Kandinsky
I entered a dream world
of color and fire
Day and night
garden and field
egg and dragonfly
Flag and football
This form a science fiction.
Mini-interview with Sandy Berrgian by Rod Roland
RR: What can you tell me about this poem?
SB: Kandinsky is one of my most favorite artists. I was probably at the Guggenheim. I don’t know what brought those images up. His paintings are like a dream world and also science fiction.
RR: Can you tell me when you wrote this poem?
SB: Absolutely not.
RR: Have you written a lot of ekphrastic poetry?
SB: I’ve written some. I like looking at art and making juxtapositions. I went to an Edward Hopper show and people were standing next to the paintings. I wrote about the people and the paintings. They were all short poems. I like writing short poems. This book Light Oh Light has several poems based on looking at paintings. Some you can tell and some you can’t.
Sandy Berrigan is the author of Daily Rites (Telephone Books, 1974) and Summer Sleeper (Telephone Books, 1981). She has also over the years self-published a number of rare and fugitive works, which will hopefully one day be collected and presented in a single volume. In the early 1960s she married Ted Berrigan, and was involved with many of the poets and artists of the New York School. After their divorce and a move to the West Coast in the 1970s, she there found her writing admired by a number of the language poets, including Steve Benson, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, who has cited her as an influence on his own writing life. The poem “Kandinsky” appears in her latest volume, Light Oh Light, published by Wry Press in late 2024. It collects a number of fragments written by Berrigan throughout the 1980s.
Photo credit: Hannah Zhalih Mickunas
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