Disarming Matter
Edmund Berrigan
publisher: The Owl Press, 1999
isbn: 0-9669430-0-7
price: $12.50
I have a desire to transcend conscious speech,
not to the exclusion of words or letters,
it is not a scholarly wish, must be removed
from the present past future inclusive everything
beyond understanding.
[76]
While not always so heady, the underlining feature to this debut volume -- ranging in tone from the beat goofiness of a Gregory Corso to the Symbolist-tinged collages of early Ashbery, from the rich dailiness of a Bernadette Mayer to the more heated "boheme" of Rimbaud -- is a negotiation between the dream-like irrealities of daily life, a polyvalent sexuality that is not out of tune with much Gen X flirtation with self-contradictory identities, and a figure called "God" who occasionally drops in as something like a placeholder for the channel to the "other world."
The beautiful long sonnet sequence "Cross House" is a mysterious affair, like a traipse through a virtual haunted mansion, with figures of love and desire teaming among the threat of limitless possibility:
The persons I have seen in patterns
were so torn as to be absolute traps.
[...]
She had never seen him trusted above all
earthly things. They were leaning on the
screen before the fire. "You bear your
wrongs more gently than I can bear
mine." He bent over the group
in a caressing way, with renewed violence.
[54]
The quiet surety of Berrigan's meters are perfect for the wavering between "violence" and the "caress," and he resembles a 17th century metaphysical -- Herbert the closest -- in his decorous rhetoric, which he dons most strongly when asking the "big questions":
Oh, but never, I have something, a major contribution
to the record of life, in a world winter-obscene, that
works with fingers peel back a series of inventions
for mortality. Armchair comfortable for those who desire it.
Absence from the physical being as strong a security as any.
[34]
These are big issues for such a poet in his mid-twenties, one who, consequently, doesn't take himself too seriously, and is as pop-sensible, funny and crazily improvisatory as any grunge lyricist:
I am a heartfelt bulging crotch
when I take on the swiss initiative [...]
I made love to Nico a lot, I dug her a lot
it was like hanging out with a guy except
she had girl pants
[16]
This combination of addresses to the higher powers with a mischievous running-with-the-disaffected-youths of the present makes Berrigan a true Hamet-like figure for the nineties, not the highbrow of Eliot, but a thoughtful, late-century rebel engaged in his deep, "irrational" discourse with Yorick while the world only dreams.
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