“Hello, the Roses”

Poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s 14th book extends her project— an epistemological, a spiritual and an aesthetic venture. Hello, the Roses is mesmerizing and its register is unusual: smooth, dense, aphoristic. Reading, you glide off surfaces, forget on lifting eyes from the page. Meditative in effect, propelled by a stirring, accretive logic, the poems, with their long lines and progressive descriptions, have a strange, shimmering beauty.

Here’s a taste from the first section (of four) in a poem found about halfway through, called “Slow Down, Now”:

I’ve been sitting looking at a plant, without feeling time at all, and my breathing is calm. There are tiny white rosettes, and the whole bush is a glory of feathery pink seedheads, here in the arroyo. Even with closed eyes I see roses in the center of my sight, new ones opening with pink petals illuminated by low sun behind me, and gray green leaves. There’s no stopping this effusion. Looking at the plant releases my boundaries, so time is not needed for experience. Late afternoon is like a stage, a section of vaster landscape, and my mood is of a summer idyll. The dry arroyo sparkles all around. Meaning I come upon on wild land strikes me at first as a general impression, then joy suffuses me. I accept that I’ve aged and some friends have died. At first, meaning is part of the plant, not unified with my experience as a whole, like sight opening out to its periphery. There’s impasse between my will, desire and the resistance of a phenomenon to reveal itself. My seeing becomes so slow, it seems to disengage; it grows cloudy; then suddenly, meaning as a whole interweaves with my perception. A delicate empiricism makes itself identical with my plant.

Describing Berssenbrugge’s previous book, I Love Artists, poet and novelist Ben Lerner wrote in 2006, in the online review, Rain Taxi, “Cezanne refused to dissolve the object into atmospheric effects (Impressionism) or to assimilate the phenomenal world to ideal forms (Renaissance naturalism) because neither technique could depict the emergence of form in the process of perception” (Lerner’s emphasis). “For four decades,” he continued, “Mei-mei Berssenbrugge has been writing poems that seek to make the process of perception perceptible.”

It’s apt, not least because Lerner links her work with visual art. The spouse of American artist Richard Tuttle, whose art graces the book’s cover, Berssenbrugge has collaborated with visual artists such as Tuttle and Kiki Smith, and she is attendant to questions of form and artistic process. Offering entry into the room of her oeuvre, however, Lerner employs a rather rudimentary skeleton key. It feels like a bit of a cheat, extracting theme where a full, rich sensibility exists, as poet Mary Ruefle puts it in her essay “On Theme” (Madness, Rack and Honey, Wave Books, 2012).

Berssenbrugge’s poetry may be an open field rather than a room. Reading, one begins to discern a profounder commitment than mere mindfulness about perceptual processes. Like Cézanne, Berssenbrugge sustains in her art a radical openness to being; as she says: “the situation is not a dialectic; it’s rich.” Rilke was transformed—“educated,” he writes, in a series of letters about Cézanne—by the “devotion” he witnessed in Cézanne’s paintings. Cézanne himself articulated best the nature of this devotion: “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”

Though Hello, the Roses greets the world through poetry as a bird sings—Berssenbrugge’s ideal of poetic expression—this is no untested, naïve stance. In the way Rilke writes about Cézanne’s devotion, it’s where the “real work, the abundance of tasks begins.” The aesthetic is essentially an ethics, dedication to exactitude in art and to the “givenness” Berssenbrugge perceives in being. Born to a Chinese mathematician mother and a Dutch father, she is also influenced by Buddhist teachings about self and the world: “I’m trying not to be separated. I like trying to be a medium.”

Being a medium constitutes a metaphysics for Berssenbrugge. “My latest passion,” she says, “is so-called New Age philosophy and its correlations with ideas in quantum physics. I think of this as opening out the connections between the person and the universe. The European cultures would call it naturalism.”

Roses recur throughout the book, both motif and figural analogy. Their “opening-out” parallels architecture, and their status as natural and cultural icon (to degree zero, as she observes) allows Berssenbrugge to reveal fluidity between the singular and its milieu or conditions, between different “fields” such as immediacy and memory, the tension between form and emanation, emergence or energy, the play between intimacy and abstraction, feeling and observation, and the continuum between representation, illusion, being and non-being, between matter and consciousness, culture and nature, physics and metaphysics, action, ethics, fate and flow. Demonstrating the hair’s breadth and reversibility—between logic, chance and magic or enchantment— founded on an ecology of opening-out connections (correlations, parallels, radiations, generations, transmissions, translations), “The Mouse” begins like this: “Transmission from speaker to you is like warm breath from a young girl who’s not wholly concerned with information, truth, drawing you into her presence. When she whispers, you catch fragments of words, which seem nonsensical. When asked to speak clearly, she looks down. Her voice softens and breaks off, haunting you, not connected to any person in the room, as if all words were pulled from books and left on the floor. How would you find meaning, except by chance? But people don’t believe in the order of chance or order from within.”

Berssenbrugge sees a universe of plenitude; her stance invites us to share this vision. “One day you need a plant you don’t know,” she continues in “Slow Down, Now,” “in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person you’re trying to be with. It may be a rosebush at the end of the road, a summer rose, whitish on the outside of each petal and pink inside, expressing its gestalt visually…Even though the rose I want is in the garden of my friend I miss, another reveals itself in late light in the arroyo when I’m alone, a wild rose, Delphic… “

You and I nest within many such fields from a rose.”

As Rilke writes about his re-education by Cézanne: “But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature, and all we basically have to do is be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.” ❚

Hello, the Roses, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2013, 108 pages, $16.95.

Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a poet and writer with an interest in creative processes across the disciplines.