Edmund Berrigan Performs a Lyrical Book Review of Renee Gladman's Morelia

“Morelia” lyrics, sung by Edmund Berrigan:

Reading is collaboration, so is dreaming

Specificity in dreams shares a false exactness

Morelia is a secret city where I have stashed myself

 

“When I open the door there is no longer knocking”

I reach in my mind for a territory I can cross    

“I think my happiness is climate controlled” 

 

“The sentence was in a new place but it was still the sentence”

“The person reading the book was small and subdued easily”

“It’s the mouth that conjures the dream in the first place” 

 

How to navigate a time-scape of displaced consciousness

In a reverse sleep cycle where you only wake up in dreams

“There it is, the sentence, in all its glorified foreignness”

All quotations are from Morelia by Renee Gladman.

*

Edmund Berrigan is most recently the author of More Gone (City Lights, 2019). Other recent publications include We’ll All Go Together (Further and Fewer, 2015) and Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2014). Berrigan was the guest blogger for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog in March of 2019, and recently has had essays included in the collections Lovers of my Orchard: Writers and Artists in Frank O’Hara (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017) and Joe Brainard’s Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).