Three Answers: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

by Michael Coffey, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 4/10/2006

Poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts. Among her books are The Heat Bird, Empathy, Sphericity and Four Year Old Girl. A new book, I Love Artists: New Selected and Poems, is just out from University of California Press. Her collaborations include books with artists Richard Tuttle and Kiki Smith..

PW: After a career of publishing with small presses, what does it mean to be have a selected, drawing from all your previous work, published by a large university press? Has the experience been different? Are your expectations different?

MB: My experience with great small presses, I. Reed Books, Burning Deck, Station Hill and Kelsey St., was personal, cutting edge and on a scale that suits me, intense and uncompromising. At first I was a bit apprehensive with the process at California. I’d never had a publisher who didn’t love me. I wasn’t used to administration by e-mail. I’ve come to a high respect for them as a cultural institution and as a collaborator. I enjoyed being exposed to evolved societal standards of punctuation, to the idealism of my editor, which was revealed very quietly. I enjoy the feeling of the weight of institutional support behind my book.And I’m intrigued by the sophistication of the book design, which has a beautiful scale.

PW: You are well-known for the length of your poetic line as well as your connection to the visual arts. You have a daughter with the artist Richard Tuttle, and in the title poem to your new book, there are clear references to the work of Bruce Naumann, among other contemporary artists. Is there any relation between your long line and the visual arts?

MB: Perhaps what my line length and my relationship with artists have in common is emphasis on the visual, as I think my line length came from looking every day at the landscape of New Mexico, its horizontal scale, which was so responsive to changing light.

PW: You say in the title poem in the new book, “Telling was engendered in my body and fell upon me, like a battle skimming across combatants, like a bird hovering.” Is there anything about your personal history that you feel compels or suggests a certain aesthetic?

MB: I have said that being born into the Chinese language in Beijing and moving to the United States and into English as a baby, when my linguistic structures were forming, perhaps instilled in me a sense of the relativity of meaning and expression, which is a central theme of my work. Also, I wonder if my use of landscape as a canvas on which to explore philosophical questions is related to Chinese traditions in poetry. Sometimes I think my affinity for abstraction is partly the result of my alienation of having come from somewhere else.