Notes From Irrelevance

by Anselm Berrigan

"A vortex, a nexus, and a weather system all to himself."—Small Press Traffic

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2011

About the author

Anselm Berrigan is the author of four books of poetry, including Free Cell, Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Notes from Irrelevance, and is the co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and formerly served as Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. He lives and works in his hometown of New York City.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes from Irrelevance reminds me of those movie scenes where the hero has seconds to defuse a ticking bomb by touching two wires together, but isn’t sure which the right ones are. The wires here are the twisting, tensile lines, like the seven-clause stunner that opens the poem; the bomb is the urgency of the poet’s self-interrogation as it works its way through memory, family history, friendships, anxieties, and “uncodable degrees of grief”; the movie is the studied artfulness of the rhetoric; while the hero is Anselm but also finally us, the public for whom the poem’s variety of assertions, confessions, and evasions are performed.

On its surface, the book seems like an easy climb. As “a transcription of/a stain on the soul/of the off-looker,” it recalls Dostoevsky’s anguished, appealingly underdog narrator in Notes from Underground. Like him, Berrigan draws in the reader as a kind of invisible confessor to a searching, sometimes self-lacerating assessment of his life:

I am
not inferno, no, no
matter how aptly
uncharacterized by
stranger and estranged
alike, my brooding bent
toward seeing, forcing
an issue out of perceptual
marginalia—“my life” or
more succinctly, my
humor.

That “issue” includes bracingly open reflections on competitiveness, sobriety, desire, childhood, parenthood, work life, city life, first-named relationships (Dana, Sylvie, Ted, Eileen), and a lineage extending from “my father” to “the baby [that] sits on my thigh” needing “a chance to unfix/all she’s told.” If the self in writing’s like tonality in music, Notes from Irrelevance is hooky with C’s, giving its readers a finely rendered set of “micro-meanings” that modulate easily from poetry to autobiography.

What excites me most in the poem is how this material interacts with another, more dissonant narrative that’s as much about withholding as revealing. In one especially memorable image, the poet asks:

Is a nude picture of
Jackie O found in
Andy Warhol’s suitcase
really a bizarre item?

A nude in a suitcase, arriving in the interrogative, seems like an apt metaphor for the poem’s own wavering between exposure and erasure, disclosing and concealing. “I am constantly/hiding my torso in/front of our bloodshot/field of vision”: this contradictory moment of self-assertion—“I am” joined with “constantly hiding”—rhymes with similar lines throughout the book. The same voice that confides personal anecdotes about Ted or Eileen also tells us that “I garble the/rhetorical aspects of/sensibility or silence/them altogether as/occasion implicitly demands”; that “I am not most comfortable/removing layers of myself/at no one’s behest”; that “I am most/certainly engaged to a/dissolution of image,/even as I wield my own/anti-program in glossy/fashion”; and that “I will never/abandon my desire to/recede into and out of/interconnection.”

Hiding, garbling, dissolving, and receding are themes that cut across the confessional surface. Berrigan’s special genius is to make them feel like moral imperatives, worked deep into the poem’s formal fabric. My favorite moment in Notes creates its effect by stoically evading its own punch line, trusting the reader to dive in ear first and find it:

The other day
I was imagining the
Marquis de Sade,
pronouncing the Sade
part with additional
invisible letters: an h
after the s and an r
after the a. There would
also be pronunciation
of the e as if it were a
long a: the Marquis de
Sade, yes, I was only
thinking about the Sade
part: he himself means
nothing more than
opportunity, as all the
horrible pop songs that
haunt my chintzier memory
play all around me.

I come up from this passage a little haunted, too—by the unspoken ‘Shar-day,’ by the r hidden in Sade, and by the traces of the poet’s own associative leaps in transforming Marquis to chanteuse.

Similar moments occur across the book, the function of a varied and intricate syntax that can move from bumper sticker-sized koans—“Not ‘true.’ Happening.” “I will/ not grovel ethically before/just what is”—to the fin de siècle panache of “One may/be so dispossessed as to/emit the frailest of leers/at these mood-lit/passersby.” “Signs of virtuosity,” writes Berrigan, “are no impediment to the punk,” but there’s more to the display than flexing chops. “So the task,” we’re told,

is to find a new way
to speak, to tell of being,
tell being to fuck off and
come back with a steelier
measure of lack, a kinder
spirit for company,
distance, pain, fortitude
in the empathetic grist
rephrasing caught rides
half the time, or so a
speaker badly sung
with snarling hook
intones.

Get that—or fall off it and get back on again—and you’ve got the poem’s measure. Or, better, the measure it gives the reader through the process of reading it: speaking as being, speaker as singing, deflection as ethic, and style as the trick to still the bomb.

—from The Poetry Project Newsletter #230

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes From Irrelevance by Anselm Berrigan is an 80-page poem which I read and reread over several sittings. In the interest of transparency, I'll state that I won the book through LibraryThing, but the experience of reading it would have been well worth the price of the book. I need to reread it at least one more time before I can feel like I've even begun to digest it. I found it soothing and provocative, with fragmented jumps that were sometimes irritating but more often woke me up and moved me to greater focus and attention to both the work before me and the world around me.

The book gives glimpses of the poet's experience of the world and himself in it. The language reflects and refracts this experience and recreates it, creating a resonance in the reader allowing both a brief connection with the poet and a new connection with the world and her experience of it.

I found the work exhilarating. I strongly recommend it to all lovers of language.

[Anselm]

so lame

[J B · Rating 4 out of 5]

High four stars. Reminded me deeply of my own poetry which is why it was recommended to me by my friend Lukas. Here's an excerpt that inspired an idea of a poem:

"(...) I write
with the fact of being in
civilization as context
to which it is hardly
necessary to refer unless
some use gets cajoled
to the surface, making
plans to make plans
forming a foundation
for invisible suburbs
within the city. (...)"
(page 15, parentheses and ellipses mine)

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 3 out of 5]

One long poem that stays intriguing, while much of the time impenetrable. I read it, gave it a week, and read it again.

[Erica Reichert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes on Irrelevance comprises one single book-length stanza—65 pages of briskly progressing lyrical writing. I really struggled with this offering from Anselm Berrigan, in spite of the fact that it took me about an hour to read (aloud, as poetry should be read). This book made me feel not very smart because I had a hard time making sense of most of it, even though I am an avid and prolific reader of poetry, and have been for a couple of decades. I feel like one requires at least a Masters degree in English in order to decipher the larger meaning driving this work. Berrigan references his father, alcoholism, fatherhood, and a couple of popular cultural mile markers, and clearly references and critiques the alienation inherent in the experience of (post)modern urban technocratic daily life, but most was unintelligible to me, a middling reader. I found myself struggling to track Berrigan’s briskly winding path through the piece; honestly, I found the experience somewhat akin to maintaining one’s own grounding in conversation with a florid schizophrenic.

All of the above notwithstanding, I would not discourage any curious reader to take the leap and dive into this piece. The work is adventurous and innovative. Notes on Irrelevance provides struggling novices like me with a counter example of contemporary poetry as autobiography, confession, and cultural criticism.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't like to give negative reviews, but this book was definitely not to my taste. It strikes me as being loosely in the tradition of Ginsberg's Howl in that it seems to be stream-of-consciousness and seems to be trying to express a dominant social/emotional experience of people at this time, that being the irrelevance of the title. However, Berrigan isn't really a howler but more an intellectual juggler of words and ideas. You'll find little imagery here. And rather than Ginsberg's long lines, Berrigan's are short. If there was any methodology/crafting of the line breaks, it was lost on me. And if there was any wedding of sight and sense in the columnar appearance of the poem, it was also lost on me. I would have preferred reading it in prose form with paragraph breaks. Here's a sample from page 33 so you can judge for yourself whether this is your sort of poetry:

unwilling to measure the
qualities of desire as we
stand in its relation, I
find I stare at your script
from afar, wondering if
the open, refined, sensuous,
conservative imagination
it projects is a functional
defense against the light
arts, or more of an active
missionary filter with, for,
and from reality's stance
on a version of "us."
Crimson elephant
smiling from a poster
for art disguised as
delirium. Does it nod?

[Philip Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

If something vaguely smacks of epistolary, I am lapping it up right now. These artifacts of thought that are reaching directly to the reader, posed in some ways as queries by the writer, to the reader(s), "what do you think?" and in between the lines a confession of sorts of their own experience. I had remembered Anselm Berrigan's, Notes from Irrelevance, and that sharing of experience without monologue – but with the reader as collaborator/conspirator/co-instigator – and in those sixty odd pages of "sharing," something honest about where we stand today. Because I have been lapping and looking for that, I went back to it and had a different experience this time around. Before I was appreciative of craft. This time, a couple years on, I read through it 5 times in moments where I could be alone with the text, and I felt, oddly, no longer alone.

p.shaw

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became aware of this cool book-length poem at Anselm Berrigan's reading at Emory last December. He recommended opening to random pages and reading, and that's just what I did. I enjoyed the somewhat stream-of-conscious-yet-obviously-well-crafted-and-maybe-tightly-edited approach of the poem. Berrigan's controlled chaos command of language is fascinating to behold, if not tedious at points. Regardless, a very good work.

[Derek Fenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

There will be many returns to this new poem by AB. It stands singularly in its place, the poet coming through from the mind, onward. A steady voice, with presentiment for all the wants of writing at the edge of it all--the self the poetic, the epistolary.

[Jmignault]

The notes are the murderer.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally I don't rate books here, but felt obliged in this case to help counteract some bozo's one star review.