Pregrets

by Anselm Berrigan

Note for poems: I get an odd kind of pleasure from writing longhand underneath pre-selected titles, titles that seem to imply or propose a tonal space from which to begin generating and/or arranging material. A small show of drawings, prints and paintings by Jasper Johns at the Museum of Modern Art titled Regrets made me curious to try that word as a title this past spring, and the term Pregrets – the fantasy or fact of getting ready to feel sorrow or distress, the attendant humors such a frame might provoke, the probability of not landing in the predetermined spot, the derangement of proposed memories – popped into place after awhile and eventually took over as the primary term to work under. As the process of writing these poems is on-going, I don’t have a further assessment to make of their makes, and don’t want to force one out just yet, out of fear of stopping the vehicle before it ends on its own terms. I can say that I’m relying heavily on what I consider internalized collagist wiring to make relatively quick decisions about what gets into the poems.

http://vagabondpress.net/collections/...

44 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2014

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.