling glides on air, bloken exhaust”“anticipating a violence that’s always coming’s”“applause performed only in fist bumps”“dodo money powder”“history by implication nuzzles in fragments”“live in the agency of self-deprecation, just to mean”“I wanna hear more about how you feel”“kind on that note”“just the layeredness of that”“narrow bridge with fraught fundamentals caught”“razor days await”“sounds’ moving shape shapes the unforgiven”“humans are much more interesting when they’re open about”“uh-oh all of too many wounds lights pointing down”“the figure in my dream collapse was like what”“the smart friend explains that we never really touch”“when we met we talked about what it is to observe”“the best dork defender, an atomic bomb aesthetic”JOHN COLETTI IMITATION RACKETFind Myplease keep it conciseJohn Coletti Zoom Meetingj.c. imitation #2“A: ‘Will you be voting in the election on Tuesday?’”“ear pause”You don’t sayYou can’t soppethyI understand & wish to proceedBig Sketchbook Semi-Survival Poems“Like Real People I lent normal”“Post-cormorant bar:”“I will”Planet TerrorLast Thrift“Times are dangerous !”“moon lunar hallucinations”“forgive the”“brought to bears”“junky kitty wants”“the singer sings”“I’ve done my all”“( get your ass”“got”“g”“poetry”“The bird watchers tap their lenses”“your”“works to the left”Marcella D. reading—8/16/20—K/S backyard—Hastings on the HudsonPrivacy Mutation TokenII.from an ongoing untitled poem for Lewis WarshSelected Resurrections“the words get together”“Vermeer was something of a visitor”on all my substitute birthdaysConsumer Affairs Unenclosed Sidewalk Cafe LicenseSelf-involved poem for Brandon B. on his BdayPoem written during a zoom meetingPoem written just before turning fifty“You can’t keep yourself in sync”FreegretsCorner EyeStill HereTo CedarPoem inspired by EverythingNotesAcknowledgments

For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality...—Michael Brodeur, Boston GlobeAnselm Berrigan's voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry, for its singular welding of candor, political awareness, and humor that attempts, with a very high rate of success, to co-opt the commercial and political jargon of our times to return it to higher purposes...—Virginia Konchan, Galatea ResurrectsAnselm Berrigan's free radical poetry chops your hands off mid-line, drops the book into your lap, and caresses you with disquiet indie pop allusions and echoes of ubiquitous advertising absurdities as it cheers on that last ill-intentioned pint before the crestfallen exit from the pub on a Monday night while ambitiously and unambiguously telling you it might not be OK, but I wouldn't know anyway.—Jason Eric Jensen, The Brake Lights