Mark thy calendar …

Stephen Berg Memorial Reading.

The date is Tuesday, December 16, 7 PM.
The location is the Green Line Café, 4426 Locust Street
(SE corner 45th & Locust Streets, West Philadelphia –
please note there are other Green Line Café locations).

If you would like to be a part of this,
please contact Leonard Gontarek,
gontarek9@earthlink.net
215.808.9507.
You can read a poem or two and say a few (or many) words
about Stephen.



Stephen Berg
1934–2014


Poet and editor Stephen Berg attended the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, the University of Indiana, and the University of Iowa, where he earned his BA. His collections of poetry include The Daughters (1971), Grief (1975), In It (1986), New & Selected Poems (1992), Shaving (1998), and 58 Poems (2013). His translations include Oedipus the King (1988), which he co-translated with Diskin Clay, and Ikkyu: Crow with no Mouth: 15th Century Zen Master (1989). With Robert Mezey, Berg helped edit the popular Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1969) and The New Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1976) anthologies. He founded and edited the American Poetry Review.

Stephen Berg’s honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pew Foundation. He received a PEN grant in translation and the Frank O’Hara Prize. He taught at Princeton and Haverford College and served as a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.




from Being Here, Like This - The Poetry of Stephen Berg by Edward Hirsch


We still haven't taken the measure of Stephen Berg's poetry. His achievement is hard to pin down, and criticism, which runs on fashion, hasn't caught up with him. He had an idiosyncratic voice—forthright, nervous, intimate, self-questioning. I would call him a confessional poet except he kept emptying out and interrogating the self that is the basis of that mode, which he felt was misunderstood. He wrote in the wake of "Song of Myself," Four Quartets, Life Studies. He demanded utter authenticity in art—individuality of feeling, depth of sincerity. He was a fragmented post-confessional, a spiritual seeker, a poetic magpie, an antic skeptic, an agnostic Jew who kept looking for justice, for wisdom, for God, who disappointed him.

…

Stephen Berg was one of our most eccentric, psychologically astute, and humane poets. The stakes were high in his work—he tended to write as if death itself was always just about three weeks away. It was never far from his mind. I love him for bringing everything to the blank page, his battlefield. He read and wrote as if his life depended on it. He was frightened, but he didn't hold back, he threw himself into the fray. He was flawed and courted extremity, he thought constantly about suffering, and he marshaled all the poets at his command for his one-man literary combat against oblivion. A complicated human being steps forth in his work, which is streaked with shadows and light, and we are deepened by the experience.




Eating Outside



Fat pine boughs

droop over the vegetable garden’s

sticks and leaves,

the moon’s hazy face comes and goes

in the heat.

Beautiful women,

your skin can barely be seen.

The moon’s gone. Clouds everywhere.

A pale hand curls

on the tabletop next to mine,

there’s talk about work and love.

We’re like the moon at this hour

as clouds swallow it or dissolve so

it glides through the shaggy limbs,

full, like the grief inside us,

then floats off by itself

beyond the last tips of the needles.

The trees are quiet. In the house

my daughters play the piano and laugh.

The family dog races in and out howling.

The candles on the table have blown out.

I keep trying to explain

but when I go back, like now, there’s

the red hammock, the barbecue guarding

the lit back wall like a dwarf,

the self, awed by changes,

motioning to us as it leaves.

Deep among those arms, it pauses

clear, white and unseen.




Stephen Berg