The Meaning of Poems

“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