John Gery (U.S.A.)

For Richard at 80

I first met Richard Berengarten (then Burns) in Belgrade in September 1999, not long after the NATO bombing of Serbia ended on 10 June of that year. Traveling circuitously via Budapest, since the Belgrade airport was not functioning, my partner (now wife) poet Biljana Obradović and I reached the heavily damaged city in time for the Belgrade International Writers Meeting, where I was the only American poet present and Richard the only poet from the UK. I don’t know when I have befriended someone so spontaneously as when Biljana and I shared our first dinner with Richard at Dva Jelena in Skadarlija.  

Given the unsettling, post-war context in which Serbian writers joined with writers arriving from throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East – a context shimmering with the Serbs’ justifiably indignant response to the virulent NATO campaign against Slobodan Milosević’s regime that had resulted in civilian deaths and severe damage to populated areas throughout Serbia — it was not surprising that Richard and I found quick kinship. Of course, having lived in Yugoslavia a decade earlier, Richard was far better informed about Serbian history and literature than I. Indeed, he was well-known there for his Serbia-focused work, especially his poems on the 1941 German massacre of schoolchildren near Kragujevac, including his remarkable sequences, “The Blue Butterfly” and “The Death of Children” (the latter a set of villanelles, no less). Yet I found our connection more than circumstantial. Richard was a generous guide and mentor, and his engagement in Biljana’s and my poems contributed, for me, to what became an intimate immersion into the lives and politics of the Serbian artists we met struggling to assert their dignity in a realm where much of the west had isolated them. In Richard’s company, and hearing his striking, dramatic poems, I felt emboldened to speak openly as an American to a potentially hostile audience — not to justify U.S. doctrine, but to express the same mix of curiosity, compassion, and admiration for the victims of violence that I often discovered was their reaction to me. 

Even more striking, however, in his poetry composed through the years, Richard persistently marries vivid, enmeshed, sometimes harsh images of contemporary life to the ineffable truths poets from Horace to Yeats have always yearned to divulge in their poems, despite the illusory nature of what we can know. While Richard’s work demonstrates surprising formal variations and great thematic range, poem by poem, book by book — whether celebrating folk culture or steeped in the urbane discourse of postmodernity — he cannot keep himself from risking the utterance of truth. As he poses the question in his Adamic poem, “Naming the Creatures,”

Must the creatures lie breathless there? Is there no redeeming

    The world we would capture with the poem’s snares?

Must we be evaded, cheated in veils of seeming,

    Incapable of rising to the green song that dares

Us on, through language, not just from the next glade

    Nor even the afternext (which tempts us overmuch),

But here, from this world, the unnamed we see and touch?

Through a long, rich life of determined writing, Richard’s green songs again and again have dared us on. In their music lies their, and our, redeeming of this world.

Back to introduction here.

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