ISBN: 9780935992502
Sept 15, 2020 • 92 pp • Poetry
Cover Art : Allen Saperstein
Book Design: HR Hegnauer
United Artists Books

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Digigram

Barbara Henning’s Digigram is unrelenting in its collaging of reality, visions, and thought buds. Sometimes diaristic and newsy, this is edgy poetry that moves beyond the tricks of fashion. An agitated style centralizes the subjects—heartless immigration policies, women’s rights, weather, racism, virulent patriarchy, compromised democracy, family, daily life, sex, spirituality. In this book we get glimpses of Henning’s assertive and experiential humanism. Pointedly political. Digigram is the work of a major writer.
—Uche Nduka

Digigram pulses in and out like a telegraphic beacon. Both emotional archive and urgent transmis- sion, Barbara Henning records a daily exchange with transnational historic events, the memories of city streets, intimacies both brief and endless. With each digigram a message is passed between the day and the mystery, the event and its shadow, the poet and the whole world.
—Laura Henriksen

Digigram is an expedition through the uneven rhythms in which we’re all immersed, a telegram from our digital travels through the tragedy and the beauty we’re all close to at any moment. Languages culled from all levels of consciousness and experience—political tumult, daily routine, newspaper stories, anonymous conversations, flashes of memory—leap across the hyphens that join each thought-phrase to the next. Sensitive, caring and unwilling to accept the injustice happening the world over, Barbara Henning has given us a vital, life-affirming book.
—Tony Iantosca

Digigram follows the path of Barbara Henning’s daily orbit into the roar and stammer of the universe just outside her apartment door – the politics of the hour, the wandering populace, the upheavals and intervals of all the treasured ordinary. An engaged participant and insightful commentator, Henning defines her times with riveting staccato observation and claims her place as part of that manifold citizenry.
—Maureen Owen

Reviews and Interviews:

Passages from Reviews

Henning is a flaneur weaving in and out of her own life. Her sleight of hand is the flow of adjacencies and she doesn’t let the poem’s narrative create finality. She shows us the neighborhood in brief strokes, its vibrancy, leaving it there in its completely gritty glamour, for you to take inside her apartment with her where you’ll find yourself in her bedroom, only to leave off from her, there. This is a signature of hers. There’s something to love. (In this respect I can’t help recalling Paul Blackburn’s poetry, not just in his game-changing volume The Cities,1967, but straight through to the posthumous The Journals, 1975).   

—Burt Kimmelman “Barbara Henning’s Present Tense,” Marsh Hawk Review, Fall 2021.

For a long time the poet, novelist, and teacher Barbara Henning has made a career of violating genre boundaries, mixing fact and fiction, prose and poetry, autobiography and chance procedure to compile an utterly original body of work. Written in the pre-Covid teens during the hellish rise of Ubu Trump, her latest book Digigram is an homage to public life, a celebration of the energy, movement, community, anonymity, and freedom afforded by our erstwhile urban existence. . . . Reading Digigram now, in the wake of Trump’s defeat, one recognizes the angst of the past four years all too well. Something else also comes through: a sense of moral courage. On every page we read defiance in the face of tyranny, open-hearted fellow feeling, and an embrace of myriad possibilities for love and enduring life. I take courage from Barbara’s sagacious outlook, her unflinching reckoning with the harsh realities of 21st century life, and her optimistic spirit of joyful resistance. 

—Kit Robinson “Poet, Teacher, Citizen, Sage,”American Book Review, Volume 43, Numer 3, Fall 2022.

Henning’s poems [in Digigram] are like quick flashes of thought, a mind moving through the pages, to the rhythm of the sounds of the street, and what she encounters there. The staccato rhythm of the poems is like the sound of the subways, or the sound of Bebop. These poems are angular like Charlie Parker’s soloing; they are like airtight riffs on what is passing or almost gone like the memory of events in one’s life, like those “dark scattered clouds – the western sun – a golden hue.”

 . . . There is also the sense of a stillness, a quiet, that resounds in the poems, a wider, more natural vibration; in Buddhism, sound and vibration were the building blocks of the universe; from light was born darkness, and from darkness light. . . . Throughout Henning’s book there is a sense of prevailing mystery that underlies each poem. It is the mystery of life; that all things cannot be known and this mystery must be preserved. Man makes laws and attempts to civilize the world but he cannot fully understand it. …This is not to say that these poems are mystical themselves. They are very much grounded in the world of global events and people, and bristle with the savvy eloquence of a poet that echoes the writers of the second generation New York school; the tone is casual and frank, conversational; these poems are generous.

. . . Henning is adept at this art of synthesis. She . . . puts a lot of things in these poems: perceptions, feelings of longing and desire, love, loneliness, the urban and the natural world, the local and the global, but she does it in such a way so that they are unified in the musical form, that staccato rhythm, despite the duration of the phrases; it’s like Parker playing on the changes (the phrases) while the rhythm section keeps the steady 4/4 beat (the beat of the constant rhythm). There is an ethic contained in these poems: “Buddha said – one must light – the path of others – in the filthy waters.” That is exactly what these poems do; they light our way in the darkness.  

—Peter Valente. “Telegrams to the World” : On Barbara Henning’s Digigram Talisman, Issue #52, 2022

Many poets have used broad strokes to deplore the current reactionary environment (as Eliot Katz does so superbly in President Predator), expressing their outrage, disgust and sadness, but Barbara Henning in Digigram takes a different route, examining how the coarsened political climate has insinuated itself into all the interstices of everyday life. 

. . . From life's daily stew of conversations, street scenes, interfaces with the faceless bureaucracies, and the flight of birds and the homeless through Tompkins Square Park, using a carefully crafted, reticent verse, Henning creates a sense of the incremental impact of the ruling elite's ongoing assault on human liberty and dignity. Paired with this chronicle is evidence of how people are dealing with the stress. From overheard conversations on mass transit . . . and interactions with students, grocers and an acupuncturist, she garners a sense of the public's reaction, which goes from apathy and resignation to fear and obliviousness. In contrast, in the reactions of those with whom she is close one finds camaraderie, widened sympathies, mutual aid and (as commemorated in her attending a performance "at St Marks" where "Laurie Anderson tells - a story - with her violin") the creation of gently insistent, progressive art.

—Jim Feast, “Reticent Verse,” Fifth Estate:The Anarachist Review of Books, Winter 2021.

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