Thirty-eight years since its composition, Richard Berengarten’s Tree has been translated wholly or partly into at least eleven languages. And with nine translations, TREE is now inaugurated as a multilingual project in Margutte. Tree is published here in a number of…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN Twelve propositions Our words inspiration, respiration and spirit all have a common origin in the Latin verb spirare ‘to breathe’. We breathe involuntarily and necessarily. The air we depend on for life itself surrounds the earth like a…
KERRY SHAWN KEYS Between the silverfish and the moon a gray ailanthus tree marks this city as mine (I have just eaten a book. I ate all its characters. I ate the deadend of the book) Between the silverfish and…
GERMAIN DROOGENBROODT Released from the tree a whirling down autumn leaf trip with no return Slowly branch by branch breaking out of the vapour the green of the pines Tree on a hilltop with branches spread like wishes to embrace…
SILVIA PIO I once said the apricot tree was my home because I preferred its clamorous leaves to the silence sounding the old walls. When autumn began to confine me inside I would look to the tree as one looks…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN The ‘planting’ of Richard Berengarten’s chant-poem TREE in Margutte, together with translations into other languages, marks the beginning of an ambitious poetry publishing project that has strong ecological relevance and resonances. This roots potentially wide-reaching international prospects and…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN I wrote Tree in Cambridge, 1979, at the age of thirty-five. Much of the poem’s direct inspiration came from Ann Waldman’s chant-poem, Fast Speaking Woman,[1] which she based in large part on her researches into women’s customs in…
