Essays

On Poetry and Morning: Twelve Observations

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RICHARD BERENGARTEN 1. Dispassionate morning greets me. I breathe into rain-sounds, sleep-filled, dream-billowed. My flat roof creaks, pitter-patters. 2. It holds above me. The world that bears me confirms it’s in place. 3. But dreaming hasn’t done with me, still…

Four Statements on Poetics from Imagems 2

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RICHARD BERENGARTEN These four texts are to be published, with others, in Imagems 2, by Shearsman Books (Bristol, June 2019). Imagems is an ongoing series of twelve-point statements on poetics. Some of these texts blur the distinctions between theory and…

On Poetry and Exile: Twelve Propositions

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RICHARD BERENGARTEN 1. Who is not in exile. We make and remake poems and songs, so that we may go home again. To this making there is no end. 2. Home is by definition where mine is shared with you…

On the Breath and the Cry: Twelve Propositions

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RICHARD BERENGARTEN 1. In the beginning was the breath. Then came the cry. 2. When the newborn baby first meets air (greets the world), the midwife makes sure the baby cries. Like all other later cries, that first cry is…

A Synchronistic Experience in Serbia

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RICHARD BERENGARTEN [Abstract] In May 1985, I visited Serbia from my home in Cambridge, England, to run a series of poetry writing workshops for pupils in Serbian schools, mostly in their early teens. With my daughter Lara, who was then…

The infinite translating

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Frederick Townsend Jonathan Galassi *** In the Italian page Gabriella Mongardi compares the translations with Leopardi’s original text