Mei-mei Berssenbrugge has popped up on PennSound Daily frequently over the past few months, between her nomination for this year's National Book Award in Poetry for A Treatise on Stars, and her October reading for POG's Zoom series, but today brings even more reason to celebrate Berssenbrugge: she's been awarded the 2021 Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University. Here is part of announcement, including the judges' rationale:
"Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry explores the permeable boundaries between the human and the natural worlds, as she makes palpable her communion with birds, plants, dolphins, stars, and the beyond," the three-member prize judging committee said. "Emerging from the ferment of the Basement Workshop, a collective of Asian-American poets, artists, and activists in the 1970s, Berssenbrugge went on to create a visionary ecopoetics that directly confronts our planetary –– and human –– crisis. With her preternaturally long lines, Berssenbrugge composes a syntax of unfolding vistas, stretching our senses of both the plausible and the possible, bringing new modes of affinity and new paths for freedom into view. Berssenbrugge's entanglements of consciousness and perception have created a lyric that moves away from self-centeredness toward the cosmos. A Treatise on Stars is a far-out star flight — profoundly meditative, extravagant, disarming, open. 'Any soul may distribute itself into a human, a toy poodle, bacteria, an etheric, or quartz crystal.' As readers we are, again and again, enthralled by her radical wagers on poems enacting transformation. 'Writing,' the poet tells us, 'can shift the mechanism of time by changing the record, then changing the event.'"
The judges panel included Maureen N. McLane, Nicole Sealey, and our own Charles Bernstein, who won the Bollingen in 2019. You can read the complete announcement here. PennSound's author page for Berssenbrugge is home to more than two dozen individual recordings going back as far as 1986, including interviews, radio programs, and a great many readings. You can hear more from A Treatise on Stars in particular by checking out her 2019 Kelly Writers House Fellows reading and the aforementioned 2020 Pog reading.
