Stephen Berg founded and edited the American Poetry Review. His collections of poetry include The Daughters (1971), Grief (1975), In It (1986), New & Selected Poems (1992), Shaving (1998), and 58 Poems (2013). He taught at Princeton and Haverford College and served as a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pew Foundation. He received a PEN grant in translation and the Frank O’Hara Prize.
Poetry
Summer 1996
Hymn
We are moving nearly at the speed of light but we do our jobs optician florist fruit vendor bumthe world is cut in half and we don’t know it black on […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: Happiness
for Lou Each of us is doomed to be happy, forced to live many lives. Each of us will be crushed on the anvil of terror, reborn by awe. […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: The Impossible
for Lou Rain, snow, ice storms, peaceful sunny days, I was riveted to life, a beggar cruising the endless road. Oblivious, stupid, proud, preternaturally calm, who needed friends or […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: Words
for Lou The tiny bud scared me. Vicious landscape. I did everything to escape it. I told people I could visit them inside me, mocked the current darlings of […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: Hands
for Lou Beggars are too honest, they disgust me. Blue-white my eyes, skull narrow as a broom closet. I’m like the Gauls, I don’t butter my hair. With the […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: Impasse Metanoia
for Lou Fire in my guts, dose of holy poison crippling me, I’m a live corpse almost reborn, but I slipped away. Happy, good, I’m ready for salvation, and […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
From “Rimbaud”: Pain
for Lou The rich can’t sleep. Wealth should be everyone’s. All the rich know is lineages, but I’ve had to transcend my own suicidal habits, my own mute gift […]
Poetry
Summer 1992
Cold Cash
for Helen, at 60 O howls of crystal, milky souvenirs, desire piercing its own unsleeping eyeball with desire, glimpse of the ephemeral soul, bed where we talk and unfold and […]
Fiction
Spring 1990
Three from Shaving
Iowa When I think of it now I still see just how ugly and dirty the place was, just what a bare unprotected monk-like life it was that year, living […]
Weekend Reads
Hymn
From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer-Fall 1996, Vol. XVIII, No.3/4 We are moving nearly at the speed of light but we do our jobs optician florist fruit vendor bum […]