The Meaning of Poems
Selected Poems (as) Poetics
James Berger
ISBN 978-1-963908-28-2 164 pages $22.00
“Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Whitman challenged his readers. In this bracing, audacious, dialogical collection, James Berger takes up the question with a sly, ironic wit that interrogates the idea of poetics and subjects his own assumptions and biases to a ruthless and delightfully honest self-critique. Many poets will see their own agon reflected here. “My project is to slog/ my mortality in the dried vein// of lyric, and to claim// at last my incapacity// as my own.” Yet this is not a poetry of exhaustion, but of self-renewing vitality: Yeats’ foul rag and bone shop or Manny Faber’s termite art, restless, eating away at its own boundaries. Subversive and disarming, Berger charts his development as a poet with humor and panache. It makes for one hell of a ride.
Patrick Pritchett
With the contemporary poetry world’s modernist-hangover obsession with “projects,” it’s fairly unusual to find a book, like this one, that is uniformly delightful. The levity of Berger’s poetry, however, is not unserious: it grapples with the puzzles that plague us all as poets and as human beings. It’s filled with personal revelations, direct address, relatable moments, and a ludic, lexically attentive sensibility further leavened with charming notes of self-deprecation. Berger claims in his intro that this book isn’t an ars poetica, but isn’t every poem ever composed a de facto artifact of a poet’s answer to the question: how to make a poem? If that question imbues your own “project,” and if institutional answers to it make you roll your eyes, you will love this book.
Nada Gordon
I can't decide if Jim Berger is the most sincere poet in America or the most recent incarnation of that ultimate Jewish trickster, Bugs Bunny, or a Whitman touched in the head by Groucho Marx. That's his particular superpower—he is naive, sentimental, thoughtful, cagey and direct. I know of few poets so intent on "making the obvious evident," He’ll tell you himself, "I'm a fucking deep motherfucking poet." And he is! But that’s just the starting point.
David Kaufman
Prior books by James Berger
The Obvious Poems and The Worthless Poems
The Obvious Poems and The Worthless Poems
is a title that smacks you upside the head. So it’s worthwhile to state
the obvious: James Berger may have divided his latest book into two
sections—the first of politically and socially aware poems, intensely
alive to the accelerating disintegration of social, ecological, and
ethical order in the world around us, often descending into incandescent
(and wholly understandable) rage, the second of wordplay, formal
experimentation, and wonderfully acute, often tender quotidien
observation; but his obviousnesses are far too profound to be merely
obvious, and what he calls “worthless” is worthless only by the
standards of hedge fund managers and petrochemical investors. Once upon a
time, Horace said something about poetry being for “instruction and
delight”: Berger’s still working that vein, loading every rift with ore.
Mark Scroggins
Prior
“There is an ever-present intensity to James Berger’s Prior through which the reader plummets. Full of complex and particular insight, by turns darkly comic and comically dark, these poems are as unafraid of regret an anger as they are of quick surprise and happiness. Prior testifies to what it means to be ankle deep in a new century, one marked by sound and fury and the astonishment that words still hold us fast to what is yet to come. Berger is a poet for this, our only, right now.”
Richard Deming
“With Prior, Jim Berger offers up exuberantly dark and witty meditations on the past, maggiage, love, maturity, projects, protecting one’s children, cultural amnesia, violence, kindness, and the impossibility of the present moment. These poems lean into the future and reach back to prior orders of suffering and loss, swinging wildly between disillusion and hope. They give us a sense of the fierceness of being alive, and the sheer gift of being able to reflect on what that means. They remind us, beautifully, of our brevity in this world.”
Joanna Klink
Under the Impression
“James Berger, the unseen hand behind two searing volumes of OBU [One Big Union/ Oligarchy Busters United] manifestos, emerges into light in Under the Impression. Known in the OBU books as an advocate for labor unions, radical politics, and yet-unimagined forms of social solidarity, here we encounter a poet whose imaginative and intellectual cv includes many passions: the history and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, art, basefall, jazz, puns (good and bad), insects as beings and as metaphysics, tennis, fatherhood (from both sides), a mother’s death, marriage, intellectual disability, sex, John Ashbery, hiphop rhymes, friendship, and poetry as form, profession, aesthetics, politics, satire, and lyric. Where OBU was a “project,” this volume projects many more lenses of Berger’s fly-eye. This is a manual on how to see the contemporary world and to survive that seeing, while knowing that ‘It’s only now that the saddest thing in the world is joy.’”
Susan M. Schultz
“Under the Impression transverses the spongy dents in the surfaces of language and memory. Anti-lyrical and insistently lyrical, frank, interrogative, and punctuated with humor, Berger’s poems articulate brilliantly an inventive scepticism of the real world’s edges and fictions. Lines like ‘The cat is chasing the bouncing ball./ Can you determine if that is a true statement?’ and ‘What’s so pressing?... We will see the shape when we no longer see the violence’ imbue Berger’s reader with a monstrous sensitivity toward the perceptible persistence of absense, time, injustice, and the possibility of happiness.”
Orchid Tierney
The OBU Manifestos
“One Big Union aka Oligarchy Busters United–a serious and radical hoot, a real send-up and a real, passionate intervention–these Blakean manifestos for our pluri-poly-inter-problemantic NOW-TIMES smash and reconfigure the relations between politics (explicity), situationist aspiration (informed), aesthetics (pointed), and aspire to a metamorphic (dada?) democracy–all with a fierce and witty love. Ingest the transformative OBU; readiness is all.”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
“The OBU Manifestos offers evidence of a poetic imagination at work, imagining in the best utopian fashion a world of human mutuality the direct obverse of the oligarchical nightmare into which we seem to be descending. If it can be imagined, then it can be–or ought to be–realized, and The OBU Manifestos is an advanced primer in turning imagination into reality.
Mark Scroggins
James Berger is now a Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Yale University, but he will retire after the Spring 2025 semester–after thirty years of university teaching and a prior ten years teaching in elementary schools. He is the author of two academic monographs: After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (U. of Minnesota Press, 1999) and The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (NYU Press, 2014); and of three books of poetry: Prior (BlazeVox, 2013), Under the Impression (BlazeVox, 2020), and The Obvious Poems and the Worthless Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). He is also midwife and conduit of The OBU Manifestos, vols 1&2 (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017, 2019). He is currently at work on two books: “On Naive and Sentimental Poetics” and “The Book of Impasses.” He will not tell you what genres these books might occupy.
