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Cluster index: Richard Berengarten

Two sonnets.

By Richard Berengarten. ◊ Rimbaud recocious pupil, teenage layabout, He’s played provincial brat, brash schoolboy slut, Barbarian beast, filthy louse-ridden mutt— Until piss-artist drink-mates chuck him out; Absinthe and argot mingling in his throat, Teacher’s best pet, deranged, turns foul-slanged slob, Illumination-seeker, cannon-gob, Working his passage on a drunken boat. And then he’s twenty-two. And […]

Five sonnets in honour of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Executed on the Scaffold, Westminster, 29 October, 1618. By Richard Berengarten. ◊ He dresses in the Tower T five, the priest. The prisoner, confessed, Cheers up a little, even seeming merry, Taking his usual care in how he’s dressed, Stylish as ever, fashionable (very)— Doublet, hair-hued; taffeta breeches, black; Waistcoat, embroidered, black; kid gloves, in […]

On the Spirit of Poetry in a Time of Plague.

Berengarten: ‘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.’

Holding the Desert.

Richard Berengarten: ‘I hear a rushing, and swoon.
When I come to, I remember.
my guide has carved a wand
out of, all things, a bone.’

On Gathering and Togethering.

Richard Barengarten; ‘In terms of heritage, tangible and intangible, the protective and projective celebration of poetry in the present is action for and on behalf of the future. Past, present and future are treasured together in the Medellin Poetry Festival.’

The interview as text and performance.

Richard Berengarten: ‘If conversation is like a river (line, thread), flowing sequentially in one unstoppable direction, a text (or a recording, in the sense in which I’ve been using the word) is more like a lake, a reservoir. That is to say, it can be imaged, pictured, approached and re-approached, as a space in, though, around and over which—even while you’re actively doing things in it and to it, and shaping and bounding it—you have the freedom both of overview of the whole and of insights into its parts. ‘

Octavio Paz in Cambridge, 1970.

Richard Berengarten: ‘In the act and process of reading Octavio, whether his prose or verse, my experience is that I am breathed on by a larger, more oxygenated air, so that whatever may be the othernesses that constitute my ‘I’ (subliminal, hidden, unnoticed, potential, dormant, discarded, dismayed, disarrayed …) which, together with my ‘I’, compose the multiple folia of my Self itself – these all get gathered and re-gathered into an opening of lungs and horizons, into a fuller, richer and more acute alertness of the senses to harmonies and dissonances; to the unique minutiae tucked and pleated throughout panoramas and the panoramas resident and resonant in minutiae. ‘