"Decode into chrysanthemums": Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Post-Structuralist Thought

Many experimental American poets have succumbed to the seductions of post-structuralist thought, resulting in increasingly thorny lyrical meditations. At times this appropriation of a philosophical stance—and an abstruse vocabulary—has created monstrous poetic forms that exist in limbo between rigorous philosophy and lyric poetry. In exemplary ways, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's poetry incorporated the language of post-structuralism, transforming her early lyricism into strange hybrid texts that enact ideas put forward by Derrida and Lacan. But at what cost? Her work became imprisoned in the language of theory rather than liberated, forcing her to interpret theory through a lens of Chinese philosophy.