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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease swipe right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix prose poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
Departments
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Contact the Editors here.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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On the Spirit of Poetry in a Time of Plague.
The First Imaginationalist Manifesto
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Issued by RICHARD BERENGARTEN.
Twelve statements.
1.COVID, if I catch and carry it, may bring not only my own sickness, sorrow, suffering, and possibly death, but also those of another, of others. COVID can destroy my health, haleness, wellness, life itself, and those of another, others, many others. As an agent and carrier of death, COVID can literally take my breath away – and yours, one you or more you.
2.COVID is both individual and communal. Individual, because if I catch it, it’s I who suffer. Communal, because it’s infectious, i.e. capable of being carried to me only by another (others) and equally to another (others) by me. I don’t, won’t, can’t catch COVID in any other way than from somebody else, some other body. Nor do, will, can you: you singular, you plural.
3.COVID makes me realise and recognize more and more deeply that I’m mortal, that (my) life is short, that (my) nature is animal, that (my) death is inevitable, ineluctable, inescapable – and that all this is true of and for you too – again, you singular and you plural.
4.Nor can I avoid converting all the above statements, which refer to I and me, to all other pronouns (beings and entities) – above all to, you, singular, other, and you, plural, others: that is, all together, we / us. COVID can’t help personalising, individualising everybody, each and every anybody or somebody, any and every other, all others. But curiously, far from separating us, COVID emphasises our community and, perhaps, even creates our communality, which is inevitably universal, since nobody (human), even if inoculated, can be entirely excluded from the risk of catching this plague.
5.All these areas and aspects of attentivity involves my realisation, too, that so far as I (we, all of us) know, there’s no consciousness without mortality.
6.Poetry is the linguistic medium above all others and par excellence that not only bares this entire set of awarenesses of mortality but also enables me (us, all of us) to bear it, and to do so with courage, patience, modesty, and compassion for others.
7.So: in such times as this time, this time of plague, I (we, you) need, want, rely on poetry more and more, and with increasing curiosity, urgency and passion. For poems, including stories and songs, are more capable of forming, formulating, expressing and communicating care, carefulness, and caringness, and doing so more honestly, truthfully, intensely, fully and profoundly, than any other linguistic expression.
8.Conversely, when any expression in language touches, even merely grazes – no, even so much as hints at – any such quality of honesty, truthfulness, intensity, fulness and profundity, it necessarily becomes poetry.
9.For that’s precisely what poetry is: language in its highest, best and completest form of honesty, truthfulness, intensity and profundity.
10.So I (you, we, all of us) need, want, rely on poetry in a time of plague, not only because it consoles me (all of you, all of us) – in, through and despite all my (our, your) weaknesses and fragilities – but also because it makes me (us) even more aware of all these aspects of living and dying. In so doing, it brings me (each of you, each of us) closer to the realities of the human heart, mind, spirit, soul, flesh, body.
11.But poetry isn’t borne or expressive of only pain and suffering. Poetry is and brings and reveals joy, and hope, and courage in the thisness, the hereness, the nowness of the this-here-now, and in the miraculous beauty and grace of this universe in the fullest possible context of all its (and our) mornings and evenings, nights and days, morrows and tomorrows.
12.With respect to and within the specific field of language, in the face of birth and death – this face that is so clearly delineated in a time of plague – poetry is the prime and most treasured agent of all hope, all courage, all joy.
RICHARD BERENGARTEN
Cambridge, 29-30 July 2021
♦
RICHARD BERENGARTEN’s writings include: (poetry) Changing, Notness: Sonnets, Manual, For the Living, The Manager, and his Balkan Trilogy: The Blue Butterfly, In a Time of Drought and Under Balkan Light; and (prose) Balkan Spaces (Essays and Sketches), A Portrait in Interviews, Imagems 1 and Imagems 2 – all published by Shearsman and available online here.
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Publication: Thursday, 21 July 2022, at 19:52.
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