Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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Berssenbrugge in 1975

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Chinese: 白萱华; pinyin: Bái Xuānhuá; born October 5, 1947, in Beijing, China)
is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the
Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is married to
the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated.[1]

Contents

1 Personal life

2 Poetry

2.1 Fish Souls

2.2 Summits Move With the Tide

2.3 Random Possession

2.4 The Heat Bird

2.5 Empathy

2.6 Sphericity

2.7 Endocrinology

3 Awards

4 Work

4.1 Poetry

4.2 Plays

4.3 Chapbooks

4.4 Broadsides

4.5 Magazines and journals

4.6 Anthologies

5 Notes
6 External links

6.1 Poems and prose

6.2 Audio

6.3 Video

Personal life

Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing to Chinese and Dutch-American parents, and grew up near Boston,
Massachusetts. She was educated at Barnard, Reed, and Columbia University. After receiving her M.F.A.
from Columbia in 1974, she settled in rural northern New Mexico, which has remained her primary
residence ever since.

Poetry

After receiving her degree, Berssenbrugge became active in the multicultural poetry movement of the
1970s along with Leslie Marmon Silko as well as Ishmael Reed, theater director Frank Chin, and political
activist Kathleen Chang. Berssenbrugge taught at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, where
she co-founded the internal literary journal Tyuonyi.

Traveling frequently to New York City, Berssenbrugge became engaged in the rich cultural flourishing of
the abstract art movement, and was influenced by New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest,
James Schuyler and Anne Waldman, and then the Language poets, including Charles Bernstein, as well
as artist Susan Bee.[2] She later joined the contributing editorial board for the literary journal
Conjunctions.

Berssenbrugge's poetry is known for its mix of philosophical meditation and personal experience, and
for moving quickly between abstract language and the concrete particulars of immediate perception.
Her poems often contain subtle shifts of grammar and perspective, and Berssenbrugge often works with
collage to produce unexpected juxtapositions. Her work is also known for its exploration of the
complexities of cultural and political identity, an interest informed by her own experience of cultural and
linguistic displacement.

Fish Souls

Fish Souls is Berssenbrugge's first published collection of poems. It was published by Greenwood Press
in 1971. Only 100 numbered copies were published. Information about this volume is scarce.

Summits Move With the Tide

Summits Move With the Tide, subtitled (on the cover of the second edition) Poems and a Play, is
Berssenbrugge's second collection of poems. It was published by the Greenfield Review Press in 1974,
and later in 1982. The acknowledgments page indicates that some of the poems previously appeared in
First Issue, Intro 3, East-West Journal, Cathedral, Ash Tree, Gidra, and Greenwood Press. In contrast to
her later books, most of the poems in the collection are short, with only a few carrying over to new
pages. Additionally, only two poems are broken into numbered stanzas, a format Berssenbrugge would
use in later poems. The poems in the collection are organized into four groups: three groups of poems,
and one play, One, Two Cups.[3]

The book contains the following poems:

Group 1: Aegean; Finn Song To the Bear Ghosts; Bog; Book of the Dead, Prayer; El Bosco; Spirit; Hopi
Basketweaver Song; Beetle is Born, Lives ...; Los Sangre de Cristos; In Bhaudanath; Snow Mountains; Red
Backs & Autumn Leaves ...; and Ghost.

Group 2: Old Man Let's Go Fishing In ...; Travelling [sic] Through Your Country; Propeller Sleep; Fish &
Swimmers & Lonely Birds ...; Spaces are Death; The Second Moment; The Third Moment; Perpetual
Motions; Leaving Your Country; The Old Know By Midsummer; and Abortion.

Group 3: Written Before Easter in New York; Chronicle; Tracks; On The Winter Solstice; Blossom; Hudson
Ice Floes; Poor Mouse; Sky; and March Wind.

Group 4: The play, One, Two Cups.

Random Possession

Random Possession was published by I. Reed Books in 1982. On the contents page the poems are
separated spatially into five unnumbered groups (with only the first three listed on the contents page).
The pagination bears out the scheme, with one empty page between the groups. The book contains the
following poems:

Group 1: Chronicle.

Group 2: The Membrane; Rabbit, Hair, Leaf; On the Mountain with the Deer; The Suspension Bridge;
Numbers of the Date Become the Names of Birds; Spring Street Bar; Heat Wave; The Intention of Two
Rivers; For The Tails of Comets; and Sleep.
Group 3: The Field for Blue Corn; The Reservoir; The White Beaver; Breaking the Circumference; A Deer
Listening; You and You; and Goodbye, Goodbye.

Group 4: The Scientific Method (for Walter); Walter Calls It a Dream Screen; The Constellation Quilt;
Run-off and Silt; The Translation of Verver; and Commentary.

Group 5: Tail.

The Heat Bird

In The Heat Bird, Berssenbrugge shifted to a long-verse format. The book contains only four poems, all
several pages long and broken into numbered stanzas: Pack Rat Sieve; Farolita; Ricochet Off Water; and
The Heat Bird. The verso indicates that some of the poems in the book were previously published in
Conjunctions, Contact II, Roof, and Telephone.

Empathy

Empathy was published by Station Hill Press in 1989, and contains three numbered groups of poems.
The verso indicates that some of the poems appeared in Bridge, Calaban, Conjunctions, Parnassus,
Temblor, and Tyuonyi. The book is dedicated to Bradford Morrow and Sheffield Van Buren, and contains
the following poems:

Group 1: The Blue Taj; Tan Tien; Alakanak Break-Up; Texas; Duration of Water; The Star Field; and
Chinese Space.

Group 2: Jealousy; Recitative; The Carmelites; The Margin; Naturalism; and Fog.

Group 3: War Insurance; Empathy; The Swan; Forms of Politeness; and Honeymoon.

Sphericity

Sphericity was published by Kelsey Street Press in 1993, and was her second collaboration with Richard
Tuttle. The first edition of Sphericity was limited to 2000 copies, with the first 50 signed by
Berssenbrugge and Tuttle and hand-colored by Tuttle. The book consists of six long poems, all with
several numbered stanzas: Ideal; Size; Combustion; Sphericity; Experience; and Value.
Endocrinology

Endocrinology is an artists' book made in collaboration with visual artist Kiki Smith. Forty copies were
produced by Universal Limited Art Editions from a maquette made by Berssenbrugge and Smith.[4] The
Kelsey Street Press edition, a facsimile of the original book, was limited to 2,000 copies, with the first 60
signed and numbered.[5] The book contains a single poem: Endocrinology.

Awards

1976 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

1980 American Book Award for Random Possession.

1981 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

1984 American Book Award for The Heat Bird.

1990 National Endowment for the Arts Award.

1990 PEN West Award[6] for Empathy.

1998 Asian American Literary Award for Endocrinology.

1999 Western States Book Award for Four Year Old Girl.[7]

2004 Asian American Literary Award for Nest.

Work

Poetry

Fish Souls. New York: Greenwood Press. 1971

Summits Move with the Tide. Greenfield Review Press. 1974. ISBN 0-912678-56-9. Other ISBN 978-0-
912678-15-3.

Random Possession. I. Reed Books. 1979. ISBN 0-918408-13-X. Other ISBN 978-0-918408-13-6;

The Heat Bird. Burning Deck Press. 1983. ISBN 0-930901-02-9. Other ISBN I0930901037; 0930901037;
9780930901035

Hiddenness. New York : Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 1987 (A collaboration
with Richard Tuttle)

Empathy. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. 1989

Mizu. Tucson, AZ: Chax Press. 1990

Sphericity. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press. 1993. ISBN 0-932716-30-X. Other ISBNs: 9780932716309;
0932716318; 9780932716316 (A collaboration with Richard Tuttle)
Endocrinology. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press. 1997. ISBN 0-932716-41-5. Other ISBNs: 0932716423
(Limited Edition) (A collaboration with Kiki Smith)

Four Year Old Girl. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 1998

Nest. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0-932716-63-7.

Concordance. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-932716-67-5. (A collaboration with
Kiki Smith)

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems. University of California Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-520-24602-7.

Hello, the Roses. New York: New Directions, 2013. ISBN 978-0811220910.

A Treatise on Stars. New York: New Directions, 2020. ISBN 9780811229388.

Plays

One, Two Cups, directed by Frank Chin, and published in 1974 in Summits Move With the Tide.

Kindness (1994), commissioned by the Ford Foundation and staged at the Center for Contemporary Arts
in Santa Fe with the collaboration of Richard Tuttle, Tan Dun, and Chen Shi Zheng.

Chapbooks

Pack Rat Seive. New York Cambridge Graphic Arts, 1983

Broadsides

The Mouse 5. IE Poetry Broadside Series Two, Clayton Fine Books, 2006. "Issued in an edition of 25
copies of which 20 copies are for sale."

Magazines and journals

Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. The Mouse, Conjunctions, Number 48, Spring 2007.

Anthologies

Claudia Rankine; Juliana Spahr, eds. (2002). "From Four Year Old Girl". American women poets in the
21st century: where lyric meets language. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-6547-1.

John Ashbery; David Lehman, eds. (1988). The Best American Poetry, 1988. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-02-
044181-6.

Notes

Miles Xian Liu, ed. (2002). Asian American playwrights: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook.
Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-31455-1.

Hinton, Laura."Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge" Jacket, Issue 27, 2005

Summits Move With the Tide. Greenfield Review Press. 1982. ISBN 978-0-912678-15-3.

Hinton, Laura."Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge" Jacket, Issue 27, 2005
Endocrinology. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press. 1997. ISBN 0-932716-41-5.

Zoë Anglesey, ed. (1994). Stone on stone: poetry by women of diverse heritages. Open Hand Publishing,
LLC. ISBN 978-0-940880-48-1.

"Archived copy". Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved September 4, 2010.

External links

The Mei-mei Berssenbrugge page at Poets.org

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's author page at the Electronic Poetry Center

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge page at Penn Sound

A review of I Love Artists by Ben Lerner

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Links at "Intercapillary Space" - links to Berssenbrugge poems, reviews, talks,
recordings

Berssenbrugge's works at [http://www.kelseyst.com/ Kelsey Street Press]

"Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Berssenbrugge participated in

Hinton, Laura. "Three Conversations With Mei-mei Berssenbrugge" Jacket, Issue 27, 2005

Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Nest," by Natalia Cecire

Boundary Work in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Pollen," by Jonathan Skinner

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.