Anselm Berrigan, _Something for Everybody_

I CAN THINK of a good many examples of both parties in a couple being published poets--contemporary examples are many--but I have not been able to think of another example of both parties in a marriage being published poets and their offspring also being published poets. A couple of poems in this collection were co-authored by Sylvie Berrigan, who was in elementary school at the time, so the next generation is already being groomed for succession.

Reading Anselm Berrigan's book right after reading his mother's latest, I found myself wondering about apples and trees and distances. Berrigan's poetry is easily distinguished from Alice Notley's (and from his father's and his brother's), but they all seem somehow New York School, certainly within hailing distance of each other and of Koch, Schuyler, O'Hara, no one of them likely to be spotted in anthologies like Garrison Keillor's, for instance. I found myself wondering about the tradition of being at a healthy remove from tradition. 

I thought of this especially in reading the collection's final poem, written to be read at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and also about the St. Mark's Poetry Project and for that matter a reasonably good instance of the kind of work furthered by the St. Mark's Poetry Project. And since Anselm Berrigan grew up in the shadow of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, one starts to think that the anti-tradition represented by the St. Mark's Poetry Project eventually becomes its own tradition--noticeable also in Berrigan's invocations of writers like Joe Brainard and Jim Brodey, not to mention his parents.

Would the genuinely transgressive move, were one Anselm Berrigan, have been to turn into...I don't know...William Logan? Adam Kirsch? 

Then again, one Adam Kirsch is plenty. Even one William Logan may be surplus to requirements, actually.

The kind of continuity Berrigan exemplifies may even be heartening, come to think of it.