A. Robert Lee (Spain)

Personal Access: Richard Berengarten

With Richard you can’t help but imagine all those life-rivers.

                        Jewish

                        British

                        European

                        Mediterranean

                        Balkan

                        Italian

                        Greek

                        Chinese

And imagined and lived them Richard has…

In spades. In a lifetime’s texts: poems small and epic, fiction, memoir, essay, document, performance.

So let me add one more river.

                      Japan

It’s where we met in person for the first time.  

                       Tokyo

He was there with an ensemble of poets, a column of international talent. Myself mid-way into a 14-year stay teaching literature at the country’s largest university.

Chris Emery, founder-guru of Salt Publishing, Cambridge, and for whose press the both of us had written, put us in touch. Richard was coming to Japan – could we meet?

Over a first lunch in the Chrysanthemum Kingdom’s capital, and with Melanie and a university colleague or two, we soared into precisely some of those Berengarten, ex-Burns, life-rivers.

Plus hugely pleasurable and inevitable writer-talk.

No doubt it was symptomatic that the eatery was a wondrous corner place run by a Japanese chef trained in Belgium whose only European language was French. He had called the place La Patate which, if you’re up on your colloquial French, you’ll know carries a colloquial smack – spuds or something like. 

From there it’s been absurd amounts of friendship, albeit much via internet and old-time mail.  

I can’t help but think of how Richard-in-Japan was reached. Travel less by plane than page, the extraordinary journeying of his power of word. 

Let me take three examples in which I have been privileged to have a connection.  

The diary-novel, The Manager, with its steer between hope and existential fracture, corporate and IT buzzwords and the bid for language of personal intimacy. At the invitation of the editors of Managing the Manager I contributed “He Do The Different Voices: The Manager Speaking.” In a hurrah for Richard’s virtuosity I was able to write: “A strikingly varied yet composite gallery… aided and abetted by fragments of speech in other languages (among them French, Italian, Serbian and Hebrew), plays of two kinds of Atlantic English, and resorts to varying British class registers.”         

The hundred sonnets of Notness. Footfalls as may be of Shakespeare or Donne, not to mention Judaic and Classical tradition. But wholly his own. I was more than happy to add a cover endorsement to those of others: “These are poems which give contemplation to the very in-being of life, in personal folds of love, birth and death. A genuine triumph.”

Changing (2016), Richard’s re-composing of the I Ching epic. Hexagrams. Sagacities. Observations. The kinetics of living. Many of the pieces have their dedicatees. One of them comes my way. Thank you. Xie-xie.

So beyond geography, borders, getting to Japan had its literary journey. You could, of course add in all the rest, whether the Shearsman collected/selected poetry from the Balkan trilogy begun with The Blue Butterfly through to Book With No Back Cover. Or his Imagem pamphlets to the composite Balkan Spaces. Essays and Sketches.

Whichever you opt for, one or all of them, I’m far from the only one for whom the choice has been a feast, a seder.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.