Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s book I Love Artists

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s book I Love Artists contained a few poems of interest, but her writing style was rather sterile in that her poems seemed to contain little emotion and used a very technical language in the majority of the poems she wrote. For example, her poem “The Four Year Old Girl” begins with these five lines “The ‘genotype’ is her genetic constitution./ The ‘phenotype’ is the observable expression of the genotype as structural and biochemical traits./ Genetic disease is extreme genetic change, against a background of normal variability./ Within the conventional unit we call subjectivity doe to individual particulars, what is happening?/ She believes she is herself, which isn’t complete madness, it’s belief” (lines 1-5). The poem is about a child dying of a disease, but is written in a manner in which all emotion, which one would expect to be present, is absent. It is apparent that this is a type of protest poem about the medical field or insurance companies, or the callused nature that many people in our society have about death and war, where people are reduced to numbers, studies, and reports, but, the impact of this poem is lessened by the fact that this is the tone of many of the poems within the book. Although there are poems within this collection that are not as distant and less devoid of emotion, this is by no means the only poem with this type of tone.

            What is also interesting about the poetry of Berssenbrugge is that it is written in a matter where race and ethnicity is not only not a factor, but the reader is only rarely given a glimpse into the race of the speaker. This seems as though it should not be a big deal, but after reading many books of poetry by African American, Latino/a American, Asian American, and several other ethnicities, the idea of race or ethnicity usually becomes apparent somewhere within the poetry. Be it Sonia Sanchez or Amiri Baraka’s overt exclamations or the more subtle instances by Gary Soto or Alan Chong Lau, the idea of the speaker’s race is usually more apparent. Even in poems such as “Chinese Space” we are only told of the speaker’s family background as she discusses her grandfather being Chinese. Unlike the poetry of those aforementioned poets, the speaker in this poem focuses more on the garden than on what the garden means to her in an overt expression of being Chinese. The crux of what the speaker is implying within the poem can be surmised in the final three lines where the speaker is discussing what is means when “the person/ becomes sufficient” (lines 31-32). The speaker states, “The family poses in front of the hotel, both self-knowing and knowing others at the same time./ This is so, because memory as a part of unfinished nature is provided/ for the experience of your unfinished existence” (35-37). Because the main subject of this poem is the “Chinese Space” which is spoken about, nearly exclusively in the previous lines, I believe that these last lines, although speaking directly of the photograph, are about what it means to the speaker to be Chinese and to have this kind of legacy, such as memories and a relative who had a garden like the one she described as being a “Chinese Space.” As such, the lines indicate that, to paraphrase, where we come from only makes up part of who we are, thus, regardless of one’s racial or ethnic background, that only partially makes up who we are as a person. One of the only other poems where the speaker discusses being Chinese is in the poem “Nest” where the speaker discusses her mother tongue, Chinese, and the meaning of the language she shares with her mother and the idea of changing the mother tongue for her daughter. She discusses the importance of language in the poem, but again, the importance of what it means to be a certain ethnicity or race is not a main issue within the poem. Obviously language is a large part of one’s ethnicity and culture, thus changing the main language for her daughter is of great significance, focus is on the individual rather than the collective culture, much like “Chinese Space.”