Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (; born October 5, 1947, in Beijing, China) is a contemporary Chinese American poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is the 2026 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Early life and education Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing to Chinese and Dutch American parents. Her mother was an educated mathematician, and her American father was born to first-generation Dutch emigrants. She grew up near Boston, Massachusetts.
Berssenbrugge was educated starting at Barnard College of Columbia University. Afterward, she transferred to Reed College, where she earned a B.A. in 1969. She then attended Columbia University, completing her M.F.A. from Columbia in 1973, before settling in rural northern New Mexico.
Poetry
After receiving her degree, Berssenbrugge became active in the multicultural poetry movement of the 1970s, together with her friends Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ishmael Reed, with theater director Frank Chin, and political reformer Kathleen Chang. Berssenbrugge became a teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Traveling frequently to New York City, Berssenbrugge became engaged in the rich cultural flourishing of the abstract art movement, and was influenced by New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and Anne Waldman, and then the Language poets, including Charles Bernstein, as well as artist Susan Bee. She later joined the contributing editorial board for the literary journal Conjunctions.
Berssenbrugge's poetry is known for its mix of philosophical meditation and personal experience, and for moving quickly between abstract language and the concrete particulars of immediate perception. Her poems often contain subtle shifts of grammar and perspective, and Berssenbrugge often works with collage to produce unexpected juxtapositions. Her work is also known for its exploration of the complexities of cultural and political identity, an interest informed by her own experience of cultural and linguistic displacement.
Fish Souls Fish Souls is Berssenbrugge's first published collection of poems. It was published by Greenwood Press in 1971. Only 100 numbered copies were published. Information about this volume is scarce.
Summits Move with the Tide Summits Move with the Tide, subtitled (on the cover of the second edition) Poems and a Play, is Berssenbrugge's second collection of poems. It was published by the Greenfield Review Press in 1974, and later in 1982. The acknowledgments page indicates that some of the poems previously appeared in First Issue, Intro 3, East-West Journal, Cathedral, Ash Tree, Gidra, and Greenwood Press. In contrast to her later books, most of the poems in the collection are short, with only a few carrying over to new pages. Additionally, only two poems are broken into numbered stanzas, a format Berssenbrugge would use in later poems. The poems in the collection are organized into four groups: three groups of poems, and one play, One, Two Cups.
The book contains the following poems:
Group 1: "Aegean"; "Finn Song to the Bear Ghosts"; "Bog"; "Book of the Dead, Prayer"; "El Bosco"; "Spirit"; "Hopi Basketweaver Song"; "Beetle Is Born, Lives ..."; "Los Sangre de Cristos"; "In Bhaudanath"; "Snow Mountains"; "Red Backs & Autumn Leaves ..."; and "Ghost".
Group 2: "Old Man Let's Go Fishing In ..."; "Travelling [sic] Through Your Country"; "Propeller Sleep"; "Fish & Swimmers & Lonely Birds ..."; "Spaces Are Death"; "The Second Moment"; "The Third Moment"; "Perpetual Motions"; "Leaving Your Country"; "The Old Know by Midsummer"; and "Abortion".
Group 3: "Written Before Easter in New York"; "Chronicle"; "Tracks"; "On the Winter Solstice"; "Blossom"; "Hudson Ice Floes"; "Poor Mouse"; "Sky"; and "March Wind".
Group 4: The play, One, Two Cups.
Random Possession Random Possession was published by I. Reed Books in 1982. On the contents page the poems are separated spatially into five unnumbered groups (with only the first three listed on the contents page). The pagination bears out the scheme, with one empty page between the groups. The book contains the following poems:
Group 1: "Chronicle".
Group 2: "The Membrane"; "Rabbit, Hair, Leaf"; "On the Mountain with the Deer"; "The Suspension Bridge"; "Numbers of the Date Become the Names of Birds"; "Spring Street Bar"; "Heat Wave"; "The Intention of Two Rivers"; "For The Tails of Comets"; and "Sleep".
Group 3: "The Field for Blue Corn"; "The Reservoir"; "The White Beaver"; "Breaking the Circumference"; "A Deer Listening"; "You and You"; and "Goodbye, Goodbye".
Group 4: "The Scientific Method (for Walter)"; "Walter Calls It a Dream Screen"; "The Constellation Quilt"; "Run-off and Silt"; "The Translation of Verver"; and "Commentary".
Group 5: "Tail".
The Heat Bird In The Heat Bird, Berssenbrugge shifted to a long-verse format. The book contains only four poems, all several pages long and broken into numbered stanzas: "Pack Rat Sieve"; "Farolita"; "Ricochet Off Water"; and "The Heat Bird". The verso indicates that some of the poems in the book were previously published in Conjunctions, Contact II, Roof, and Telephone.
Empathy Empathy was published by Station Hill Press in 1989, and contains three numbered groups of poems. The verso indicates that some of the poems appeared in Bridge, Calaban, Conjunctions, Parnassus, Temblor, and Tyuonyi. The book is dedicated to Bradford Morrow and Sheffield Van Buren, and contains the following poems:
Group 1: "The Blue Taj"; "Tan Tien"; "Alakanak Break-Up"; "Texas"; "Duration of Water"; "The Star Field"; and "Chinese Space".
Group 2: "Jealousy"; "Recitative"; "The Carmelites"; "The Margin"; "Naturalism"; and "Fog".
Group 3: "War Insurance"; "Empathy"; "The Swan"; "Forms of Politeness"; and "Honeymoon".
Sphericity Sphericity was published by Kelsey Street Press in 1993, and was her second collaboration with Richard Tuttle. The first edition of Sphericity was limited to 2000 copies, with the first 50 signed by Berssenbrugge and Tuttle and hand-colored by Tuttle. The book consists of six long poems, all with several numbered stanzas: "Ideal"; "Size"; "Combustion"; "Sphericity"; "Experience"; and "Value".
Endocrinology Endocrinology is an artists' book poem made in collaboration with visual artist Kiki Smith. Forty copies were produced by Universal Limited Art Editions from a maquette made by Berssenbrugge and Smith.Hinton, Laura."Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge". Jacket, Issue 27, 2005. The Kelsey Street Press edition, a facsimile of the original book, was limited to 2,000 copies, with the first 60 signed and numbered.
Personal life Berssenbrugge is married to the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated.
Awards
1976 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. 1980 American Book Award for Random Possession. 1981 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. 1984 American Book Award for The Heat Bird. 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Award. 1990 PEN West Award for Empathy. 1998 Asian American Literary Award for Endocrinology. 1999 Western States Book Award for Four Year Old Girl. 2004 Asian American Literary Award for Nest. 2026 Frost Medal, awarded by the Poetry Society of America for lifetime achievement in poetry. Work
Poetry Fish Souls. New York: Greenwood Press. 1971 Other . Other ; Other ISBN I0930901037; 0930901037; 9780930901035 Hiddenness. New York : Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 1987 (A collaboration with Richard Tuttle) Empathy. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. 1989 Mizu. Tucson, AZ: Chax Press. 1990 Other ISBNs: 9780932716309; 0932716318; 9780932716316 (A collaboration with Richard Tuttle) Other ISBNs: 0932716423 (Limited Edition) (A collaboration with Kiki Smith) Four Year Old Girl. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 1998
(A collaboration with Kiki Smith)
Hello, the Roses. New York: New Directions, 2013. . A Treatise on Stars. New York: New Directions, 2020. .
Plays One, Two Cups, directed by Frank Chin, and published in 1974 in Summits Move With the Tide. Kindness (1994), commissioned by the Ford Foundation and staged at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe with the collaboration of Richard Tuttle, Tan Dun, and Chen Shi Zheng.
Chapbooks Pack Rat Sieve. New York. Contact II, 1983."Periodical Notes," Feminist Collections: Women's Studies Library Resources in Wisconsin, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter 1984), p. 12. https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/21553/FC_5.2_Win1984.pdf "Interview with Eileen R. Tabios," Speaking of Marvels, April 11, 2017. https://spkofmarvels.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/eileen-r-tabios/
Broadsides The Mouse 5. IE Poetry Broadside Series Two, Clayton Fine Books, 2006. "Issued in an edition of 25 copies of which 20 copies are for sale."
Magazines and journals
Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. The Mouse, Conjunctions, Number 48, Spring 2007.
Anthologies
References
External links The Mei-mei Berssenbrugge page at Poets.org Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's author page at the Electronic Poetry Center Mei-mei Berssenbrugge page at Penn Sound A review of I Love Artists by Ben Lerner Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Links at "Intercapillary Space" – links to Berssenbrugge poems, reviews, talks, recordings
"Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Berssenbrugge participated in Sentimental Spaces: On Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Nest," by Natalia Cecire Boundary Work in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Pollen," by Jonathan Skinner Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Poems and prose Audience Concordance [Our conversation is a wing] Concordance [Working backwards in sleep From A Context of a Wave, published in Conjunctions 17, Fall 1991 Duration of Water Forms of Politeness Hello, the Roses, published in Bomb issue 117, Fall 2011 Ideal Kate's Talk, a talk presented by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge at The Poetry Project, St. Mark's on the Bowery, October 1987 The New Boys, published in the October 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail New Form, opening remarks delivered at the "New Forms/New Functions" panel of the Poetry Project's Symposium, Poetry of Everyday Life Permanent Home Red Quiet; Section 3 Reservoir Safety from How 2, Volume 1, Issue 8, 2002 Starfield Susie, Kiki, Annie, published in Big Bridge Tan Tien Texas Two Lines, Reprinted from "A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line," edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee
Audio A recording of a reading and conversation with Charles Bernstein A recording of Berssenbrugge reading at the University of California, Berkeley Berssenbrugge reading her poem, Texas
Video A video of Berssenbrugge reading at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 1, 1999 A video of Berssenbrugge in conversation with Arthur Sze Lunch Poems: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge A video of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Reading from "Plant Fragments"