Jacqueline Berger
{{short description|American poet}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Jacqueline Berger
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| birth_name = Jacqueline Lisa Berger
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| birth_date = {{birth date and age|mf=yes|1960|11|30}}
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| occupation = Poet, educator
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| website = {{URL|http://www.jacquelineberger.com/}}
}}
Jacqueline Lisa Berger (born November 30, 1960){{cite linked authority file|id=n2004149446}} is an American poet and director of the graduate English program at Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in California. She is the author of three books of narrative poetry: The Mythologies of Danger (1997), Things That Burn (2005), and The Gift That Arrives Broken (2010). Her work is concerned with the themes of desire and loss.
Biography
Berger was born in Los Angeles and received her BA in English from Goddard College in 1982.{{cite journal|author=Goddard College|date=Spring 2010|url=http://www.goddard.edu/stuff/contentmgr/files/7d4fc40dafca25bb65cf95bbbd381864/pdf/alumniportfolio.pdf|title=Alumni/ae portfolio|journal=Clockworks|publisher=Goddard College|page=14|access-date=2011-04-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110723180434/http://www.goddard.edu/stuff/contentmgr/files/7d4fc40dafca25bb65cf95bbbd381864/pdf/alumniportfolio.pdf|archive-date=2011-07-23|url-status=dead}} [http://www.goddard.edu/clockworks_2010spring full issue] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110723180455/http://www.goddard.edu/clockworks_2010spring |date=2011-07-23 }} She studied under Olga Burmas and Jane Miller at Goddard, and later became interested in free writing and attended the Freehand Women's Writing Community in Massachusetts.{{cite web|last=Raab|first=Zara|date=2011-04-15|url=http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/featured/4-15-11-an-interview-with-jacqueline-berger-award-winning-poetry-author/|title=An interview with Jacqueline Berger, award-winning poetry author|work=Writing Around The Bay|publisher=San Francisco Book Review|access-date=2011-04-16|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110503001943/http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/featured/4-15-11-an-interview-with-jacqueline-berger-award-winning-poetry-author/|archive-date=2011-05-03|url-status=dead}} Berger obtained her MFA from Mills College in 1995.{{cite web|author=Mills College|date=2011-03-02|url=http://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate/eng/alumni.php|title=MFA Alumni|publisher=Mills College|access-date=2011-04-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110108154309/https://www.mills.edu/academics/graduate/eng/alumni.php|archive-date=2011-01-08|url-status=dead}}
Since the late 1990s, she has been the program director for the Master of Arts in English at NDNU in Belmont, California. Berger is also an assistant professor and director of the writing center at NDNU and teaches writing at City College of San Francisco. She draws inspiration from the dependent relationship between her teaching and writing career: "I really adore teaching, and it certainly inspires me. And I couldn’t teach writing if I didn't write. So the two certainly work together."
In the mid-2000s, she participated in the Changing Lives Through Literature program, teaching prisoners at the San Mateo Women's Correctional Facility.
Poetry
Her poetry has been published in two anthologies of American literature: "Grandfather" was included in On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (1995); "Getting to Know Her", "The Gun", and "Between Worlds" were published in American Poetry: The Next Generation (2000). Berger's poems have also appeared in Poetry Flash, Rhino Poetry and River Styx Magazine.
Her first book of poetry, The Mythologies of Danger (1997), won the Bluestem Poetry Award{{cite web|author=Bluestem Press|year=1997|url=http://www.emporia.edu/bluestem/berger.htm|title=1997 Winner The Mythologies of Danger by Jacqueline Berger|publisher=Emporia State University|access-date=2011-04-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100601190229/http://www.emporia.edu/bluestem/berger.htm|archive-date=2010-06-01|url-status=dead}} and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award.{{cite news|last=Kipen|first=David|date=1999-03-29|title=Hochschild, Chang Win Local Awards|newspaper=San Francisco Chronicle|page=E3}} See also: {{cite web|url=http://www.poetryflash.org/BABRA_Winners.html|title=Northern California Book Awards|publisher=Poetry Flash|access-date=2011-04-15|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110519135508/http://www.poetryflash.org/BABRA_Winners.html|archive-date=2011-05-19|url-status=dead}} American author Alberto Ríos, the final judge at the Bluestem competition, described Mythologies of Danger as "poems of immediate human energy and willful edge...Always bold but always thoughtful too...a smart, compelling move into the speaker's world of charged moments, sparks, which here are always dangerous and ingenuously engaging."
Things That Burn (2005), her second book of poetry, was awarded the 2004 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry by Mark Strand, United States Poet Laureate (1990–1991). It was published by the University of Utah Press.[http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/upcat&CISOPTR=1268&CISOBOX=1&REC=1 Things That Burn] University of Utah Press Catalog. Retrieved August 2, 2014. In Things That Burn, Berger uses narrative poetry to explore the ambient nature of feeling: "I want to use both story and language to enter the place where experience is atmospheric—the blue or red smoke of the soul, if you will."{{cite journal|last=Paegle|first=Julie|date=Spring 2005|url=http://www.continuum.utah.edu/spring05/write_to_me.htm|title=Bookshelf: Write to Me|journal=Continuum|publisher=University of Utah|volume=14|issue=4}}
Her third book, The Gift That Arrives Broken (2010), won the Autumn House Poetry Award.{{cite journal|last=Hartig|first=Jean|year=2010|title=Autumn House Press|journal=Poets & Writers Magazine|volume=38|issue=1|page=105}} For a review of The Gift That Arrives Broken, see: {{cite web|last=Raab|first=Zara|date=2010-11-11|url=http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/the-gift-that-arrives-broken/|title=Fables of Contemporary Life|work=Center for Literary Publishing|publisher=Colorado State University}} The title originates from a deleted line in a poem that reflected a new closeness with her family at a time when her mother and father were both ill.{{cite web|last=Grahm-Smith|first=Sheila|date=2010-07-21|url=http://tangerinetreepress.blogspot.com/2010/07/jacqueline-berger-gift-that-arrives.html|title=Jacqueline Berger - The Gift That Arrives Broken|publisher=The Tangerine Tree Review}}
Style
Berger is an advocate of the free writing technique for generating initial ideas in a notebook followed later by a separate, secondary process of using the computer to shape and refine the poem. She believes that the writing process is similar to the dream experience that occurs during sleep.Beatty 2010: "For myself and probably for a lot of other writers, we simply don't choose our material. I think in this way writing is very much like dreaming. We don't go to bed at night with an idea of what we're going to dream about. It's a very strange and mysterious and unconscious process. Thirty years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago, I could have talked your ear off about my mother but I could not have written about her. And then, suddenly, the material came. Things circle around, they appear on the page when they do, on their own time in a sense...everybody can relate to that in terms of dreaming; you have weird dreams that appear out of left field and we don't control it. I really do think that writing is much the same. I generate all my material through free writing, which is pouring things out in a notebook. And I just don't know what's going to pop out." Event occurs from 11:20-12:23. See: {{cite podcast|url=http://podcasts.wyep.org/prosody101027.mp3 |title=Jacqueline Berger |website=Prosody |publisher=WYEP-FM|host=Beatty, Jan |date=2010-01-05 |access-date=2011-04-14}} Prosody episode includes a reading of "The Magic Show", "My Mother's Refrigerator", "The Routine After Forty", "Cigarettes", "At the Holiday Crafts Fair", "Gin", and "Good". For Berger, the writer doesn't consciously choose a topic to write about in as much as the material simply comes when the time is right:
"We don't go to bed at night with an idea of what we're going to dream about. It's a very strange and mysterious and unconscious process...you have weird dreams that appear out of left field and we don't control it. I really do think that writing is much the same. I generate all my material through free writing, which is pouring things out in a notebook. And I just don't know what's going to pop-out."
Selected works
- {{cite journal|date=Winter 2005–2006|title=At the Holiday Crafts Fair|journal=The Iowa Review|publisher=University of Iowa|volume=35|issue=3|pages=57–58|issn=0021-065X}}
- {{cite journal|date=Winter 2005–2006|title=Gin|journal=The Iowa Review|publisher=University of Iowa|volume=35|issue=3|pages=59–60|issn=0021-065X}}
- {{cite journal|date=Winter 2005–2006|title=The Weight of Blood|journal=The Iowa Review|publisher=University of Iowa|volume=35|issue=3|pages=61–62|issn=0021-065X}}
- {{cite journal|date=Mar–Apr 2006|title=The Routine After Forty|journal=Paterson Literary Review|publisher=Passaic County Community College|volume=291|issue=2|page=6|issn=0029-2397}}
- {{cite journal|year=2006|title=The Gift That Arrives Broken|journal=Paterson Literary Review|publisher=Passaic County Community College|issue=35|page=318|issn=0743-2259}}
- {{cite journal|year=2006|url=http://www.southernpoetryreview.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=23|title=What is There|journal=Southern Poetry Review|publisher=Armstrong Atlantic State University |volume=44|issue=1|pages=10–11|issn=0038-447X}}
References
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- {{cite book |editor=Tessa Kale |editor2=Edith Granger |editor2-link=Edith Granger |year=2002|title=The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies|publisher=Columbia University Press|isbn=0-231-12448-1|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/columbiagrangers0012unse}}
External links
- [http://www.jacquelineberger.com/ Official site]
- [http://www.ndnu.edu/academics/our-faculty/jacqueline-berger/ Notre Dame de Namur University], faculty page
- [http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/author.php?auth_id=2608 Jacqueline Berger] on The Writer's Almanac
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Berger, Jacqueline}}
Category:Poets from California
Category:Goddard College alumni
Category:Notre Dame de Namur University faculty
Category:21st-century American poets