'an overwhelmingly sensorial experience': Talking With Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Up this week at the Cordite Poetry Review is a thoughtful conversation (and introduction) between Chi Tran and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Tran sets up the interview by thinking through questions of reading and understanding, and the ways we come to "know" any single poem, but particularly Berssenbrugge's dynamic writing: "[...] poetry and one’s understanding of it is not singular – out of necessity, it cannot be. It occupies a state so multiple that its plurality cannot perhaps even be intellectualised in a way that is fathomable, much like this very sentence is attempting to do. To understand a poem, any poem, is an ongoing process, one where diversion and distraction and delay are perhaps requisite for it to continue moving." We like where this is going! More from the intro:

I view Berssenbrugge’s writing as working towards fostering a non-binaristic mode of thinking. Popular couplings such as thought / feeling and poetry / theory exist as spectrums in her mind, and taking into account the work she has made throughout her decades as a writer, she has always been a spectrum thinker, or indeed a spectrum feeler.

Their conversation begins by interrogating memory and understanding as they pertain to poetry, reading and writing. We'll dig a little deeper into the way Berssenbrugge imagines the idea of "understanding":

CT: [...] I am really interested in talking to you about this idea of ‘understanding’.

MB: Yes. Even though I studied poetry in school and I have a graduate degree in poetry, I don’t think I’ve ever understood a single poem in my life. I think there’s an argument to a poem, and then there’s the energetic matrix of a poem. And I think it’s the argument that I don’t necessarily understand in poetry.

CT: What do you mean by an energetic matrix?

MB: I think of a poem as an energetic whole, because the way I reach an expression of energy is through language. I definitely think about the so-called idea or meaning of a poem, but for me, it is more about keeping the energy high. I also want to mention that when I write a poem, I often have no idea of what I’ve said. I make assemblages of notes and put them together, but it’s at the unconscious level that composition occurs, and I think there are more profound gestalts of understanding to be found that way. So I am not somebody who thinks complex thoughts by my will; I find them. A lot of people now say that there are more neurons in the heart than there are in the brain.

Head to the Cordite Poetry Review to learn more. This is certainly one to read in full!