Sharing, Honouring

Richard Berengarten’s multifaceted body of work, poetic as well as critical, has been the subject of numerous book reviews and essays. Some key stops: the wide-ranging Companion to Richard Berengarten, published initially by Salt in 2011, then again by Shearsman in a 2016 revised edition; or the volumes of essays focusing on particular works in his output, such as Managing the Manager: Critical Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Book-length Poem in 2019 and, only this year, Under the Sign of the I Ching: Essays on Richard Berengarten’s 'Changing'. The research and readings contained therein offer multiple avenues into the literary enterprise of a poet who keeps venturing outward (psycho)geographically – contemplating Balkan traditions and cultural life in works such as In A Time of Drought (2006) and The Blue Butterfly (2008) for instance, or George Seferis’s themes and poetics – which partly inspired 1983’s Black Light. Berengarten has kept at inviting in alterities; he negotiates elsewheres as already part of a constantly expanding self – one that in his poetry often turns into a study of our common humanity. In a response featured in a volume of interviews, he points out that it is possible now to ‘see ourselves as part of the same human race’; and continues:

Not only that, every poet has some interlocutor in mind, some ideal reader or listener. For me, incidentally, an interlocutor is by definition singular, for two reasons. First, because poetic communication is always necessarily directed out of the fulness, the completeness, of one person’s humanity into the fulness / completeness of another’s. Secondly, because the act of receiving a poem can only be done by an individual, in the core, as it were, of an individual’s uniqueness. So, with this in mind, I wouldn’t want to suggest that a poet should write for anyone he or she doesn’t want to write for. But even taking that point, I think it’s a pity if a poet of our time doesn’t grasp the full power and gentleness of the word ‘human’ in its fullest and most recent range of connotations. (Berengarten and Halkon 2015: 92)

Across more than five decades of his disciplined involvement with verse, Berengarten has conceived projects that illuminate or refract cultural and poetic identities in fruitful, necessary dialogue: Black Light, mentioned above, is even subtitled ‘poems in memory of George Seferis’; the pamphlet An Octave for Octavio Paz, edited in 1972 with Anthony Rudolf, brings together devotees of the Mexican poet to emphatically argue for the legacy of his work in an Anglophone context; the contents of 1981’s Keys to Transformation: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas hone in on the imaginative spaces formed between poetry and painting. In fact, this is a poet who has always shown keen interest in the interplay of the verbal and the visual. Dyad (2022), his most recent collaboration with graphic artist Will Hill, is another testament to this long-lasting concern.

Connecting languages and the world perceived or created through them, is key in understanding this poetry. In a web presentation hosted by the International Literary Quarterly featuring an astounding 92 renderings in different languages of ‘Volta’, one of the Greek-inflected poems from Black Light, the poet himself further accents this. His Introduction there ends with these sentences:

This anthology, including the biographies of its author-translators and this introduction, shows clearly that in our contemporary world, territories, countries and professions no longer serve as containers or niches for speakers of any one single hegemonic language, but rather for richly variegated and saturated solutions of many languages. Out of each and all of these languages, poems crystallise. 
                                                                                   
The ‘Volta’ project, then, is not merely an affirmation of multilingualism. It issues an implicit claim, made gradually more explicit here, that multilingualism and diversity constitute our defining contemporary linguistic, cultural, literary and poetic reality. In attempting at least a preliminary outline of some guiding principles for a viable future poetics, this anthology, including this essay, may form part of a larger communal project.

Such a poetics might be called universalist. It could also be called the poetics of the border/line. (Berengarten 2009)

In this vein also, fellow poets, translators, critics, academics, publishers and visual artists from across the world have forged lifelong relationships with him. Berengarten’s own verse has also chronicled the sharing of literary ideas (sometimes through translations and intertextual borrowing). And hospitality has been part of the shared experience of the people who have found themselves in his orbit. Truly, human connections have been integral to this oeuvre: shaping its genesis and its themes. Some of Berengarten’s most perceptive reflections on the art can be found within the pamphlets of Imagems 1 (2013) and Imagems 2 (2019). There, one of his propositions contends:

Whenever the guest arrives, the host is reciprocally hosted. The particular interior that encompasses both guest and host is the anterior time space that itself first gave welcome to the host. Poetry, being itself a gift, flourishes in that generous presence of arrivals, meetings and gift-givings. (2013: 11)

What several of Richard’s friends and key collaborators make clear in the alphabetic assembly of brief texts that follows, are ways in which the poetic act is not bounded by a single mind when it comes to Richard Berengarten but often emerges from conversation with others; it is geared towards recognizing intersecting communities, cultures, and ultimately, our shared humanity.

Given the electronic environment where these tributes appear, it is quite apt to conclude with a video of the poet reading from his work at UCLA, in one of his many journeys abroad.

Paschalis Nikolaou

REFERENCES:

Berengarten, R. and Halkon, R. (2015). ‘Aspects of the Work’. In Richard Berengarten: A Portrait in Inter-Views, ed. P. Nikolaou and J. Z. Dillon. Bristol: Shearsman Books, pp. 81–109.

Berengarten, R. (2013). Imagems 1. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

Berengarten, R. (2009). ‘Border/Lines: An Introduction’. The International Literary Quarterly 9 (November, ‘Volta: A Multilingual Anthology). Online here.

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