The Meaning of Poems

<p><strong>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. </strong></p>