#barbara berman

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Barbara Berman, Collage. Jay De Feo collection.

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Part of what America is saying in 2016 is that 1930s German fascism is here and real, and people who accept its fictions as fact feel entitled to inventory and murder men and women whose ethnicities and sexualities they don’t share. This is, of course, directly connected to the worldview and actions of our country’s founders, who owned slaves and rationalized slavery, which included the right to inventory, and commit violence against, the bodies of the humans they considered their property. These are self-evident truths that we must continue fighting.

At The Intersection Of Personal And Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now Edited By Amit Majmudar by Barbara Berman

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If silence is bitter, change yourself into song.        O listener, I think of you alone there    on the cliff’s edge of your daily duties,        waiting, the way saints wait, for the    falling to cease and the fire to rise,        when the tiniest note, the loveliest letter    from this world finally arrives.

excerpt from Self-Portrait As A Wikipedia Entry by Dean Rader, reviewed by Barbara Berman.

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Host to both the factory and the olfactory, like a beer-drinking boyfriend, occasionally the meadowlands burps and methane deep in the landfill rises up like a half-digested ale or a gassy bean dip; an intimation of ocean, a spoiled seafood quesadilla and wafts around the surrounding towns: Lyndhurst, Rutherford, Kearney, North Arlington, to name a few, then across the Hudson to Manhattan. Sometimes it explodes.

excerpted from Meadowland Take My Hand by Pamela Hughes

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Advice we had was to just step right out,    like wading    in a stream. Motorbikes-hundreds of them-    would find    a way around us. We must not be hesitant,    for that    would throw everyone off. So, trusting these    our friends    here on the street named for the poet of Kiêu,    we leaned    into the traffic as if it were only a light wind    flowing round    our faces. At that instant I tried to imagine    a world    completely merciful and belonging to those    few who,    as they passed smiling, looked as if they just    might forgive us.

“Crossing Nguyên Du Street” excerpted from Said Not Said by Fred Marchant, reviewed by Barbara Berman for The Rumpus

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America was born with an immoral race problem and will die with it. The late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan got it just right when she said at a Watergate hearing that “When they wrote the Constitution, I was left out.” All writers face this with varying degrees of consent, creativity, and success, often in direct or indirect collaborations with historians and archaeologists.

Barbara Berman reviews Of Poetry And Protest: From Emmett Till To Trayvon Martin, edited by and compiled by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr and Monticello In Mind: Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar.

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The dinghy out there stranded by the tide it waits on the new moon to bear me to that bourn of dreams I fear to dream.

“Down At The Dinghy” excerpted from Catechism: New And Selected Poems by Antje Katcher and reviewed by Barbara Berman for The Rumpus.

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She had forgotten how the August night Was level as a lake beneath the moon , In which she swam a little, losing sight Of shore and how the boy, that was at noon Simple enough, not different from the rest, Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went, Which seemed to her an honest enough test Whether she loved him, and she was content. So loud, so loud the million crickets’ choir… So sweet the night, so long- drawn- out and late… And if the man were not her spirit’s mate, Why was her body sluggish with desire? Stark on the open field the moonlight fell, But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and secret as a well.

an untitled sonnet excerpted from The Collected Poems Of Edna St. Vincent Millay, reviewed by Barbara Berman for The Rumpus.