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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Poem-A-Day: from "Primitive State" by Anselm Berrigan

      
from "Primitive State"
by Anselm Berrigan
 

Thingitation righteousness for pre-avail to drive away the mighty

   kraken

Put me in a room full of strangers and leave me alone

...cauldron in twine, disarray as fair game, keen ablution borne 

   skeezed...

Forced into assertions by a lack of attention

...the warp we held out in readiness, taking wind off the table, the

   awe thus retrofitted
within the futility of cleanliness, that mere cost...

But I am not trying to achieve a general unity of impression, which

   anyway sounds like a
metaphysics of port authority

Clear-cut you are my enemy, alternate pen failing eternity

...bazaar residence, chatty folly, all perks, all codes...

If'n diffident glee

For the appearance of a glove, designed in wood to imitate a

   mama whooping crane from
the neck up, would prevent the little chick from being humanized

   by coming through a
hatch in the wall to commence feeding time

Where its nothing personal happens

Selling points envying the rim

The patter of claws as I upload Brahms in the dark

He demonstrated the location of his injury by touching the trainer's

   parallel area

...video courtesies, seeing the quiddity a five-headed eagle brings

   to light, in a touch...

A late run at respectability about to come up short

Mellow radiation lulls with rosemary

T'aint

The window so far behind the what

...drums in the bleep, four savory flavors in mind, forgeries bloody

   coming after me...

It was indeed a terrible idea to lend a valuable book to a painter

Soon I must go to sleep and simulate someone at rest

Trilobite death wish to replace beer funnels downstairs with

She pours herself into recognition as if every moment is a new one

Should I hide the ointment from the truth

The industry of analyzing that which may

String straps suck

Should I gnaw on everything with my five pesky teeth

To sit back down still high amidst the aggro-squirrel set under

   amber street light, kid
asleep, paper catching drizzle, phone lurking in pocket

Standards, such as yours, don't exist

...risers tracking reliquaries, gradations of skill at filling a thirty-

   second spot...

At some point it became spontaneous to have a plan

A daydream that everyone speaks only in acronyms 


Copyright © 2013 by Anselm Berrigan. Used with permission of the author.
About this Poem:
 
"This is a run of material from about sixteen pages inside a thirty-eight page piece called 'Primitive State,' the entirety of which is made of modular sentence-addled lines and their bracketing horizontal spaces. The lines with surrounding ellipses run occasionally through the whole thing as a kind of on-going listing within the structure, which is itself a long list of consciousness smears that probably shouldn't go together. But on the Joe Brainard premise that there are no colors that don't go together, they kept going together anyway."

Anselm Berrigan

Poetry by Berrigan 

Notes from Irrelevance

 

Poem-A-Day launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.

 

Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem In Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.
April 4, 2013

Anselm Berrigan is the author of several collections of poems including, Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011) and Free Cell (City Lights, 2009). He is the Poetry Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, a former Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College and The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

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by Ted Berrigan
by CA Conrad
by Timothy Donnelly

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