By Jennifer Rocco
Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter Vol. 16.2, Spring 1992.
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge was born in Peking and moved to the United States shortly after her birth. She was raised in Massachusetts and received her MFA from Columbia in 1973. Since that time, she has taught on reservations in New Mexico and Alaska, and now lives with her family in Santa Fe. Her books include The Heat Bird, Empathy, and a limited edition, Mizu, which was recently published by Chax Press. She is on the editorial board for Conjunctions. Her husband, Richard Tuttle, is a painter.
Last year, Berssenbrugge was exposed to a pesticide that greatly weakened her immune system. She gave a reading for the Poetry Center on April 1, 1992. Later, I talked with her about the relationship between the body and poetry, as well as her obsession with space.
Jennifer Rocco: What in your background has shaped your identity as a poet?
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: My first language is Chinese. When I came here I was one year old and I think that change is what made me into a writer. My language changed so now language became my subject. Also, I think that some of my sensibility relates to Chinese sensibility.
Jennifer: And yet you don't speak Chinese now. What do you feel is "Chinese" about you?
Mei-Mei: I think in my writing there's a very concrete relationship to the image even though my writing is abstract. I have a distinctly concrete relationship to the image that I see in Chinese poetry. It's hard to make these generalities, but also my interest in nature and placing that relationship in a larger, philosophical context is something I see in a lot of Chinese poetry... kind of multiple points of that relationship, instead of a single point.
Jennifer: When did you start writing in longer lines? What seemed to trigger this impulse?
Mei-Mei: The Heat Bird is still in a short line, so I probably started writing in the longer line about 10 years ago and it just started to get longer. I had to turn the paper on its side in the typewriter. Maybe that was when I started going to Alaska... and you know, the tundra. I think it relates to the horizon line but it might have been a development in my thought too. In a way, my thought was lengthening.
Jennifer: Do you think there is that direct relationship between the environment and your writing? Say you lived in New York City, an urban environment, would that change the length of your line, or the way you think?
Mei-Mei: I think the environment has always affected me, but my subject has been the landscape in New Mexico and that could extend to Alaska because Alaska has space. But I've lived in New York often and I never write a poem about it. I also have travelled a great deal and 1% of the time I can get a poem. It's not that everything comes in.
Jennifer: That's unlike what we hear about the poet being a receptacle, or being receptive to his/her place, an open agent of the environment. It seems you're dealing with a specific subject, New Mexico, and you take that subject with you. What attracted you to New Mexico?
Mei-Mei: Well, it was love at first sight. I was 18 when I came and I didn't know anything about it... I just came with a friend. It was 25 years ago. It was very wild. And I say I'm not an eccentric person, but I am a wild person. I like wild things. Eventually I lived in a county for 10 years by myself and it's a village where very few women live. It's still in the 18th century.
Jennifer: Did you make a conscious decision to live in an isolated place, to live in a kind of exile for your poetry?
Mei-Mei: The poetry and my self are one thing. I have a lot of solitariness in my likes—my interest in nature. And I didn't know how to get along with people all the time. Even when I was teaching in Providence, which is a beautiful city, I woke up and said to Richard, "What kind of people can wake up every day and look at buildings?"
Jennifer: Jorie Graham has said that the role of poetry is to slow things down in our sped-up society. She, too, has tended to write in longer lines. Do you feel you are kind of working against society? How would you see your relationship to society as a poet?
Mei-Mei: Well, poetry is a very concentrated form and you have to slow down to read it, so some of that is inherent in the form, as I know it. My nature tends to concentrate things, so my poetry is very concentrated.
Jennifer: But at the same time, it's very expansive.
Mei-Mei: Yes, I feel like people can just listen to it like music, that it rises and falls. But my relationship to society is really ambivalent. I'm an anarchic person and I've been very disturbed by our society's response to the Gulf War and I'm still profoundly upset about that.
Jennifer: Why do you tend towards longer poems?
Mei-Mei: The work is primarily on a meditative scale because I pick a subject large enough so that I could go a long time. Although now I can't write such long poems because I don't have the time. Also, it can get boring.
Jennifer: "Time," "space," "context": these are repeated words in your work. Where does your obsession with these things come from?
Mei-Mei: "Context" is a good word I think. Because I think that concern comes from the fact that I came from somewhere else. That I come from another country. It doesn't come from language. Also, I've always had an intellectual curiosity since I was small. In a way, it's just a way of talking about the world around me. I used light for a long, long time, but I think my interest in space started when I noticed that in poetry, any place you put in "space" you could put in "time." It didn't change the meaning at all.
Jennifer: How do you decide which word to use then?
Mei-Mei: I'm still fumbling. I just try one, or try the other. But I think it's probably space I'm talking about, because that's where I am. Maybe the use of time is decorative. Space is a deep, deep part of me, because I've always lived in empty rooms. We always live in these big houses that are empty.
Jennifer: Before reading "Chinese Space" at the reading last night, you said that different cultures have different perceptions of space. Where does your thinking about space originate? Was it your work with Native Americans?
Mei-Mei: I think the experience of it with my mother and my friendship with Leslie [Marmon Silko] came before I thought about it, when traveling. Bui I thought about it after visiting the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The inside was a space that was not conceptual, but that you experienced with other parts of you. I eventually started thinking about how the body experiences space outside your mind. Then this article I read in Art Forum had a picture of a bridge in China that went four ways and for some reason from that bridge I got an intuition about Chinese space. The author talked about how the eye experiences space and the "me" experiences space. There are spaces you can conceptualize and hold in your mind as a diagram and then there are other spaces that can't remain in your consciousness. A maze is an example. I'm interested in the body's relationship to space.
Jennifer: Has your recent exposure to pesticides intensified that awareness?
Mei-Mei: Yes. I was always a very mental person, and now every day is a struggle—from hour to hour, it's a physical struggle, so I'm forced to be that way.
Jennifer: Maybe that can lend a new direction to your work?
Mei-Mei: Well, yes, mortality, for one thing.
Jennifer: While at the same time your subject matter has been influenced by giving birth to your daughter. You've recently talked about how having a child has changed your awareness, made you seek a kind of morality. I think we, as artists, tend to freeze when we hear the word “morality.” How are you defining this word?
Mei-Mei: I think we can think of the word "morality" as value. For me and for my work and what I want around my family is work that is towards life, towards the energy of life and the spirit. That's a personal decision. In general, people can think about the issue of value, what their poetry's effect is in the world.
Jennifer: How has your relationship to visual art influenced your work?
Mei-Mei: Like most poets and writers, I've always been interested in contemporary art because you can talk about it and get a story out of it. I have a gift for intimation but I'm not a visual artist. In a way, there's kind of a war between a literary apprehension and a visual apprehension of the whole world. It's like they're from different parts of the brain. Richard and I have a joke, "You don't think while you're looking.” It's a profound antithesis. Even because [Richard] is such an eye... just trying to experience that world where you look and you think visually and you experience visually has been very interesting to me. In a way, it's introduced a complexity in my life I can't write about. Because real seeing isn't verbal. When a writer looks, they translate it into words. But when a visual person looks, they don't translate. That is the language they're using.
Jennifer: What do you think about the state of poetry today?
Mei-Mei: I think in the last decade there was a great revolution with language poetry, when people started incorporating abstraction in poetry. I don't think we'll lose that. But now I think everyone is groping, as far as I can see. I think everyone is going an individual way. I ask many people, "Have you read anything?" "Have you seen anything?" And I get a vague answer now. So I think it's a transitional period. But poetry has been around for a long, long time, it's a part of people's lives and it's not going to stop.
Jennifer: Where is your own writing going? Are you experimenting?
Mei-Mei: I haven't been writing for almost a year. I don't know why, but I'm getting a quieter diction, more straightforward, and gaining an interest in the body, leaving the landscape more. That may all just be this confusion from this illness because my mind and my spirit get separated so I'm struggling to do anything I can. Maybe that's the way it always is: that you're struggling to do anything you can, but I don't know what's going to come out. The body is going to be an important part, not as a subject, but as a means to something. And I think mortality, because I've come up against something I can't conquer... maybe some kind of humbleness has come from it. And, I think the idea of death and the way it's not transcendent, because I've worked a lot towards transcendence in my work. I'd like to deal with death in a way that's not transcendent.