Katelyn Peters

 

Review 4

 

Interview with Anselm Berrigan, poetry editor of the Brooklyn Rail

 

KP: I read a little bit about the history of the journal online. I am curious about the beginning of your work with the Rail. How did you become involved as the poetry editor at the Rail?

 

AB: I was directing the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church until Spring 2007. John Yau was the Arts Editor at the time; he has since left and writes for Hyperallergic. John asked if I was interested in the Rail. The poetry editor Monica de la Torre happened to be leaving, so I became the poetry editor in Spring 2008.

 

KP: I read that the Brooklyn Rail curates art exhibitions, panel discussions, reading series and film screenings. I subscribed to your mailing list but I was curious about past events that you have been involved with or any upcoming events that you know about.

 

AB: I am not involved in putting on events, but the Rail supports a number of different engagements, including talks and readings, and is sometimes involved in putting on events directly. The publisher of the Rail, Phong Bui, has a very expansive idea of what it can do. There are other versions of the Rail that have started—in Miami and in Minneapolis I think. There have been a handful of books published jointly with Black Square Editions, John Yau’s small press, when he was an editor. After Hurricane Sandy, Phong curated a huge exhibition with dozens of local artists to raise money for those artists whose studios and work were damaged by flooding from the storm. I was commissioned, among others, to write a poem for a joint reading. There was money raised for the show; it was meant to demonstrate solidarity, raise awareness and help the artists who have been directly affected by the storm.

 

KP: Brooklyn Rail Editions publishes books of poetry, experimental fiction, prose meditation, artists’ writing, and interviews with artists, in addition to art and literary criticism. Do you contribute editorially to these publications?

 

AB: I have no editorial role in publishing books, but I have total autonomy in my role as the Poetry Editor. I am in contact with the staff at the Rail electronically. In the six years I have worked there, I have never been to the office. I was hired around the time my first daughter was born and I didn’t have a lot of time. I am actually going into the office for the first time next week.

 

KP: In “A Brief History of the Brooklyn Rail,” Theodore Hamm says, “As for any specific agenda aesthetically or politically, the Rail hasn’t one: the editors control the content of their sections as they please. The Rail covers arts and politics but makes no demands that the twain must meet.” What are your thoughts on this topic?

 

AB: That is an accurate description of my relationship to the Rail because I do have total autonomy over the poetry section. There is no aesthetic or political agenda. I have never been given instruction as to how to do the section. Sometimes poets ask me if they should send me their books, but I have no involvement with the book review section. The poetry in the Rail is not reflected in the book reviews. The Rail covers political issues in the city that are and are not directly related to the art world. When artists read the Rail, they are getting another line of information. A journal can have a political consciousness, but not demand that the art serve illustratively for political issues. Art isn’t art if it doesn’t have autonomy. Many artists have serious political content outside of their art and it is either explicit or implicit in their art. If you want to get a broad sense of art in the city, you cannot limit content with an extraneous political agenda, or ask that artists or readers enter art in a certain way, with a bent towards the avant-garde or in a way that is reactionary.

 

KP: In the same piece of writing, Hamm says, “The Rail’s real commitment is less to a program than to a place, or better yet, to a set of traditions that place represents.” What is your relationship to Brooklyn?

 

AB: The journal is published out of Brooklyn and it has grown out of Brooklyn. I think many of the editors live in Brooklyn. I don’t think the title would sound as interesting if it was called the New York Rail, but the audience is the whole city. The Rail has an international presence because of our web publication. There is more material on the web. There is a Brooklyn beat, but there is writing on the whole city in addition to local political writing. Decisions made in City Hall in Manhattan impact Brooklyn, but the Rail focuses on political issues specific to Brooklyn. But gentrification, education, police issues, etc. extend across the whole city. I think the impetus for making the publication specific to Brooklyn is because the cultural ground of the city shifted to Brooklyn in the mid-nineties. The shift was tied up in gentrification: Manhattan was too expensive for artists who needed studio space moved to Williamsburg. In 1996, I moved from out west to Williamsburg and lived there for five years. At that time, there weren’t throngs of people on Bedford Avenue and there were no big buildings on the waterfront. It was still affordable. Brooklyn has a long history; millions of people live there. There are lots of pockets to it. The current development boom, specifically the art boom over the last twenty years, hasn’t put Brooklyn on the map. Brooklyn was already on the map. It is so big and so complex. Manhattan does a lot of work on the imagination because it is an island, it is a financial capital and houses so many institutions, but it is more known than unknown at this point. Gentrification has, of course, taken hold around Brooklyn and the other boroughs as well, and one wonders if New York can remain affordable for artists at all at this point.

 

 

KP: What is your commitment to publishing writing that is local to Brooklyn? Do you, at least in your poetry section, aim to represent what is contemporary in Brooklyn right now? I noticed that in the April 2014 issue of the Rail, you published CA Conrad, who lives in Philadelphia, but the other three poets you published are from New York.

 

AB: I am not counting numbers. Most writers who live in Brooklyn are not from Brooklyn. The print edition is a local publication. I mostly work read from people who are in New York, but I try to keep it an organic process. I am interested in putting together a section of strong, interesting material that changes from issue to issue. I have to work with what people send me. The poetry section isn’t trying to make a map of a scene. I am open to publishing people who are not published much and who are not located in New York, but who are making good work. I have ten deadlines a year. It is not like a journal that is published once a year. I try not to plan out the issues too much because things come in all the time. I don’t want to feel constrained.

 

KP: Do you mind if I ask about your own poetic life? How long have you written poems?

 

AB: I’ve been writing poems since the spring of 1991. I started writing little prose pieces the year before, and concurrently wrote poetry and prose for another two years before giving myself over to poetry completely.

 

KP: What poets do you like?

 

AB: There are too many to name. At this point I’m more interested in poems than in poets—or it can feel that way enough of the time. John Coletti’s poem “Evident Source”, for instance, is on my mind—it’s just gone up on-line. And I can’t get past what’s going on in the first five pages of Fred Moten’s poem “Block Chapel” from his book The Feel Trio because I get stopped and want to open my notebook. So I haven’t gotten too far in the book. Writing this way makes me think I must be wanting to be interrupted. That doesn’t have to only be a total stop—to be stopped completely—but a test of one’s own limits. Taste, for instance, is a self-imposed limit, and ultimately a form of cop out. Hoa Nguyen sent me five poems to consider for the Brooklyn Rail, and told me she didn’t think they went together, which was great, because why should poems go together?

 

KP: In my program we are studying the New York School of Poets (and the relationship they had with the abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s and 1960s). I know a little bit about your lineage: what do you think about this classification and the naming of a second generation on New York School Poets?

 

AB: I respect the term and its jokey complexities and evasions as it relates to the first and second generations. The first generation bleeds into the second generation more messily for me than for most people. Frank O’Hara is as much as second generation New York school poet as first, once you get around to acknowledging how porous a classification this is. The second generation probably ought to include some of the West Coast L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, and Bruce Andrews. Many people would be disgusted by this idea, but a smart, sensitive, slightly fucked up writer could make the case. In a longer view, you could probably name Dante as the first New York School writer, followed by Gertrude Stein, then Williams and Edwin Denby. Coleridge was a New York School poet when he wrote “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”. David Henderson and Lorenzo Thomas were instructors at the building-less campus, and so on. Having grown up in New York City and having attended public schools in New York City and New York State for my entire formal education, I have too much direct experience to be part of the New York School.

 

KP: What is your vision for the future of the Brooklyn Rail?

 

AB: Because I am only the poetry editor, I can’t have a full vision. I want the poetry section to have poems in it, without attempting to over-define what a poem might be. And I want people to be introduced to poems they’re not

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