Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's soft voice soothed her audience at her reading for the Contemporary Writers Series on March 6. Like a gentle lullaby, her coaxing intonation harmoniously complemented the words of her poetry, providing a consistency and steadiness to her ethereal lyrics.
The abstract and diffuse threads of her poetry had an even and nurturing quality, as if she was spoon-feeding her listeners. Her poetry expressed the multi-layered complexities of language.
Berssenbrugge molded her scattered words into a continuum of multiple perspectives. In her poem, "Kisses of the Moon," inspired by a performance of the Bill T. Jones dance company, she choreographed a multifaceted rendition of intimacy.
Moving quickly between abstract language and specifics of immediate perception, she peeled away the many layers of human connection. Dealing with what is understood intuitively instead of what is known, the poem goes on to reveal the all-too-familiar fears of friendship and insecurity. The contrasting language of this poem and the shifts of perspective it includes reflect the vulnerability that friendship and self-exposure require. The multi-dimensional perspectives portrayed in her poem express the desire to gain self-awareness.
Berssenbrugge's rhetoric evocatively affected her audience. In her poem, "Concordance," her syntax astounded. Again, she straddled many perspectives. In the pure acts of reading and writing, Berssenbrugge dove into the consciousness of her reader. In this poem, she rendered a hybridized voice interweaving lyrical, colloquial and even scientific language. In this way she created a poetic cubism, from which all positions and viewpoints were taken into account. Through the multiplicity of perspectives, she created cohesion, both fluid and holistic.
The cyclical nature of her poems demanded contemplation. No clear or finite end could ostensibly exist with Berssenbrugge's poetry. In this way, perhaps the essence of her poetry is the sensual beauty of linguistic patterning and word play.
A singular poet, Berssenbrugge extends certainty in the face of inscrutability. Her long sentences do not lose the reader, but rather move them through labyrinthine clauses and phrases. Her linguistic strands guide the listeners and left them couched in an accumulation of thought. Her language fragments and refracts - as if through a prism - only to become whole again. Her poetry does not have a linear structure or end with an incontrovertible proof. Defying logic, her words transcend meaning, grammar and syntax and morph into an algebraic search of the unknown. Perhaps unsolved, her poetic equations are nonetheless balanced.
