Post by Michelle Puckett

Photos by Merredyth Messer

I was introduced to Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge before her reading at Canessa and she quickly complimented my earrings, as well as my friends’s skirt, and my roommate’s leather belt. I considered it rather genteel of her, but upon approaching, as Tiff put it in her introduction, the “quantum world” of Mei-Mei’s poetry, it soon became clear that Mei-Mei had not been solely performing niceties with us, but had instead showed a bit of her recent tendency to engage in acts of social critique via the clothes a person wears. Opening with two poems about fashion, she said that lately she’d been noticing, “Carefully-dressed, slender boys in New York – more carefully dressed than the girls.” She named the “contemporary as liminal” and noted that things become “vintage because of the simultaneity of time”. Her poem “A Placebo”, luxuriating in adjectives, takes us from a “honey-sable coat” to an experience of “grey without melancholy” and is a meditation on “placebo” as “the intention of my dress. When you wear it for the first time, you are surprised by a rush of feeling for yourself”. Mei-Mei names the “feeling of compassion” as “disorganization” signaling the splintered-self on its way through this time in history as “a sex-creativity” with “sudden shifts” where young men “circulate non-identity as themselves”. She calls this an “internalization of chaos”. Quantum world, indeed.

In the second half of the reading, she turned to works that came out of an eight-year period of drought in New Mexico. She enters the natural world of that work with the desire to use as much description as possible, without paying attention to what is “good writing or bad writing”. The result is an “upward space where openness is form”. Walking amongst pine trees, Mei-Mei “likes it when [she] can’t see the source of light” in the forest, which she calls the “original region of consciousness”. She says that she no longer does collaborations with other artists, but instead does collaborations with the universe itself by communicating with animals, insects, and plants directly. She admits that she “love[s] to look at nature with poetic feeling” by illuminating the reciprocity of the relationship between phenomena and observer. “Even with closed eyes, I see flowers. There is no stopping this effusion…Hello, the roses. The rose collapses her boundaries and the woman enlarges hers. Affinity between awareness and blossom”. And her reading was like that: with eyes half-closed, there was a feeling of an exquisite noticing of the light – a trust in “the correctness of spontaneity that we are trained to be suspicious of”.

[Photo 1 and 2, Mei-Mei. Photo 3, Mei-Mei with Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser.)

Guestblogger bios:

Michelle is an MFA in Writing student at Mills College Oakland, CA Her poetry appears in BANG OUT and Beehive.

Merredyth is a photographer who lives in Oakland, CA. View her gallieries at www.merredythmesser.com, where she reports a slight addiction to the smell of fixer.