Let's call Pregrets by Anselm Berrigan (out from Black Square Editions last winter) something like a memoir. Or, let's call it something like poetry. Or maybe, art journalism alongside memoir and personal lyric inside a diary cut-up, blended, and processed into poem forms.
     Or like Virginia Woolf writes in her diary, "There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to...Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes to mind." [1]
     Whatever else it may be, Pregrets is certainly this. A book of poems totally elastic—at times solemn and elegiac, at others farcical and raucous. It is definitely loose knit and beautiful: the weird beauty of collage and assemblage. Beautiful and slovenly, for Berrigan's poems here (as in every book of his) exist among paradoxes of thoughts and feelings. Double, triple, and quadruple negatives. Oxymorons, neologisms, and malaprops.
     For instance in the poem "Regrets," Berrigan writes, "it's very bright said nurse Boris / & ever since my thought balloon's been filled with wings / drooling to a shatterpoint, what you figure death adds to / you after it finishes erasing" (45). Exactly what a thought balloon filled with wings might be, or how it might drool to a shatterpoint, is beside the question. Berrigan doesn't stop to define images like these; rather, he brings them to the page as they appear from out of the messy, subconscious psychosphere that we, as human beings, are all stumbling about in (yet rarely have the sense to acknowledge). Further, Berrigan skillfully links these strange transmissions to other, perhaps more typical, sentiments—what you figure death adds—and in the end creates an arresting scene that is eerily and utterly (and darkly) true.
     Berrigan prepares us for such imaginative tensions from the outset with an epigraph by the iconic New York dance critic and poet, Edwin Denby. He wanted everything in the picture out of / equilibrium, except spontaneously all of it. The line serves a perfect thesis for the book, as it describes the internal combustions of each poem to follow: their slipstreams of physical and metaphysical data, their omnidirectional nodes of witness and critique. The random fates of playgrounds, park benches, street corners, and city avenues. "We might / as well count bag leafs, they're banned in Paris, I see / one know, shredded, I mean now, in a blank tree in / Sauer Park on 12th near B, where I write this amidst / people disguised as people" (80).
     Denby's figure returns as the dedication at the close of the poem "Egrets" (the final poem of Section II), whose speaker, "buys a ticket to see what's true...hurry to ballet, its invention overflows like a rifled trunk...but its contagious / tonight the two stray cats here wail"(52). Like so many of the poems in Pregrets, "Egrets" details the specific circumstances of one body and brain (a "miracle consciousness") awash in the various stimuli of the world. Berrigan manages to metabolize everything in frame: sights, smells, overheard conversations. "Manhattan night, inbound, outbound...groans, storm-dark or moon fog instable near my shoe" (52). And crafts lines that together become a frame, a piece, so that with each poem Berrigan assembles a real art object—akin to Gertrude Stein writing with the brush-work of Matisse and Picasso, or to the automatic collage styles of Robert Rauschenberg, Willem De Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Jasper Johns. (All of whom, either implicitly or explicitly, exist inside Pregrets.)
     This is true to the point that Berrigan sometimes seems like an art writer reporting from the quotidian exhibitions of his own life. Reports that are vital and unusual, despite their ubiquity. In a poem like "Degrets," Berrigan records the environment of a room through sense-colors: "languorous working in a front of / poured-in window light, off-white airshaft blue pushing / forward into the flatness of a room masquerading as / two" (71). What begins as a strict account of space transforms into a lyric of extraordinary attention, of haptic feeling, which resembles the best work of James Schuyler in The Morning of the Poem or of Eileen Myles in Maxfield Parrish.
     Of course, Berrigan, Schuyler, and Myles are all, to different degrees, New Yorkers, and members of a lineage of New York City writers that also includes Edwin Denby. Berrigan, as with his predecessors, achieves a dynamic compositional style that opens to the possibilities of everyday life, rather than one that freezes these experiences into static, foreclosed interpretations. In a refreshing turn, Berrigan prioritizes the superficial: the energy of surface interactions and relationships that, once transcribed, can create the poem.
     In a reading at Bard College from 1982, the poet Ted Berrigan speaks about his writing process, explaining that he "[hasn't] been interested in much below the surface," but rather, "in what comes at you from the physical person across from you" [2]. Like his father, Anselm Berrigan cultivates a sensitivity to such spontaneous happenings, an awareness of the emotional electrons bouncing and ricocheting from person to person, place to place, thing to thing. As readers, we are on a thrilling ride-along of poetic vision and inner dialogue. "Everything's better when you're crying, systematic / & human, I need a spliffed roof of a head over / my causeway, strata collar plays giant slacky thwarts / try mouth" (64). There is much of the Language poets here: Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian. Though likely more significant marks of Clark Coolidge, as he makes a bridge to the experimental work of Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley.
     But enough historicizing. Anselm Berrigan's writing is alive of its own right, delightfully idiosyncratic, and unique from anything else you're likely to read. My favorite poems of Pregrets are those that alloy the speaker's present inputs with past memories to form a complex, affecting whole. In another poem, again titled "Regrets," Berrigan writes, "I regret knowing what time it's ever been, I regret / not painting Not The Bathroom on your white / walls in big indigo letters...I regret all kinds of nothings / little beautiful timidities...you're not actually / all slime, you're a very fierce frail piece of guy / supposedly you didn't turn around the last time / dad said goodbye" (86).
     From a book that is experimental at its core, process-driven and quizzical, it is these private interiors, which the speaker pictures briefly and at a slant, that capture my heart. I don't mean Berrigan is sparing of these details; they appear throughout the poems in scenes of his family and loved ones. Scenes that are joyous and silly, or else weighted by melancholy and the oddities of grief. These details travel through Pregrets as an undercurrent, here and there entering into view and at all times investing the writing with nuance and dexterity.
     I'll cite again the poem "Regrets" from the start of this essay, continuing the lines: "I can almost listen for how / my dads smelled funny, you ever carry your dad's pee / in a jar, little technician of the sacred, butter and / whatever's left in the fridge on bread...Doug / taped a Doug Strange card to the wall we gave him / his body, gone so quickly, deep into the humor well."
     With Pregrets, Anselm Berrigan becomes this technician of the sacred, along with the sacrilege and the weird, the ineffable and the routine. The poems of Pregrets are vibrant with the touch of Berrigan's intellect and craft. His writing encourages us to follow the tracks of an ingenious mind always a step ahead, a leap to the side. Because of this, Pregrets is a page-turner (in the bizarrest, most satisfying sense). A book alone or with few others in its genre. Above all, Pregrets is a privilege to read—an absolute success.

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[1] Johanna Skibsrud, The Nothing That Is: Essays on Art, Literature and Being. Book*hug Press, 2019

[2] https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan.php