Patricia Fazzi (Italy)
Richard in Arezzo
I had the pleasure of meeting Richard Berengarten in Arezzo in October 2002, when he was invited to run his poetry writing workshops in several high schools in the city, including the Liceo ‘Vittoria Colonna’, where I was a teacher. I took my class along to the meeting and discovered an immediate rapport in our visions of poetry and in our love for the craft. I remember that Richard encouraged the student-participants to write poems, and I too wrote one. When I read it aloud, he was astonished to discover that I had been writing poetry for some time and had already published a book, Ci vestiremo di versi (2000). [1] There and then, a deep friendship was born, and during some of his free time in Arezzo, we met to talk and read each other’s poems. We ranged over many topics: etymologies, poetic rhythm, and ancient and modern languages. He spoke pretty good Italian and I spoke a more modest English, a language I had always loved and studied, along with Latin and Greek. We exchanged books and talked to each other about them: so in this way I began to appreciate all his culture and humanity.
After he left, we carried on talking and writing to each other, and the idea of translating some of each other’s poems emerged. This too was a very fine experience: our love for the word and its nuances brought us together and enabled us to transmit our poems reciprocally between the two languages, with results that he described as perfect. I translated his ‘Give time’ and ‘Nada: Hope or nothing’, [2] and he translated seven of my poems, including ‘My poems around the world’. [3] Then, in the following year, in October 2003, when Richard returned to Arezzo to run another series of high school workshops, I organised a reading to introduce him and his writing to Arezzo. This was a delightful event: it took place before a large audience at the ‘Circolo Artistico’ in the city centre, where an exhibition by the Florentine painter Mario Meucci was on display. Quite by chance, behind us there was a painting of a pianist and a violinist (see the photo). I had the honour of curating the evening and introducing Richard’s biography and his work as a poet, translator and teacher, with particular focus on his books
Against Perfection (1999),
The Manager (2001) and
Book With No Back Cover
(2003). In that same week, I presented him and his work at another joint reading of his poems in Italian and English. This was at the invitation of the Arezzo Writers’ Association [4] (of which I was and still am a member), during an important award ceremony. When we recited his poem
Tree, we took it in turn to read lines, alternating swiftly between the two languages. This was an unforgettable moment of high poetic communication.
Among the many aspects that strike a reader of Berengarten’s writings, the first and foremost is that his poetry hardly seems to be the work of an individual, but rather of all humanity, and it is to all humanity that his poems are addressed. Perhaps this quality arises by virtue of his particular and multiple cultural background, which he sketches out in a poem tinged with irony but rich in dignity: the autobiographical title-poem of his book The Blue Butterfly. [5]
Here, just as in other poems closely linked to his personal experience, such as ‘May’, [6] in which he recalls the sudden death of his father when he was still a child, there is a breath vaster than that of any confessionally intimate or merely solipsistic voice. Here we find, rather, a quality of tension – and attention – to become the voice of all that is: to look at things, nature, feelings, life and history from a perspective of universality, of sharing, of communion with all human beings. This quality is carried through an incisive and sometimes sustained expressive tone, yet one that is never overly forced but, rather, suffused with a vibrant humility. Here I cite a particularly fine passage in Book With No Back Cover (2003), which I quoted as an epigraph for my book Dal fondo dei fati (2005). [7] In this passage, Berengarten unequivocally affirms the importance of the poet’s word, which, when united with the reader’s, grows to form a single plant:
I will speak. Yes I will. I will not, cannot be silenced. I am responsible for this seed landed here called Human
[…]
Yet I will speak. I must. And of these things too. This plant that grows from our speech in joy here I name: Community. [8]
As far as form and style are concerned, Berengarten’s immense versatility enables him, brilliantly, to vary his line-lengths and lengths of compositions, as well as his tones and expressive rhythms, according to the particular requirements of his inspiration. He can compose both very short lines and long, expansive verse-units or ‘verse-paragraphs’; he can build both a perfect sonnet and a long composition of epic proportions; and he can deploy alternate rhyme-schemes or trust himself to free verse, making the page pulse with delicate composure or vigorous, impassioned energy. However, what is always evident is the perfect construction of every poem, often involving compositional or numerological symmetries, together with the skilful deployment of rhetorical figures – from alliteration to simile and from metaphor to anaphora – in short, a painstaking labor limae, [9] a true love of the word, which never degenerates into mere stylistic virtuosity.
Richard Berengarten is most properly described as a true poet, in the ancient sense of the word, that is, as one who is above trends and fashions; but he is, also and equally, profoundly modern. He offers the reader courage, motivation and hope, and thereby addresses an invitation to each one of us to look into ourselves to find answers and, by doing so, to discover a personal path which we may follow together with others.
Notes
[1] ‘We’ll clothe ourselves in verses’.
[2] ‘Give time’, later collected in Notness : Sonnets (2015: 35) and ‘Nada : hope or nothing’, in The Blue Butterfly (2006, 2008, 2011: 9).
[3] ‘Le mie poesie in giro per il mondo’.
[4] L’Associazione Scrittori Aretini Tagete.
[5] The Blue Butterfly (2006, 2008, 2011: 8).
[6] Later published in For the Living (2004; 2008, 2011: 177-184).
[7] ‘From the depths of the Fates’.
[8] Book With No Back Cover (2003: 43).
[9] ‘work of (meticulous) polishing, revision’.
Photo: Patrizia and Richard in Arezzo, 2003
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