The Meaning of Poems

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 eati...See More