David Bergman is the author most recently of The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge, 2015). His latest book of poetry is Fortunate Light (Midsummer Night’s Press, 2013). He teaches at Towson University.
Nonfiction
July/Aug 2016
The Pleasures of Poise
When we think of the pleasures of poetry, we rarely turn our thoughts to poise. But poise in the hands of Cavalier poets or Pope was a major virtue. We […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
The Man Who Wasn’t Loved Enough
He felt he wasn’t loved enough.Rain fell. Trees shook in the windlike wet dogs. But what would be enough? He did not know. He’d been lovedby a few, perhaps more […]
Book Reviews
Summer 2000
Marketing Poetry
The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism by Kevin Walzer. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998. 206 pages. $15.95. American poets have always had a vexed relationship to their […]
Kenyon Review New Voices
Winter 1999
Introduction: Banner Year
I hope you will excuse me if, at the inaugural moment of a series introducing newly emerging voices, I express my trepidation, for while I have no doubt that Keith […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
A World of Difference
We put her off as long as we could with claims of rotting floorboards, toilets that would not flush, and other excuses, all equally lame. But now in the vestibule […]
Poetry
Winter 1992
Heroic Measures
Angina Pectoris being what it is, my father is made to walk four miles a day about the Floridian development where he and my mother came to retire. Down for […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1986
Alternative Service: Families in Recent American Gay Fiction
Toward the center of Andrew Holleran’s novel Nights in Aruba, the narrator and his friend Vittorio watch “a slender cocoa-colored youth in red polyester pants” give himself a bath from […]
Poetry
Winter 1985
The Dedicant*
For Gordon Lester-Massman Dear Melville, How should I receive this gesture, my name carved on your latest craft, a gilded figurehead condemned to bite the spume or drown in waves […]
Poetry
Winter 1985
Cardiogram
It’s not angina, the pump too weak to bail its foundering ship, but a heart that skips a beat as it dances, trip- ping over its own feet. So says […]
Poetry
Winter 1980
Elective Surgery
No accusations, love, about the past. Think only of the pleasures of this night, all that we have made together. What false note could have led to such a harmony […]
David Bergman
David Bergman is the author most recently of The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge, 2015). His latest book of poetry is Fortunate Light (Midsummer Night’s […]