De Verloren Tijd

Time Lost: Anselm Berrigan

De Verloren Tijd
30-10-2020

Perdu's English podcast, Time Lost, focuses on unpublished and unpublishable work.
In this second episode, poet Anselm Berrigan presents his unpublished  three-part poem titled Elevation from the Crypt.  During the subsequent  conversation with Alma Apt, he discusses the  themes of interruption,  lack of clarity, and distraction that run  through this work in  particular.
As the poem speeds up, the  listener is left with shreds of  information, after-images and  half-formed thoughts. In between all  this, one-liners get stuck and stay  stuck in your head; poetic jokes  and jabs that loop around:
"an ability to antagonize
 organisms I mean organize
 antagonisms,"
In their conversation, Berrigan  speaks about how to find your way  into and back out of a poem's  structure, about writing that allows one  to find a collective voice, and  the problem of publishing longer poems.