Maja Herman Sekulić (Serbia / USA)

Richard Berengarten, Poet of the Soul and Synchronicity [1]

The first thing I want to say about Richard Berengarten is that he is Jewish, and British, and Serbian; that he is an international poet; and, above all, that he is just human, all too human and alive, and so is his poetry:

a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky

and settled on the forefinger

of my international bloody human hand. (RB, The Blue Butterfly, 2011, p. 8)

Thus concludes his poem ‘The blue butterfly’ and book of the same title, which is dedicated to the victims of the massacre in Kragujevac, and especially to the innocent children of this Serbian city. [2] This kind of simplicity, which is found only in the best lines of poets such as Goethe, Pushkin, Brodsky, Auden, or Popa, depends on elevating historical facts from the prosaic to the poetic level by using everyday language. This is the golden key to poetry. When this point is achieved, our eyes and ears, our minds and our imaginations, open to the true mystery and mastery of poetry.

* * *

Ever since he first learned the truth about the Holocaust and the darkness of the time of his first years of life, Berengarten, the poet, has been searching for the gates between life and death as they have gradually been opening to him. W. H. Auden wrote about this darkness in his poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939):

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark

[…]

And the living nations wait

Each sequestered in its hate…

Forty-five years later, in May 1984, standing outside the museum in Kragujevac, Berengarten became convinced, as the bards of ancient Greece had been, that the muses and gods spin darkness and evil towards mortals. This was the moment when he, the very poet of the gates between life and death, was first motivated to tell the tale and sing the song of life inspired by the psyche, the soul. In ‘The Nonplussed Pleasures of Love’, the poet asks:

                               […] Is

Death the condition without

which such a life would be

unacceptable?   (RB, Changing, 2016, p. 74)

Richard Berengarten is the poet of the soul. He doesn’t roar in anger, he doesn’t blame: he sings love and life into being.

Notes

[1] This text is an extract from Maja Herman Sekulić’s essay on RB’s writings relating to former Yugoslavia, entitled ‘Bloody Human’. It will be published in a forthcoming collection (Shearsman Books, 2025), which takes its title from Maja Herman Sekulić’s essay.

[2] For non-Serbian readers, the town of Kragujevac in the heart of Serbia is the site of a large-scale massacre by Nazi troops in October 1941. In retaliation for an attack by resistance fighters on German soldiers, around three thousand citizens were shot, including more than 200 high-school pupils and their teachers. The most popular poem about the massacre of Kragujevac pupils was written by the famous Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović. (See Berengarten 2011b: 125-140.)

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