Paul Scott Derrick

British Mind. Chinese Soil. American Grain.

Richard Berengarten’s accomplishment in Changing is too broad, too complex and too intricately detailed to explore satisfactorily in a single essay. There’s just too much to account for. So I intend to narrow my focus here to what I suspect to be the book’s central and possibly deepest concerns, encompassed in Berengarten’s vision of wholeness.

A sequence of 448 eighteen-line poems and two villanelles that compose a contemporary epic in verse, Changing grew slowly out of the poet’s extended interaction with the Chinese Book of Changes. More than thirty years of asking questions, casting hexagrams, reflecting on their contents as answers and elaborating those answers into his own responses in poems – not to mention poring over a host of other commentaries and critical studies on the origins, the history, the organization, the structure, the philosophy and the reader’s possible uses of that intriguing, compelling text.

But this kind of careful and unhurried, deliberate and thoughtful approach to writing is not unusual for Berengarten. For example, he gradually accumulated his book-length poem The Manager over a period of about twenty-two years, from 1978 to 2000 (RB 2001). And the initial inspiration for another complex sequence, The Blue Butterfly, came in 1985 and led to the composition of two poems, “The Blue Butterfly” and “Nada: Hope or Nothing” (RB 2006: 123-124). The other forty-seven poems in that collection were written over a span of twenty years. As I have argued elsewhere, this kind of composition is akin to what Martin Heidegger called ein andenkendes Denken (Derrick, online). a patient contemplation that listens, recalls and responds. For Heidegger, this way of thinking, this way of using the potent tool of the mind, offers a needed antidote to the aggressive kinds of thought that have characterized Western society in modern times and is best represented by the mindset of modern science and, especially, technology.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Heidegger saw quite clearly the threats to the survival of the world posed by thinking that imposes human will and intervenes, too often rashly, in natural processes. The initial intentions of science are to a large extent benign and philanthropic: to expand knowledge, to improve living conditions for human beings, to combat disease, to ease the struggle for life. But we know from our Romantic forebears that it doesn’t take long for those noble intentions to be contaminated by the push of the ego and for the scientist, or the culture science nurtures, to be intoxicated by the temptations presented by the power over nature that science grants us. No one would deny that we live in perilous times. And it seems to me that one of the deepest causes of the many dangers that face us now is the essentially destructive path our culture’s tampering with the world has led us to.

We need to take a different path, and for Heidegger the key to that path lies in learning to use the potential of the mind differently, less aggressively and more receptively. His term for that is reflection. In the essay “Science and Reflection”¹ he says that “Reflection is of a different essence from the making conscious and the knowing that belong to science […]” (1977: 180). After elucidating how that making conscious and knowing impose the human will on nature, he sums up what he means by reflection: “To venture after sense or meaning [Sinn] is the essence of reflection [Besinnen]. This means more than a mere making conscious of something. We do not yet have reflection when we have only consciousness. Reflection is more. It is calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning” (ibid.). And I would argue that this passage gives a good description of the process by which Berengarten produced Changing.

It has long been my contention that there is a deeply embedded strain of nihilism in Occidental culture, and that the Romantic movement stemmed from a recognition of that strain and marked the first glimmering of a need to resist it. On the heels of the Enlightenment, numerous writers, painters and thinkers perceived the dangers inherent in an over-dependence on rational thought, and so initiated what I like to think of as the “recessive” line of thinking in Western culture, which has been, over the intervening centuries, examining and criticizing our drive toward fragmentation and destruction. This subversive countermovement necessarily advocates a return to unity and wholeness. That is, to a holistic paradigm. And I believe that one of its finest representatives in contemporary poetry is Richard Berengarten.

The gods speak to us through the poets, diviners and holy prophets, but the poets, diviners and holy prophets also speak to the gods for us. […] Our poems and our prophecies are also our prayers.

Edward L. Shaughnessy, Preface to Changing (x)

When Ruth Halkon asked Berengarten if he considered himself a religious poet, he gave a typically holistic reply:

I do, in a way. […] ‘Religio’, the Latin antecedent of ‘religion’, means ‘re-binding’. […] The poet is always trying to ‘yoke’, to ‘join’, to find connectivity, and that is engrained in the structure – and stuff – of metaphor [and] of language itself, and of experience itself. Everything is connected and the poet realizes these connections. Pound reminded himself of that, quasi-tragically, at the end of his Cantos: “It coheres all right – even if my notes do not cohere.” As Wordsworth says in The Prelude, “I mean to speak / Of that interminable building reared / By observation of affinities / In objects where no brotherhood exists / To passive minds.” “Observation of affinities” will inevitably result in perception of connectivity, yoking: religio. As is assumed in the entire endeavors of science and mathematics, there is a pattern, and there are inherent, intrinsic laws governing pattern. This sense of pattern, connectedness, connectivity, is inherent in all poetry. The physicist David Bohm calls this “implicate order.”² (85-86)

The question of religion is significant in a book that has its origins in the I Ching. In that ancient book Berengarten found the perfect interlocutor to ruminate on and cultivate his conviction that “Everything is connected.” Edward L. Shaughnessy is right to focus in his Preface to Changing on the “relationship between prayer, prophecy and poetry”(ix). I take it that he is implying that the kind of serious questioning of the Book of Changes that was the source of Berengarten’s book is a form of prayer – not in the selfish sense of pleading for some kind of personal favor or privilege, but as a way of seeking a deeper understanding of what we are and how to be, that is, a clarification of life. And I would postulate that prayer in this sense also corresponds with what Heidegger called Besinnung, or reflection.

Gaze into a mirror, or a well or a pond. You see yourself (and you see yourself looking back at yourself). For many, this can be a cause of wonder: the visual image of consciousness. Henry David Thoreau is looking into his own mind when, using both scientific knowledge and imagination, he plumbs the depths of Walden Pond. Walt Whitman sees the reflection of his own divinity when he stares over the rail of the Brooklyn ferry and

Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,

Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,

Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water […] (Whitman: 2033)

Emily Dickinson peers into a well (“Like looking every time you please / In an abyss’s face!”) and realizes that there are things in the world (and in herself) that empirical science can never completely account for:

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.        (Franklin 1254)

And in ‘For Once, Then, Something,’ following on Dickinson, Robert Frost peers into another New England well,

[…] never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven godlike

Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs        (Frost 145)

and almost sees something in his own reflection that he realizes is finally ungraspable. They all discover some aspect of themselves in the image the water gives back to them.³

Similarly, when we stare into the deep waters of the I Ching and elaborate meaningful answers from the ambiguous images of its hexagrams, we are also plumbing the depths of our own minds. To “speak”, as Berengarten has done, with the I Ching is “a calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning”.

This isn’t the first time I’ve alluded to Martin Heidegger’s thinking in relation with Berengarten’s work, nor is it the first time I have talked about the subversive and poetical thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson in this respect. But I need to repeat the point that Heidegger’s philosophy of the twentieth century “rhymes” with Emerson’s deep thinking in the nineteenth century. That is, they both form a part of that line in Western intellectual development deriving from our Romantic forebears.

In his foundational Transcendental text, Nature, first published in 1836, Emerson foresaw the threat of fragmentation inherent in the dominant rational line of Western thought. He comprehended how easily things could fall apart. I never tire of returning to this passage, because we forget so easily and we constantly need to be reminded – especially today, when things do seem to be spectacularly falling to bits.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. […] The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. (Emerson 1989a: 930)

Emerson had been trained as a Unitarian minister in the Harvard Divinity School, not as a formal philosopher, so he had no qualms about using an undefined term like “soul.” But I hope most of us know what he means. As both ex-minister and romantic thinker, he believed in a spiritual component of human being – whatever it is that gives us our ability to think, and feel, and intuit, and imagine – which must be acknowledged and potentiated for our continuing survival. Both rational thought and intuitive feeling are, he argued, necessary elements of what we are. We only see a part of the world, and therefore fragment it, if we only observe through the lens of rationality. This is why he continues,

Love is as much its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. […] There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. (ibid.)

That is, we need to learn to use all of our capacities, rational thought (which Emerson called Understanding) and intuition and feeling, in order to perceive the world properly and in this way keep it and ourselves whole. “Is not prayer also a study of truth, —a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily without learning something” (ibid.).

The purpose of this digression is to suggest how Richard Berengarten’s collaboration with the I Ching, his protracted conversation through question and answer, is also a form of prayer – that deepest form that Emerson is describing. And what is learned through this kind of prayer, or reflection, goes far beyond mere factual knowledge or empirical data.

What I’m talking about, of course, is wisdom – an alternative way of knowing ourselves and our world that contemporary societies are very much in need of. In his sensitive review of Changing, Hank Lazer is exactly right when he says what Berengarten gives us here are “wisdom poems” . The poems in this book are the result of a union – or perhaps even better, communion – of a reflective mind with the deep reservoir of accumulated thought on timeless human experience that is the Book of Changes. In this sense, Changing becomes a kind of nexus of wholeness, connecting its readers’ minds, through Berengarten’s, to that same source. And this is why the idea of coherence constitutes one of the most important of the many themes that thread their way through Changing.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (930)

If Changing, as many commentators have suggested, is the culmination of Berengarten’s impressively rich and varied poetic accomplishment, then it stands to reason that one of its central concerns would be the issue of connectedness. I propose that this book forms a highly significant part of what I am describing as the (very) late Romantic countermovement, a rearguard action to resist our culture’s headlong drive toward fragmentation and recover a holistic worldview. Berengarten’s focus on wholeness – and its related quality, coherence – is announced in the ten epigraphs to Changing, written in six languages and coming from texts that span centuries. Two of them are particularly pertinent for my point. The first of these comes from The Journal and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose” (1). This is a brilliantly chosen passage. The idea that chance falls of its own accord into order is a perfect representation of how the oracular facet of the I Ching functions. And the other one comes from Ezra Pound. We’ve already seen it in Berengarten’s comments on religion and wholeness in the interview with Ruth Halkon: “it coheres all right” (ibid.).

This passage from the late Cantos obviously occupies an important place in Berengarten’s creative consciousness. Shouldn’t we think of it as an aged poet’s hard-won insight into human experience? One that Berengarten clearly assumes for himself and advocates. The quote has appeared before in Berengarten’s work. When Charles Bruno, the protagonist of The Manager, is pulling himself together after a personal breakdown into existential confusion and despair, he (or a supra-personal voice that represents the consciousness of the author) identifies with Pound’s complaint and resolution:

I cannot make it cohere is what the old man said. Try though he did through his art. Willing that bridges be built where none had ever existed.

And looked through his eyes’ windows. And saw the blue flash of kingfishers. And the moment benedetto. And before he went back into silence

Answered himself thus: The light sings eternal . . . i.e. it coheres all right. Even if my notes do not cohere . . . Aye, old man, through thick and thin, the world

Sticks together right loyally. (RB 2011: 146)

Taken together, these two epigraphs indicate that beneath or behind or within what may seem to be a mélange of random phenomena, there lies a scaffolding of order. And if there is order, then there is, presumably, also meaning.

Or, to hone my phrasing more precisely, they indicate that the world – the amalgamation of the physical environment and our experience of it – can be invested with order and meaning. Can be. There is undoubtedly a universe of physical phenomena and processes, but what it is for us depends in subtle ways on how we think it. Unity, wholeness, connectedness, coherence are not necessarily pre-existing conditions. They are contingent on our readings of experience and arise – or not – from the way we interact with the material world we are immersed in. The complete process of interacting with the I Ching – eliciting chance through casting coins or yarrow stalks, consulting the hexagram thus attained, pondering its ambiguous images and statements, and then constructing a meaningful answer to the question posed – all of this is a model, or pattern, for the act of creating sense or meaning through the interaction of mind and world.

The “it” that Pound was talking about can cohere, as long as we conceive our thoughts about it properly, and learn to see “the moment benedetto.” This theme runs through Changing from beginning to end and binds it together as a keel holds true the hull of a ship.⁴ It begins almost immediately in the fourth poem of the book, “Cohering, Inhering,” which is, significantly, dedicated to David Bohm:

All day long and

all night long it starts

now now. To

keep everything

(every thing) in mind

in its entirety, and

still focus entire on

this? As the universe

keeps all measures

and all in measure,

and each thing main-

tains its own seams,

stains, marks, patterns

edges, pleats, horizons

may the same quiet

patient appetite for

order cohere, inhere

in this, in here.        (1/3: 7)

This quiet, patient appetite for order is a later variation of Wallace Stevens’ “Blessed rage for order.” Berengarten talks about Stevens’ poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West” (Stevens 128-130), in the Ruth Halkon interview. There he seems to suggest that Stevens refers to a pre-existing order “that emerges out of the matrix [in this case, the sea] it has been embedded in” (Nikolaou and Dillon 96). My reading offers a slightly different nuance, in that I stress that the mind is the conduit through which order emerges, and that the perception or appreciation of that order is contingent on how the mind is used. It is, after all, the idea of order Stevens is talking about. The nameless singer in the poem absorbs her experience of “the grinding water and the gasping waves” through her senses and expresses all of those roiling non-human phenomena in her song. The speaker and his friend, “pale Ramon,” observe that process of transformation of the natural world into art, and as a result they perceive order in their surroundings: “[…] when the singing ended and we turned / Toward the town […] / The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, […] Mastered the night and portioned out the sea […]” (ll. 45-9). The nature of their perception has been changed. That is, order results from a “correct” fusion of mind and world. For Stevens, that fusion is best achieved through the creative imagination, i.e. art.

Stevens was arguably the most Romantic of the great American Modernist poets, and this poem in particular links him directly to Emerson. For to sing “beyond the genius of the sea” is a distinctly Transcendental concept. The singer’s voice elevates an unconscious world into consciousness. The whole poem illustrates Emerson’s belief that the way the mind interacts with the rest of the world – how we observe and think about what we observe – creates significant meaning, or not. And this, I believe, is the lineage to which Richard Berengarten belongs.

Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?

Mary Oliver, “Upstream” (5)

Both the I Ching and Changing are rooted in, emerge from and encourage a holistic worldview, according to which all things are connected with everything else, including the mind. This synthetic reading of the world facilitates those forces or processes that favor life, as opposed to the analytic or mechanistic reading of the world that underlies the dominant line of Western thinking. As we all know by now, analysis, by definition, breaks things down into separate parts. And these separate parts, eventually, become isolated fragments. The subversive role of art in a time when the world is undergoing this kind of de-construction is to restore a comprehension of the need for wholeness.

Mary Oliver’s sentence above, though, contains a flaw. Those cords that attach all things are by no means unbreakable. They are fragile and can only endure if we recognize and protect them. Isn’t this what Berengarten wants us to glean from “Summer, svemir”?⁵

On our big round table

a vase of campanula. On

our small table a potted

Flowering hibiscus. On

windowsills, four orchids

two speckled, one white

one pink. Outside,

two doves sit side-by-side

in our rowan tree.

Our bowl has been

replenished, our cup

overflows with juices

and still this singular

flood pours in and

through us. Today

our lives are

a garden. Nothing

doesn’t cohere.         (27/0: 216)

On this peaceful summer day, the speaker’s cup runneth over; his life – and ours if we can also see this moment benedetto – Isa garden.⁶Everything coheres when the mind opens up and, rather than imposing our will, receives and nourishes.

If there’s any doubt that the poet is thinking in terms of wholeness here, we need only take a look at the explanatory note he appends to this poem’s title:

In Serbian and Croatian, svemir means ‘universe, space’. Derived from Old Slavonic, the word is constructed from two parts, sve (‘all’) and mir (мир ‘world’, ‘universe’, ‘community’). The conflation of the homophone mir, meaning ‘peace, calm, tranquility,’ creates an interesting ambiguity. Hence the modern word svemir simultaneously suggests not only ‘entire world’ but also ‘all-encompassing peace, complete tranquility’. (CH 547)

World, universe and community. The suggestion seems to be that when everything is connected, peace and tranquility result. But of course the opposite condition also obtains: without connectedness, peace and tranquility fail.

Poem 30/0, “Over whole skies” (240), offers clear evidence that Berengarten fully understands the fragility of such wholeness. The base line for this poem, announcing its source hexagram in the I Ching, is “fire […] brightness doubled.” And this idea is presented in the first two stanzas: “No fire flames once. / That which is bright / happens twice. Sunset // and dawn repeat their / blaze over entire skies / in glory.”

But what is this “brightness doubled”? Is it simply the fact that natural processes like sunrise and sunset repeat themselves? Perhaps. Yet when the poet says, “that which is bright happens twice,” it seems to me that he is talking about the kind of peaceful and receptive perception that “Summer, svemir” exemplifies. The first brightness is the natural phenomenon and the second one is the illumination in the receptive mind. What Berengarten celebrates here is, once again, very close to Heidegger’s understanding of reflection, a non-aggressive acceptance of the world which devolves into a different way of participating in it. “When flame,” the poem continues

clings to the palpable

it connects the world

with invisible power

shattering mountains

to memory, graveyards

into present gardens

and flaring where

boundaries of May trees

bloom white snows.        (ibid.)

The point is that human perception – “brightness doubled”– is a component of the whole. Human perception is indeed a key component, for it contributes consciousness, will. We can choose the will to power or we can choose to renounce power and strive to participate (connect the world with invisible power) rather than to dominate. “When brightness clings / to brightness, nothing / happens alone.”

The secret then, or the key, is to learn again how to permit the world to go on being what it already is. If this is an echo of Heidegger’s term “letting be,” it is also what Emerson means when he talks about “the problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty” (1989a: 930, emphasis mine). And too, this is almost certainly what Berengarten has in mind when he says at the end of 45/4 (“Beautiful September Morning” 364), “Things of their // own accord fit and / cohere, including our / breaths in this air.” That modest internal half-rhyme, cohere/air, nicely serves to reinforce the idea. Things fit and cohere of their own accord (though the implicit if we let them is left unsaid). Our breaths, that is our being in the world, and the words our breaths produce, can and should form a harmonious part of all that is. This is poetry whose aim is to bring us back home to the world. We too need to learn, of our own accord, how to fit in and cohere.

And if anyone needs more proof that Berengarten is consciously engaged in the task of recovery and renewal – what I prefer to think of as a late Romantic subversion of the primary line of Western thought – well, we have “Mist dispersing”:

Meanings gather, adhere,

cohere. Those cunning eroders –

who ran and ruined our city

and confused its ministries

and academies by trouncing

sense out of words and

wheedling purpose from

thought – have gone suddenly quiet

They’ll be back soon

enough […]

                     They

aren’t to be believed now

any more or less than

before. Time to move

on past them, as if they

were mist dispersing.        (43/5: 349)

In China, the Classic of Changes is thought to encompass every aspect of human experience, from the beginning and end of heaven and earth back to the beginning again.

Edward L. Shaughnessy, Preface to Changing (xii)

After a long poetic sequence that does indeed encompass every aspect of human experience, the final poem of Changing echoes the book’s opening epigraphs and in this way completes an intentional circle of coherence. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to read the light that bestows a renewed sheen on the world in “Brightness diffusing” as entering in the train of the “mists dispersing” (43/5: 349). The first four stanzas convey a sense of the beauty of existence – or the potential beauty of existence – in the kind of direct, simplified and delicate language that Berengarten has perfected over the course of his career and which reaches its culmination in this book.

Sunlight bronzes sea.

Everything sighs. Mid-

October, still warm.

Olive leaves’ undersides,

Dull metallic sheens, flicker

Across sandy hill groves.

Our sunflower heads,

are harvested. Light flames

Oleanders and cypresses.

Prickly pears swell

lobes topping green oval

Faces, golden grenades.         (64/6: 518)

When we perceive it – reflect it – reflect on it in this way, the world coheres in all of its transient beauty and glory. Transient, yes. And yet, it coheres through these words that save it for us from oblivion.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” writes Mary Oliver (8). And from this kind of attention, both to the Book of Changes and to the world it helps us to see in a deeper light, a personal knowledge arises. Recall those words of Emerson: “No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.” Through the poems in Changing, Berengarten shows us how to cleanse our vision and see the world anew, by changing what Emerson called our “axis of vision” (1989a: 930).

The last two stanzas circle back to the epigraph from Pound:

Instress, pattern, glory.

It all coheres, no question,

as do these notes of mine.

Come sit at the table

out here on the balcony.

Drink a glass of wine.         (64/5: 517)

Once again, the rhyme, “mine/wine,” reinforces the sense of order attained, as the poet invites us to share this vision of a thriving world in an act of deep communion. Perhaps the final message is that, in order to preserve and protect a living world, we need to learn to think of our participation in it as this: a form of communion.

The first definition of communion in my much-loved American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “a possessing or sharing in common, participation” and the second is “a sharing of thoughts and feelings; intimate talk.” The specifically Christian sense of the word is secondary to the idea of an intimate sharing of thoughts and feelings and mutual participation. But it, too, has to do with connectedness.

That larger sense of the word is what Walt Whitman has in mind when he announces at the beginning of Song of Myself that his poem will be celebrating a new, secular kind of Eucharist, or communion:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you […]

        (Whitman 1974: 12)

What more thorough sharing of essences and intimate talk can there be? Whitman leans and loafs at his ease observing a spear of summer grass, and in the remaining one thousand three hundred and forty-odd lines of the poem he allows nature to well up through his calm, receptive mind and speak through his voice “without check and with original energy” (ibid.)

Communion, communication, commingling, community. Whitman took his cue directly from Emerson, who wrote for example in “The Poet,” “I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature” (1989b: 985). And just as Whitman loquaciously reports his conversation with nature, so Berengarten reports his own conversation, and communion, with the ancient Chinese compendium of wisdom that is the I Ching.

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was not made just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

Mary Oliver, “My Friend Walt Whitman” (12)

Changing is, without a doubt, an intellectual thing. And one of the myriad qualities that make it so impressive is its “robust wordiness”. Its intricate interlacings with the intricacies of the I Ching, the multiple layers of meaning, suggestion and rich ambiguity conveyed by Berengarten’s appendix of explanatory notes, the disciplined stanzaic form of the poems, based on the structure of the Chinese hexagrams: all of this, and much more, attest to the deep intelligence that created it. But this is also poetry that speaks directly to its readers in a very human, very understandable voice.

Berengarten has often stated that he doesn’t think of himself as a specifically English or British poet. Rather, he prefers to be thought of on a broader scale as a pan-European voice. But the more I read and reflect on his work, the more convinced I am that he can also be placed quite comfortably within what William Carlos Williams called “the American grain.” Even in a work inspired in ancient Chinese thought and culture, I can’t help finding lines of continuity with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stevens and, of course, Ezra Pound.⁷

But then, simply to make that claim without any further qualification would be too facile. The real point is that the American grain is essentially a European grain, once removed. The profound and striking similarities between Emerson’s transcendental thinking and Heidegger’s existential philosophy make the point well.⁸ What is in play is the larger, underlying counterforce (to employ a term from Gravity’s Rainbow) initiated by the Romantics to subvert the tendency in our culture toward fragmentation and to reunite thought and world in a holistic synthesis. I suspect that this synthetic comprehension of experience, in which language is conceived as the adhesive that fuses all things into an interconnected whole, is what originally called out to Berengarten from the Chinese thinking that produced the Book of Changes.

He is aware that he’s taking this alternative but necessary path; though it would be more in keeping with the temper of Changing to invoke the concept of Tao and say that he is following this way through thought. Berengarten also knows full well that he is taking a step beyond Pound, for these carefully crafted notes of his do cohere. In poem number 2/5 (“A yellow lower garment”19), describing the light that bathes everything in the world in the same rich glow, he writes: “yes, you flow and cohere / all right, very right, // as do these notes, in / white light, black light, / alternating, oscillating” – an affirmation repeated, as we’ve seen above, in the final poem of the book.

And so, to finish – and possibly to begin – I want to take just one last look at the title. Doesn’t it also apply to us? Isn’t this book’s ultimate aim to contribute to a change in how, both individually and as a culture, we think ourselves and our world? Emerson understood how important it is for us to perceive everything-that-is as constant process, constant becoming. “Beauty,” he wrote, “is the moment of transition, as if the form were ready to flow into other forms” (1957: 178).

Many of the poems in Changing capture those fleeting moments of transition and reveal the beauty of a world that still has not been frozen and dissected by the meddling intellect. Will they change our axis of vision? We can only hope (or maybe pray) it’s not too late for the world we have been given to flow and cohere.

References

Baym, Nina et al. (eds). 1989. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I. New York: W. W. Norton.

Berengarten, Richard. 2016. Changing. Bristol: Shearsman Books.

_____. 2011. The Manager: a poem. (3^rd edn.). Bristol: Shearsman Books.

Bohm, David. 1985 [1980]. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Burns, Richard. 2001. The Manager: a poem. (1^st edn.). London and Bath: Elliott and Thompson

_____. 2006. The Blue Butterfly. (1^st edn.). Cambridge: Salt Publications.

Cavell, Stanley. 1993 [1972]. “Thinking of Emerson” in Buell, Lawrence (ed.). Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice Hall, 191-200.

_____.1988. In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____. 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Derrick, Paul Scott. 2017. “Ringing the Changes: A Fortnightly Review of Changing by Richard Berengarten” in The Fortnightly Review. Online at: http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2017/02/ringing-the-changes/

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1989a [1836]. Nature. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I, Baym, Nina et al (eds.). New York: W. W. Norton, 903-931.

_____. 1989b [1844]. “The Poet”. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. I, Baym, Nina et al (eds.). New York: W. W. Norton, 984-999.

_____. 1957 [1860]. “Beauty” in Miller, Perry (ed.) The American Transcendentalists. Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor Books: 171-186.

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Published: Sunday 22 May 2022

[RETURN TO CHANGING]

Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer, retired, in American literature at the University of Valencia. He has published three collections of essays and co-authored various bilingual critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams and Sarah Orne Jewett. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi 2007) and is also one of the co-editors of The Companion to Richard Berengarten (Shearsman 2016) and Managing The Manager: Critical Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Book-length Poem (Cambridge Scholars 2019). With Miguel Teruel, he has translated Berengarten’s Black Light into Spanish (JPM Ediciones 2012) and with Viorica Patea, has translated three volumes by Romanian poet Ana Blandiana into English (My Native Land A4; The Sun of Hereafter & Ebb of the Senses and Five Books: Bloodaxe 2014/2017/2021). A further volume of Blandiana’s poetry, The Shadow of Words, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2023. His critical essays, translations and poems have appeared in print and electronic journals in both Europe and the US.