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…
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…
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…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN 1. For poets, as for everyone else, the challenges, dangers, possibilities and hopes of our epoch are enormous. Our time is unlike any other. We have lived through modernism: we know all about that. And we have gone…
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…
The book-length sequence of poems entitled The Blue Butterfly was conceived when Richard Berengarten took the photo below on 25 May 1985, outside the Memorial Museum at Šumarice, on the outskirts of the city of Kragujevac in central Serbia. The museum commemorates a…
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…
