Primitive State

by Anselm Berrigan

Primitive State is a book-length poem written across the fall and winter of 2008-09 in which everything is out of equilibrium except spontaneously all of it. Bored by self-protection, the poem makes lines out of sentences produced by a brain afraid of turning stupid. The result is a continuous arrangement of deadpan observations, a reboot of the poet's writing mind and routine as grid, a partial portrait of the poet's then one year-old daughter, and a homage to the list poem as a catalog of consciousness-beats. The poem keeps open with an enduring impatience the question of professional responsibility toward the force or scale of inspiration that is there every day here where everybody is.

http://www.aerialedge.com/PrimitiveSt...

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

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

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book description is true to form - tweetlike observations. Funny, dark, revealing, cutting lines that encourage critical thinking.

Some favorites:

"You can point to the cost of food, but only if you can handle it pointing back" (8)

"Once I backed off my internal stance of disillusioned agony
and adopted a tone of unironic detachment I was able to
make her laugh several times over the course of a conversation
by simply relaying facts as I know them" (48)

"A bucket of hard cheese next to a spray can of easy cheese" (74)