James Berger

James Berger is a senior lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University. He is the author of a number of books of scholarship and poetry, most recently The Meaning of Poems: Selected Poems (as) Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). He is currently working on two books: “On Naive and Sentimental Poetics” (of which this essay will be a part) and “The Book of Impasses,” a frustrated investigation of our inability to imagine a future that is just and sustainable. (“What is now proved was once only imagined”).

Further work from Berger’s “On Naive and Sentimental Poetics” can be found on Jacket2 here.

By this author

The date, Diogenes, and the dog

Recently in Jacket2

The date, Diogenes, and the dog

On Susan Schultz

James Berger

Diogenes sitting in his tub by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1860).

Schultz writes so that the general unhingement is revealed in personal perceptions, emotions, and relations; and personal unhingement points back toward the general. If we live in a world of madness and deceit, how can we remain sane and honest?

I emailed Susan Schultz about madness (May 28, 2024): “I really believe there is some general madness becoming more and more prevalent and pervasive in everything — from state policy to personal emotion. There seems no sense of rational-ethical bearing; a general unhingement.

January 13, 2025

Richard Foreman (1937-2024)

Charles Bernstein

Richard Foreman
June 10, 1937 - January 4, 2024

Foreman at EPC/PennSound/Ontological
(PennSound page has many videos of Foreman's theater)

His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it.

Raw from the bellicose tumble (PoemTalk #203)

Callie Gardner, "Culture Warrior"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Julia Bloch, Iain Morrison

Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, and Iain Morrison joined Al Filreis in KWH’s Wexler Studio to talk about a poem — or rather two versions of a poem — by the late Callie Gardner. One version, titled “when will my love return from the culture war?,” is 6-quatrains long. A second, for which we have a recorded performance, is four quatrains; there’s a variation on the second that seems to invite us to call it a sonnet. Callie added a version — organized in the quatrains — to their blog on May 1, 2020. On November 19, 2020, Callie read the shorter version of the poem as part of a live-streamed reading given by eight poets. Callie was the fifth to read. We link the YouTube recording HERE, and PoemTalk listeners are invited to watch and listen to our poem at 53 minutes into the group reading.

December 24, 2024