Time Lost: Anselm Berrigan

Perdu's English podcast, Time Lost, focuses on unpublished and unpublishable work.

In this second episode, poet Anselm Berrigan presents his unpublished three-part poem titled Elevation from the Crypt. During the subsequent conversation with Alma Apt, he discusses the themes of interruption, lack of clarity, and distraction that run through this work in particular.

As the poem speeds up, the listener is left with shreds of information, after-images and half-formed thoughts. In between all this, one-liners get stuck and stay stuck in your head; poetic jokes and jabs that loop around:

"an ability to antagonize
organisms I mean organize
antagonisms,"

In their conversation, Berrigan speaks about how to find your way into and back out of a poem's structure, about writing that allows one to find a collective voice, and the problem of publishing longer poems.