From City Lights: “A scion of the New York School, Edmund Berrigan grew up in and around poetry. The follow up to Can It!, his well-received memoir, More Gone is his first full-length collection in a decade. Written in a distinctive mix of New York quotidian and post-Language abstraction, More Gone documents the poet’s search for domestic tranquility amidst the city that never sleeps. Berrigan draws on a variety of materials, from songs to found language, assembling them into poems of oblique humor and wry perspective on the challenges of everyday existence. These poems aren’t anecdotes or confessions so much as objects in their own right, even as they remain rooted in a recognizable urban landscape…”
About the Author: “Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a memoir, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). He is editor of The Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). He records and performs music as I Feel Tractor, and lives in Brooklyn.”
Don’t miss out: Berrigan will be reading with Lauren Russell and Karen Lillis at White Whale Bookstore on August 17!
“Edmund Berrigan’s poems may be ‘more gone,’ but they are also more here. ‘Anxious, patient and sentient,’ they happen at an intimate core of self, family, community, and world, webbing out in all our neighboring shades and activities of being, where experience glitches and knits. They are rollercoastery, beautiful, knowing, revelatory, and real.” —Eleni Sikelianos
POEM FOR JESS
I have inherited a kingdom of nothing
& I would and do share this with you
as the great gift. To turn in bed,
turning again, tracing the morning glories
up the cable wire, chasing cats up and down
the apartment, piling clothes
by the front door. It’s your birthday
soon (7 months) and mine in a few days.
I will be half 70, looking for my merits
In standing procedure, resting on the
Couch with my favorite accoutrements,
Books and papers piled in all the rooms,
Guitars falling through the corners
And shaky hands picking out the
Melodies. Opening the blinds and waking
up in comfort, waking again and again,
balanced and tottering, in regard,
seamfully and porously contented and coiled
MORE GONE
For the hopeless night sky often
Whose charms and harms are confused
When I copy edit the technical
Doory grains hovering in the queen’s navel
The pain spills over tiny levies
On the bed ablaze exiting
The dunce crop we surf Cy Ginger
Black market sports surgery
Enemies from the wild plains
Rice rips road or savage sweeps home plate
In the corner bed the agate
Built boats to shoot dem rebels
My gun’s steady gonna hold it level
The vehicles I need to continue
My relation, empty fugues
Rise up the flood to notions
Seeded joys refuse to perform
Hypnotized and running
A nice breeze blowing
Not a could in the sky
INSECURITY BLANKET
Remember how hard it is to be a good person?
When you take it for granted, you fail.
That’s when sportsmanship reconfigures its current.
One thing I’ve never been is alone, offset by
Loneliness. I blame myself for underestimating
The company, though I often preferred that
Of broken people over those untouched by pain.
Them I would forget in constellations of personal violence
Like a side pocket of absinthe, and drinking it,
Never to be seen until plain existence begs a return.
It’s the perception of matter transition that can’t
Help but draw attention to itself. Equally
Then recasting that perception onto others fuels
Our invisible republics that desubstantiate
Equality in favor of narrative control,
Path inhabitants be damned. Let’s infect our
Clients with fuck activism and bone-crushing
Tackles. That’s when we will deepen our bullpen
One roster spot at a time. That’s when I will
Punch you with a fist of roaches.
Copyright © by Edmund Berrigan, reprinted with permission of City Lights Books.
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