Ian Gordon (U.K.)

 Richard Berengarten: an 80th Birthday Tribute

I first came to know Richard in the early 1970s when we were both lecturing colleagues in the English Department at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, now the Cambridge campus of Anglia Ruskin University. Richard was a dynamic and inspirational teacher and, as throughout his career, an original and free-thinking spirit encouraging strict habits of enquiry and discrimination in his students. It was during this period, in 1975, that Richard founded the annual Cambridge International Poetry Festival, particularly aimed at establishing a wider, European outlook on poetry in the U.K. This ambitious and ground-breaking undertaking was a direct outcome of his deepest convictions about the nature of poetry. There has never been anything remotely parochial about Richard’s literary perspective. He is on record as having said that he would rather think of himself as a European poet who writes in English than as an ‘English’ poet.

Richard and I have continued to meet sporadically, and I have enormously enjoyed reading his subsequent poetic publications. A regard for form has been a crucial shaping factor in his poetry as he has tested himself out, and proved, his skill in a wide variety of experimental and traditional forms. His inventive use, for example, of what he calls the ‘verse-paragraph’ gives shape to the falsities, pains and ‘flesh-enmeshed’ contradictions of contemporary Western lifestyles in his long poem, The Manager (2001); while his classic sequence of a hundred sonnets sharpens and gives focus to his metaphysical speculations on life and death in Notness (2015). The interlocking cyclic pattern in his unique sequence of twenty-four villanelles (one of the most exacting of forms), lends haunting musical coherence to his celebration of the joys of hospitality and friendship, and to humanity’s endless search for ‘the way of ways’ in The Wine Cup (2022). Richard’s pre-eminent guide in each of these collections is the overall control of form.

A rigorous intellect coupled with a strong sense of the importance of musicality in poetry have been equal hallmarks of Richard’s writing. He has a mind full of imagery and new ideas, and a keen ear for the cadences of everyday, colloquial speech. He is a fine verbal impersonator, especially in his ability to capture the banalities of contemporary jargon. Above all he enjoys playing with the sound, shape and texture of words. All of these qualities are manifest in his public readings, both of his own and other authors poems. He is a fine reader aloud of poetry, a quality by no means shown by all poets.

So, or ‘Hwaet’ as the Beowulf poet puts it, many felicitations, Richard on having reached your 80^th birthday. You have courageously embraced a wider, historical, geographical and cultural world than most English poets of recent times and offered us visions of hope as well as misery, and of joy as well as sadness. You have created a body of poetry that will continue to be read and admired beyond any passing mortal anniversary.

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