This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

The Kinds of Responses I Want 

Charles Bernstein

Manual Air Release

The end of the road

is the beginning

of the journey ––

so they say.

But I say

roads don’t

end, we just

lose our way.

Or is it find it?

The first time I was invited to give a talk at a university was at the invitation of William Spanos, co-founder of boundary 2 and a professor at SUNY-Binghamton. In The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies, and as Bob Perelman recounts in his contribution to this special issue, I tell a story about leaving a copy of Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory on the return plane ride. But I had first tried to make that trip to Binghamton months earlier. There was a fierce snowstorm that day in the early 1980s. I remember stopping at one of those on-the-road gas stations on the Jersey Turnpike — it’s probably still there. There was minus zero visibility, if there is such a thing. Still, characteristically, I decided to push on, and would have, if Susan hadn’t intervened. I could not contact Bill until I got back home to 464 Amsterdam Avenue, our tiny tenement apartment on the Upper West Side. He told me the storm had closed the university. I always felt connected to Bob Creeley’s “I Know a Man”: drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going. I am too often consumed by that impulse to drive, and too often I don’t exactly know where I am going. But I have my instincts.

I start with that story because you’ve got to begin somewhere, and I was reminded of it by Mark Wallace, who mentions a slightly later visit to Binghamton recounted in Kinds. Bill Spanos published my first “scholarly” article, “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” in boundary 2 in 1981. I don’t recall any peer reviews or even comments by Spanos. That’s the way I like it — an iconic lyric of the time that Creeley repeated twice to make a poem: I like it / I like it.

My connection to this magazine has continued “through the years,” as another iconic lyric of that time goes — most recently with “Pre-Owned Poems,” published in boundary 2 last year. This forum follows up on Paul Bové’s Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistence a few years ago, which mostly charted my non-US exchanges. Now, Arne De Boever and Christian Thorne have assembled this collective engagement with Kinds. Having a home base like this has been crucial, and I am grateful for it.  

Mark Wallace writes his essay as a letter to me, knowing that I come alive most in conversation — both in agreements and disagreements (and some of the key works in Kinds are conversations and disagreements). That is where I tune up and test how far “offkey” I can be and still keep the melody or rhythm — or just hang on for sheer life when I lose both — as one lost in a snowstorm. Or found in it. Wallace quotes from Kinds: “I only know what I think when I am in conversation… Dialogue’s the center of what I do.” My essays, he says, “seem like responses not just to changing conditions but to the condition of change. Interactions. Questions. Avoidances. Refusals. Conversations.” That resonates with my own feeling that thought is a form of motion, and that sometimes, as he puts it, “a poem has to be dared into existence.”

Kacper Bartczak brings me back to Stanley Cavell’s “finding as founding,” another home base, and my echo of Cavell: losing as a faltering finding. Bartczak reads my poetics as radicalizing Cavell’s aversive practice, turning “finding as founding” into a poetics of provisionality and errancy. He sees the “event of the poem” as a suspension of settled meanings, where “losing as finding” becomes a mode of inhabiting language beyond rationalized closure. I don’t make light of loss, and I am surrounded by it — many essays in the new book are elegies or eulogies. Losing may just as well lead to nowhere, which is what it feels like to be bereft. But acknowledging that at least lets me find myself where I am.

Just as much as I wanted to get to Binghamton that day, I want to get reactions to what I write — want to hear how the work hits various ears: lands, or lands askew, or misfires. That’s what keeps me going, makes me feel I am working alongside other people. It buoys me in dark times and through thoughts turbulent.

Two of my closest poetry friends had different attitudes. Lyn Hejinian told me she didn’t like to read anything written about her work — didn’t want the response, even from supportive friends (and maybe especially from them), to spin her sense of what she was doing (though this may also have been related to the limited time she had left at the end of her life). She was referring to a new essay I had written about My Life (40 years after my first essay on the book), and it made me feel abandoned –– an unopened letter at the time of her death. (But Lyn always responded, and with full flower, to letters, right up to the end.) Maybe she was right — self-contained, not dependent on the heroin (or is it oxygen?) of response. Bob Perelman quotes the essay on My Life, reminding me that Hejinian’s refusal of closure intensifies the elegy, which is grouped with pieces by (then) living poets, rather than in the constellation of the dead called “Shadows.” My reflections on My Life is called “hung meanings.”

Leslie Scalapino was the opposite. She read responses religiously but would go ballistic when a proposed interpretation differed from what she intended. Her work is as “underdetermined” as you get, but she wanted readers to experience the aesthesis as she designed it. And she hated when enthusiastic readers read it in ways she did not intend. I would often say to Leslie that there is a sublime madness to that view, because you can’t control readers’ responses to such wildly open-ended work. But I appreciate that she extended intention to things the “intentionalists,” as described by Bartczak, would not countenance.

And it puts me in mind of what I meant … not to say, but to do. Because my poetry and essays are meant to create thinking/feeling fields, linguistic webs and folds in which readers and listeners become engaged and entangled, finding by responding. My intentions involve setting conditions, not conveying discrete packets of meaning. I find out what I mean in the making by testing my intentions against responses. It may seem counterintuitive, but my poetics is radically anti-solipsistic. Some people regard difficult-to-grasp poetry like mine as rooted in a private language and meant to be hermetic, abstract, or ungraspable. But I have been deeply affected by Wittgenstein’s aversion to “private” language and tend to think that the contained lyric of confessional and post-confessional poetry hangs on that more than, well, the kinds of poetry I want.

I am grateful to Bartczak for bringing me back to these issues of intention. In Kinds, I discuss the problem of lyric containment, but I might better have framed the problems as the containment of intention: the insistence on the poem’s meaning something specific, even thematic, over and against meaning as something that comes in response to a field of possibilities. Bartczak contrasts my anti-programmatic poetics with intentionalist theory, noting that I resist the “monolithic identity of meaning and intention.” Andrew Levy echoes this in his meditation on difficulty: “Poetry can be the making of an analogy for something non-linguistic and incomprehensible… good poems are incomprehensible.” Both frame my work as creating fields of possibility rather than discrete packets of meaning.

Intention here is like “plot” in David Antin’s sense rather than “narrative,” which necessarily involves transformation (as I discuss in the essay that is Andrew Levy’s focus, “UP Against Storytelling”). Levy reads that piece as a “meta-poem” resisting closure, noting that my “emphasis is on the ‘critical’ aspects of the ‘creative’ act’” and that its “play of subjects” is a refusal of the point. The intention of narrative is not the same as the intention of plot. By “lyric containment,” I mean poetry valued as plot (in the guise of utterance) and phobic to narrative transformation as a violation of the principles of intention. I want a poetry that builds in transformation: that is to say, something happens in the act of the poem that goes beyond rationalized intention but falls within the realm of intuition and aesthetic intelligence. It is not rational but part of reason (to use a Cavellian distinction).

My debt to Cavell is partly for his exorcism of skepticism, the idea that my thoughts are impenetrable to another or vice versa. And for his insistence that you know something not by “ocular proof” (a Cavellian echo –– from his essay “Othello and the Stake of the Other”–in the title of the first work Kinds) but by doing, responding, and acknowledging.

That’s why I can sometimes appear to be fighting for meaning, resisting the idea that everything goes and that there is no meaning. Mark Wallace comments on this adversarial dimension, likening my stance to Muhammad Ali’s “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” noting Kind’s “sheer amount of fighting” against institutional norms. Andrew Levy similarly observes my polemical energy. And Michael Davidson rightly focusses on my staging of aggrievement as a three-edged sword (that third edge is the killer). It comes down to not letting go or giving up. Drive he sd. I hate feeling that I have to intervene, but not as much as if I don’t. Yet, as Davidson underscores, I don’t shy away from the grief that comes with the zero-sum game of aggrievement.

(I admire Ali’s [Cassius Clay’s] 1963 spoken word album I Am the Greatest, primarily written by Jewish comedian Gary Belkin, who also wrote for Sid Caesar and Danny Kaye.)

I resist the term “experimental” if it suggests I don’t know what I am doing. In an odd twist, Stephanie Burt and I had an exchange in 2014 on the experimental, in which we switched roles: I argued against it from the point of view of knowhow and invention; she argued for it, but defined it as a controlled lab-coat microtinkering with small modulations of utterly conventional poems, as perhaps adding a syllable to fixed meter (https://asylum.short.gy/sb-cb). Even so, “experimental” is the term of art for just the kind of poetry Burt doesn’t want (with an occasional exception); that is, for the kind of poetry that rejects closure (to use Hejinian’s term) and is open to uncontrolled swerving (Lucretius, as Mark Wallace tags, is crucial).

As I was writing this, the Peruvian poet Mauricio Medo pressed me to push back against my rejection of “experimental” in an earlier conversation we had, collected in The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistence, asking if I agree with him that we are seeing, in effect, too little poetry of extravagant imagination, imagination that dwells, as Thoreau knew, in vagrancy. If experimental means rhetorical, performative, dynamic—an essay or try—and if its model is William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All … well then … To stop experimenting is to stop thinking, to become a shell of what you are, to become artificial intelligence. I am for the artifice of intelligence and the intelligence of artifice.

Elin Käck’s essay sharpens this point: she argues that Kinds — and my work overall—are not random trials but “provisional exhibitions,” curated constellations inviting permutation and reframing. Her emphasis on “frame” and “constellation” clarifies what I mean by experiment: not accident, but deliberate recontextualization, a movement among forms that generates new possibilities. Käck rightly links this lineage to Williams’s capaciousness, noting that my work extends the radical expansion of the poetry book into a multi-genre installation. To experiment, in this sense, is to keep language alive, to resist the calcification of thought.

Every day, I read or see a work of art that exceeds what I thought possible: some old, some new, some ordinary, and some out of bounds. And yet, and still, most (though not all) officially commended poetry and criticism is absorbed in the laborious task of containing thinking, deforesting the wilderness of thought, reining in language as if it were a bucking bronco (which, after all, it is). Forgive my mixed metaphors, but a mixed metaphor is better than a compliant simile.

As Michael Davidson observes, mine is a poetics of counterfactuals, process, and subversion through comedy. He links this to my discussion of Groucho Marx’s anarchic (“free thinking”) humor and Jewish traditions of resistance and cosmopolitanism, noting how I work celebrates rootlessness and neurodiversity. Davidson’s emphasis on “cripistemology” and the ethics of the erratic, as in his most recent book, Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, has transformed my poetics. “Cripistemology”— knowledge derived from disability experience— is hardwired into poetic errancy. In his work, Davidson shows how neurodiverse poets, including those with dyslexia or dyspraxia, generate alternative modes of sense-making that resist normative literary expectations. So, one more time: these are not “experiments” in the narrow sense but cognitive registers. In this light, my own verbal pratfalls and linguistic inversions – my Groucho Marxisms  –– are not defects but generative disruptions, part of a poetics that privileges error as insight, if one can say – topsy-turvy – privilege for what is stigmatized.

Bob Perelman highlights how my poetics détourn the expectation of tonal consistency and thematic closure, favoring an often dizzying interplay of voices and forms. He is generous in noting that I am not rejecting coherence but rather allowing meaning to emerge through engagement (what David Antin calls “radical coherence”). He values my refusal of seamless transitions as a challenge to an aesthetic conformity, where received modes of coherence are mistaken for value. Still, he gives a useful historical bounce to my comedic motif; for example, citing my opening epigraph of Lyly’s Anatomy of Wit (1578) where one Philautus responds to the eponymous Euphues in a mannered style of rhetorical embroidery—so laden with antithesis, alliteration, digression, parallelism, periphrasis, sound patterning, and outlandish allusion—that Euphues admits, as perhaps my readers might, he cannot grasp the argument and therefore cannot respond. But then Lyly paints both these characters as performance artists. Perelman’s sly implication is that flaunting what others perceive as a flaw does not extricate you from its grip.

Al Filreis, in his essay on “#CageFreePoetry,” underscores this unruliness: “Poetry constructed of verse sentences set free from their cages will always itself be a challenge to the cage.” My lab coat is my erring ear. If I were to say that much of what comes to my attention follows the straight path over the crooked and that its creators abhor those who don’t share their pride in right-thinking—what they may call “community” or even “politics”—then it would be right to say, “Hey!, old man!, the problem is you, that you fail to recognize the work we are doing, even when right in front of you: fail to see our struggle, our successes, our failures.” Andrew Levy is right that no matter how overblown my references are in this volume, they necessarily leave out more than they acknowledge, and that omission is exclusion. But I also think of Al Jolson’s line midway in his act: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” (Likely the first bit of spoken language in a talkie.) “What about all this writing?” as Käck quotes Williams. With Levy’s example of the “thickest” book, he ruefully notes that you can’t be comprehensively comprehensive. The absence of closure is not the closure of absence.

I know there are live wires out there. But the danger is that if those live wires don’t connect, there will be no sparks and no circulation. It’s the lack of any critical constellation—through periodicals or poetics or criticism—that I feel most acutely. It’s also in the middle of a disintegrating culture in the U.S., where much of the resistance seems to play out the roles the tyrants assign.

Too many poets are afraid of their own shadows, not realizing that the poetry is all shadows. But they are right to be scared: a shadow is part of the dark world. To follow the poem’s destination rather than your own, you lose traction in the world of peers and family and country, becoming outcast even to yourself. The sanity that poetry can produce drives others mad. The poets I admire are not mad, but they make others mad.

There has been a history of aesthetic invention in the US, perhaps, to let my rhetoric take over, starting with Poe (as Davidson notes). At various times, poets have come together less as schools than in negative solidarity: sharing a common opposition to the suffocating forces of virtue and conformism often iconized as craft.  Such poetry, in its aversion of convention, opens meanings rather than nailing them down. The kinds of poetry I want signals not virtue but the unknown. And yes, to be sure, there have always been multiple, conflicting fronts, forming up out of egregious exclusions of each provisional formation.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, journals, movements, and organizations have supported such new possibilities for poetry. However, right now, the distinction between mainstream and alternative is often viewed with disdain. A cynical attack on the so-called avant-garde as insufficiently “diverse” –– cynical not because it’s false, but because it’s no truer of such projected poetry groupings than it is of the mainstream. American poetry does need to be more diverse, but that includes aesthetic and language diversity; otherwise, the claim of diversity is a shell game; though I’ll always side with the shells. There is a righteous anger that marginalized poets should have done better than the prize-culture poets or, indeed, the larger culture, high and low. I share that anger. However, such marginalized and discombobulating poets are held to moral standards that they never claimed nor could plausibly have attained. So, the debunking began, but it is hardly new. Poe would have recognized it as the revenge of the mediocracy. Davidson recognizes the pitfalls of aggrievement.

Previously, “experimental” centers are now indistinguishable from their prize-oriented, “workshopping” counterparts. Places I once considered home now turn me away. Mark Wallace’s riff on “disappointment” is a needed rejoinder: Maybe the problem is my expectations. For most readers, critics, and poets, poetry is more about staying in line than “regaining unconsciousness,” as Harryette Mullen puts it. Yet through it all, individual poets continue to find ways to swerve –– and in so doing connect in subterranean ways.

To extend what I said moments ago, it may also be true that the U.S. is no longer as significant for new poetry because of its fervent parochialism. If poetry does not contribute to aesthetics, then it becomes another self-obsessed nationalist endeavor, similar to the standard cultural product all over the world.

Al Filreis, in his new book The Classroom & the Crowd, extends the rejection of closure beyond the reader and into the classroom. His book celebrates collective, nonspecialized, learner-centered reading as the necessary extension of a poetics of open possibilities and democratic vistas (echoing Whitman). So, it is unsurprising that he takes up my essay on taste, “#CageFreePoetry,” which argues for an expanded field of intention. As Filreis writes, “Poetry constructed of verse sentences set free from their cages will always itself be a challenge to the cage”—a principle he adapts to pedagogy by making the classroom a site of “wild nights” (echoing Dickinson) –– of interpretive freedom rather than deference to interpretive closure as authorized by hermeneutic expertise.

For Filreis and me, aesthetic judgment is crucial because it is not fixed, immutable, or transcendental. And, as Davidson points out, the “want” in my book title is a measure of desire rather than disinterested valuation; my desires are not “experimental” but are rooted in my body and psycho-social being, so that they are not the same as others, but the difference is what is common. The democratic space of poetry has to do with rubbing our tastes up against one another, not coming to agreements. Indeed, a value of a poem may be that it provokes sharp disagreements in judgment rather than the “assent” valued in official verse culture. Those incommensurable judgments allow the poem’s meaning not to be determined but to gel in/as process. If I say a poem is an act, not an intention, that’s because, as Filreis insists, I am less centered on saying than on doing, echoing Dewey and Austin but also Sondheim (“everybody says don’t / well I say do”). Acts are the three grand sections of the book; perhaps there is also an echo of the first century C.E. book of Acts, where “acts” stands for praxis. Käck mentions Goffman in this context: Interaction Rituals. She’s right to flag my incessant frame swaps from what I ought to say to what I do say. And sometimes the most powerful do is to do not.

Filreis and my credo is not quite, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” (Ivan Karamazov). Interpretive openness does not mean abandoning critical intelligence but embracing dictions of differences. From a pedagogical point of view, judgment is not a matter of assent to a master narrative but acknowledging the qualities of a work are as open to dissensus as consensus.

Permit me a final divagination from the protocols of response. I want to bring in Paul Bové’s recent “Critical Poetic Grace” since it offers another caution to my emphasis on response (https://asylum.short.gy/bove). Truth is not found in “the hell of conversation” if conversation means consensus, but instead in disfluency, dissidence, and the “plentitude” of sound and sense that grace allows.

<button onclick=”openPopup”>
You said it! That’s right! The secret word for the day is disfluency.
</button>

We always quote Whitman: new poetry needs new readers, though he doesn’t quite say that. In “Ventures, On an Old Theme” (1892), he says: “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.” As in other forms of innovation, readers hooked on one experience of poetry may be the most resistant to a paradigm shift – even one that occurred well over a century ago. So, the work of poetry is to create (not simply find or confirm) those new audients –– and to support the poets creating this new work.

But now here’s Whitman in the “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us, We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails another . . . The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors . . . They shall be kosmos . . without monopoly or secrecy . . glad to pass any thing to any one . . hungry for equals night and day.

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

The Kind of Bernstein I Want: Five Methods of Cage-Free Reading

Al Filreis

Done with the Compass —
Done with the Chart!
                            —Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”

You’ll find that “#CageFreePoetry” describes the kind of poetry Bernstein wants, and this, not to put too fine a point on it, happens also to be the Bernstein I want. Of the many essays and comedies in the book, it is perhaps one of a half dozen that tell you what you need to know about the poet’s eccentric stance toward the several problems posed by his preferences. We should read all the essays about taste and judgment scattered through the collection, of course, but “#CageFreePoetry” particularly rewards close attention. I recommend reading it at least twice—it’s just 11 pages.[1] Try to follow its comic wayward path through poetic value. Freed from the cage of orderly argument, Bernstein will never let you chart any such line of reasoning in earnest. Procedural unruliness and its collateral rewards are the essay’s ultimately unironic point. Despite that, I am going to proceed with some measure of sincerity, especially as I first venture to present what the essay says, as if that’s what it’s about. (It’s not.)

In all I will be discerning five ways of reading such an essay. This first way is only the most straightforward.

Cage-free reading method #1: Summarize the argument

Here it is:

Poetry needs heterodoxy and multiplicity. Poets who feel that way find themselves on the outside. That alienation can be tolerable. Academia and culture-makers avoid the question of value. But if one criterion for value in poetry is that it aims to unsettle, it does so variously. Feeling solidarity with the moral and political identity of the poet or poem is an act related to the triumph of a market. The turn against close reading doesn’t recommend distant reading as a suitable alternative to that kind of triumph. The preference for an art of possibilities doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t closely attend to the way a work of art works. Honesty about the value of an artwork helps us locate a here where we’ve never been. Our knowledge of a poem’s reality must be new.

This is fair enough as a precis. Yet it misses the ethos of the essay almost entirely. So let’s immediately turn to a second way of comprehending it. This time it’s just a list of the names Bernstein drops.

Cage-free reading method #2: A dropping of names

Sancho Panza, Larry Eigner, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, King Solomon, Charlie Parker, Stu Rubinstein, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Timothy Leary, Robert Grenier, Henry James, Robert Frost, Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Waring Cuney, Franz Kafka, Glenn Gould, Francis Janosco, Robert Duncan, David Antin, Robert Lowell, Tracie Morris, Felix Bernstein, Tonya Foster, Ibn Ezra, Robert Browning, Feng Yi, Li Zhimin.

The fourth or fifth time I read the little essay I let my eye scan lines and paragraphs for proper names. What I beheld seemed a patterned non-pattern something like Pollock canvas drippings, or maybe sidewalk litter, or twigs left behind by a passing storm, or loose wires hanging from a tangled circuit. ChatGPT, typically sanguine about making useful sense of lists (it gave me these last two faux poetic similes), couldn’t do much at all with these people. Except to notice, way down on its roster of attempts, a disproportionate posse of Jews. Did you see the Jews there? And, by the way, I did not at first inform my artificial assistant that the list was made by Charles Bernstein in particular. When I did that, later as I revised this writing, it outputted a take or slant under the heading of “Jewish or Culturally Marginal Figures.” The “or” seemed like a typical AI common-denominator hedge, but I rather think it is not that. In any case, there’s more coming shortly on Bernstein’s devotion to Jewish referentiality.

The names Bernstein drops do indeed provide a sufficiently suggestive take. It’s the way of all his many hectic hyperactive catalogues: common denominators or binding agents emerge wildly, no compass, no chart. That’s because the enumerated elements are variations on invariants. I think each is meant to be irreducible. Think of such frantic proper nouns as marking words on the pages of a disjunct and paratactic Language poem. Your guess will be precisely as good or as bad as ChatGPT’s—which is to say: your discernment of the meaning of a list as a whole experience, a gestalt, that has little to do with any item.

Another approach to Bernstein’s cage-free prose sentences, our third method of reading him, will produce comparable results. Instead of locating familiar people, as if when reading Bernstein you are eyeballing not-so-hidden puzzling yet familiar objects on a Highlights magazine spread, we search for the aphoristic statements. You might not first feel them, like the frog in the heating pot or the drinker on the first draught moving toward a wild night. Bernstein has long had a practice of slipping into his poems these difficult yet numbing, enticing nuggets. “It takes two lines to make / an angle but only one lime to make / a Margarita.” “Custom is abandoned / outright as a criterion of moral / conduct.” “Fluency in gain has remedial comprehension.” “Everyday can’t be / yesterday since tomorrow is / over before today is done.” “Taking away what we’ve got doesn’t compensate for what we’ve lost.”^[1] They are torqued adagia, unfollowable and even unwise pearls of wisdom, false-ish and goofy little truisms with a hollow ring of rightness. They are maxims absurdly impossible to live by. The way they occur invites you to ironize them, as you do any truistic fortune pulled from a cracked cookie. Often the aphorism comes in the middle of triplet statements. A suggested activity: go to any Bernstein poem or essay, find the nearest farcical tautological pseudo-saying, and then read it inside the little shell made by the preceding and following sentences. In “Me and My Pharoah . . .” (from Near/Miss of 2018), for example, we encounter this apparently useless pearl of wisdom: “You / can / bring water to a horse but you can’t / make it ride.” But how useless really? The “he” of the preceding verse sentence—it is: “He awoke, / fully charged.”—becomes in the next moment either the horse or the rider (a rider-poet?) who fails to get a lift even after proper hydration. The immediate after-thought, also aphoristic but less broadly comic, makes you indeed want the Chaplinesque man-and-his-stubborn-horse joke to be about poetry, perhaps indeed about this poem: “All poetry is conceptual / but some is more / conceptual / than / others.”[2] You’re reading a threesome of anti-sententious New Sentences with a jokey banal logic-bomb fable placed in the middle.

The fake adages in “#CageFreePoetry” are sandwiched thus. Poetry constructed of verse sentences set free from their cages will always itself be a challenge to the cage. Detained Thoreau to free Emerson: And what, Waldo, are you doing out there? Armed with the freeperson’s detonation of trite logic, you can dodge any seeming zeal or sincerity in the stanza- or paragraph-level context. How can a reader pivot from the poetizing charm of a first assertion and be ready for the potential harm of the third? Bernstein makes it easy: attend the hyper-charming burlesque show of the middle. Enjoy! Wild night! One of the adages you’ll find in “CageFreePoetry” declared exactly this in fact: “Anything is possible but only a few things get through that eye of a needle that separates charm from harm.” Here, then, are other mis-sayings:

Cage-free reading method #3: Aphoristic disruptions

A selection from just these eleven pages:

For every poem I love, a baker’s dozen hate it.
Harder for a rich man to write a good poem than to buy a good painting.
There is no perfect in poetry, but there can be more perfection.
The copy is the gateway drug for the power of the real thing.
My soul believes only its own ears.
Kisses grow cold and hard while a poem will never betray you.
The poem is not the end of aesthetic experience but its beginning.
The great but obscure poet is still a loser.
Taste is not the end of aesthetics but the onset, as of a fever.
The construction of disinterestedness is itself a form of interest.
Monotheism in poetry is a crime against aesthetics.
Being Jewish helps with the cacophonies.

Our fourth method now follows from Bernstein’s indifference toward proper transitions. His construction of disinterestedness extends to discourse markers. We know what the essay is about. (See Cage-free reading method #1 above.) But at the level of evidential flow, we are often minutely circling; amid trees we know little in the way of cause-and-effect forest. Across the paragraphs of our short essay, there are several such moments. If you can’t do a close reading of the non-succession of topics at the level of the paragraph or page, you can, indeed must, closely discern the resistance to transition as a process by which to disrupt others’ mainstream failure to disrupt. Examples of such failure are given: New Yorker poetry; the two sequential Roberts—Lowell, Frost.

Cage-free reading method #4: The rejection of transition

Take the first page for example. We get the wisecrack about monotheism, but it seems to be a one-off. Then the initial hint of the essayist’s preference for Larry Eigner over Lowell, which gives us a first mention of “my gang’s outlier taste” (163). We know his way of belonging is chiefly not to belong elsewhere. Which gang is that? There’s a mention of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. (Trump’s shills are at a Sanders rally. Boring from within?) To borrow from the Old Left of the 1930s, something Bernstein often does: Which side are you on? Then this stunner, quoted above among the janky sayings: “Being Jewish helps with the cacophonies.” Is this another dead-end quip? Who is making all that noise? We’ll go along with it for another sentence and then surely we’ll be wildly moving on to something else: “There hasn’t been a real Jewish poet since Solomon” (163). Sanders is Jewish but not nearly a poet. Eigner is Jewish but apparently doesn’t count as a “real Jewish poet” since, to follow the illogic, he post-dates the wise ancient Jewish king. Really, which side are you on?

 “Those who feel their mainstream taste is slighted” by Bernstein’s gang tend to be routinely (boringly) disputatious—to keep, even in that activity, to mainstream modes. He suggests that part of his and his allies’ response to the slighted mainstream has been to arrange a clamorous discordant “chorus”—a poetry—to make noisy rejoinders to the rejoinder. Perhaps in encountering this prose itself, with its very own anti-monotheistic and incorrect topic-to-topic motion, is meant to be an aspect of this loudness. Loud like someone speaking out of turn. Loud like a loud tie. Then a small surprise: the essay actually stays for a while with the matter of the historical scarcity of real Jewish poets. The topic takes up a whole page! We get more Solomon, and Ibn Ezra. Then a jarring anecdotal turn to the teacher-activist 1970s, Bernstein’s liberal-left resume as an educator at the Freedom Community Clinic in Santa Barbara, and there follows (i.e., doesn’t follow) the aforementioned swipe at the current-day mediocre poetic tastes of the New Yorker—and, a page-plus later, we are somehow back to Larry Eigner.

Being Jewish does apparently help with the cacophonies. Is Bernstein himself perhaps the “real Jewish poet” we have been waiting for? Certainly here in “#CageFreePoetics” at least he’s our real Jewish essayist. The great but obscure poet is a loser, perhaps, but the writer of critical, theoretical, clamorously evaluative prose—not despite but because of his resistance to argument’s normal order—is a winner.

Cage-free reading method #5: Jewish tunes not yet played

Charles Bernstein has said many humorous things to me, usually in muttered asides. The funniest by far: we were sitting next to each other at a two-hour departmental faculty meeting. Procedural matters were being discussed, at length and in minute detail, that held no interest for him. A major reform in departmental process was being promulgated by a diligent, serious-minded committee. Hearing this report, colleagues indicated elaborate assent, some contended mostly respectful dissent, a few complex suggested amendments. Then, in a whisper, perhaps a stage whisper, Bernstein to Filreis: “Yes, but is it good for the Jews?” This too was meant to disrupt the failure to disrupt. Rightly or wrongly, he deemed the academic scene to embody a “clash between refinement and coarseness [as] a symptom of discordant senses of the world” (to quote a key cage-free phrasing). Such disorder must be desirously wild and incongruous and, to him, these qualities are fundamentally part of radical poetic secular Jewish culture. He is done with topical “compass,” to use Dickinson’s crucial modern definition of getting to wildness—done with “charts” tracking the passing of the orderly muster of taste or distinction over aesthetic value. (He wrote “#CageFreePoetry” for a book of essays edited by Robert von Hallberg more or less frankly addressing the then-unfashionable subject of poetic value.) The great Jewish poet doesn’t just say things, doesn’t stand—doesn’t occupy a position—primarily for things being said, but rather does things in verse.

The poem we want does what it says. This is why Bernstein admires Eigner over Lowell. In a pivotal moment in our essay, it’s hard to miss the radical redefinition of “refinement” as a version of “coarseness” that is being derived from an accusation of poetic prejudice (tacitly ableism, and anti-Semitism perhaps less implicitly)—cages, one might say, the freedom from which cage-free poetry is to be written:

Changes of taste require changes of consciousness: the aesthetic clash between refinement and coarseness is a symptom of discordant senses of the world. I prefer Larry Eigner to Robert Lowell and find Eigner the more refined, but it’s a different kind of refinement from the patrician Lowell, as different as Cambridge from Swampscott or gentile to Jew. To prefer Eigner requires a readjustment of aesthetic criteria. It is not a matter of what Eigner stands for but what he does (167).

The form of an Eigner poem presents an anti-monotheism. And monotheism, we recall, is a crime against aesthetics. Refined coarseness doesn’t mind the cacophonous disputations of taste, and being Jewish, as we know from the adage, helps with that. Eigner heard all of it and as a Jewish poet, as good and wise as Solomon though less officially stately, he “play[ed] tunes not yet played” (167). That phrase comes from a talk Bernstein gave in 2004 and published as a prefatory statement later in the book Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (2010). He asked “Is this Jewish?” in that essay, and by this he means the writing we are reading, and its qualities as writing. “I am no more Jewish than when I refuse imposed definitions of what Jewishness means. I am no more Jewish than when I attend to how such Jewishness lives itself out, plays tunes not yet played.”[3] “#CageFreePoetry,” “Stein Stein Stein,” “Summa contra Gentiles,” “Groucho and Me” and other gathered essays explain and describe the importance of such unplayed tunes, yes, but also occasionally they themselves sound or pitch them: wave-altering, echolocational, experiential in that anarchic undirected way that life actually is. “Poetry, the kind of poetry I want,” Bernstein writes in “Groucho and Me,” “is not the unmediated expression of truth or virtue but the bent refractions, echoes, that express the material and historical particulars of lived experience. My poems don’t … translate into easily assimilable … messages” (43-44). Nor does the prose as its sentences are comprehended as themselves, each one, bearing a “process of aversive judgment.” As a whole project his is admittedly a “conversion narrative,” but one in which all “received judgments are called into question” (167) one at a time, inconsistently and anti-monotheistically—and ever based on a refusal to convert. 

[1] Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 163-73. Subsequent parenthetical page citations refer to this book.

[2] Charles Bernstein, All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 149, 124, 65, 31. “Freudian Slap,” Topsy Turvy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 8.

[3] Charles Bernstein, “Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice,” Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, eds. Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 13.

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

Constellation, Frame, and Provisionality in Charles Bernstein’s Kinds of Poetry

Elin Käck

“What about all this writing?” This question, which sounds like it may have come straight from the mouth of the executer of some literary estate who has just found an entire room full of boxes of unsorted texts and wonders what to make of them, was uttered by William Carlos Williams in the poem labeled IX in Spring and All (1923). It arguably constitutes an important meta-poetic statement (1986: 200): for it directs our attention to the uncertain—or provisional—status of the work presented in the volume itself: daring and, for lack of a better word, experimental, breaking with all sorts of expectations. It is as though the work itself is being negotiated by the poet as we go along, moving through the disorienting sequences of his poetry.

Perhaps because I happen to be a Williams scholar and Bernstein references Williams in his new book (and elsewhere), this question—“What about all this writing?”—lingers with me throughout the volume of Bernstein’s genre-defying The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (2024). The book’s overt genre labels do not entirely account for everything that goes on between its covers. When Williams asked the question in his own genre-defying volume interspersing poetry with prose sections—a book that we might now view as an early prototype for the merging of poetry, theory and criticism at which Bernstein excels—he had no way of knowing which answers future readers would propose to his question.[1] He probably even wondered in earnest what his contemporaries would make of all that particular writing—the very kind found in Spring and All—and suspected that most of them would not appreciate it. In relation to Bernstein’s work, published almost exactly a century later, I understand the question very differently, with an emphasis on the “all” rather than the “this.” The question is not so much what to make of this kind of writing—although some people still seem perplexed at the difficult poems with which Bernstein attacks his reader, deeming him “incomprehensible, incoherent, and hypertheoretical,” as Marjorie Perloff once summarized it (2021b: 167). Rather, it concerns how to deal with the sheer mass of it. Even more so, it is a question of how to calibrate any statement about Bernstein’s work or his poetics against the many essays he himself has written on poetry and poetics, not to mention all the other forms of commentary in which he has engaged, from speeches to interviews, in various formats. Here he joins both Stein and Williams among the modernists in having created an oeuvre where it is entirely possible to read Bernstein through Bernstein, just like we can read Stein through Stein, or Williams through Williams. While thrilling and often gratifying, such a method rarely offers a final, conclusive key to their work, but instead tends to generate more questions and lead to further labyrinthine routes of reading and rereading. Yet, this is precisely what a book like The Kinds of Poetry I Want invites its readers to do, given that its title suggests the presentation of a poetics, however plural. With its many references to the author’s other essays and works, it constantly breaks its own bounds and sends its reader (this reader, at any rate) on labyrinthine routes through decades of writings. The “all” is a cumulative aggregate.

If Williams’s “all” is an apt starting point for discussing Bernstein’s work, it might be because he himself hints at a fascination with this capaciousness à la Williams in the essay “Free Thinking: Spring and All versus The Waste Land at 100.” Bernstein delivered the essay with characteristic verve at the 2023 MLA Convention in San Francisco, on a panel which I convened for the William Carlos Williams Society to celebrate a century of Spring and All and the fortieth anniversary of Bernstein’s own “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA” speech, once presented at the very same conference.[2] At one point in the essay, in his discussion of Spring and All, Bernstein makes it clear that it is indeed the “all” that entices: “We are all strangers in the wilderness of language. Spring and All imagines that. And it’s not the ‘spring’ but the ‘all’” (2024a: 161). In the 1983 MLA speech, this all which Bernstein so strongly advocated for included what had previously been termed mere “rhetoric,” meaning the prose sections interspersing the short poems that would come to be canonized (2001: 246). Today, most people would agree that Spring and All really needs “all” in order to be fully understood as an avant-garde masterpiece. All the writing of which Williams asks his readers in poem IX of Spring and All is now deemed indispensable, integral to the work. What was once a source of uncertainty and seen as mere excess, out of place and muddling the sight of the actual items of poetic value, is now perhaps even one main reason for the work’s continued canonization. To speak with Bernstein’s own abbreviation system in the essay, Williams seems awfully close to having become part of OVC, official verse culture, first on the basis only of the lyric poems, and now for the work as a whole (but maybe this is calling it too soon; after all, I was asked as late as 2010—in disparaging terms, no less—why I would want to spend my time writing about the prose of Spring and All).

If Williams daringly expanded the poetry volume and reimagined its scope so as to accommodate criticism, essays, cantankerousness, speech, and philosophical ideas, then it is safe to say that Bernstein’s work has taken this capaciousness and sense of accommodation even further, expanding not only the frame (a crucial word to which I will return later) of the poetry volume, but of scholarly writing as well as of writing and/as performance. Indeed, it is impossible to read some of the pieces in his new book without simultaneously hearing them performed in one’s mind, in the loud and powerfully engaging way Bernstein has of delivering his speeches. This innate aurality comes as no surprise, given his profound interest in sound, theorized as a dichotomy between “sound and unsound” writing (2024a: 350).

In “Sounding the Word” in Pitch of Poetry, Bernstein has his text self-consciously point to its use of an italicized that as “a script code to tell you that if you read this out loud you should give an extra emphasis to that, pausing slightly before it” and then suggests to the reader just how the essay would sound in a parenthetical paragraph: “For the real experience of this script, play it on your computer’s voice reader and set ‘Ralph’ for a rate of 35, pitch of 36, intonation of 82” (2016: 30, 32). But there is really no need for overt directions, whether real or made in jest; anyone who has ever heard him read is able to imagine just how a line or sentence might sound when delivered in his voice. At the 2016 MLA Convention in Austin, the panel next door even came in to ask him to pipe down, as they were having trouble hearing their own presentations with the noise from our crowded room emanating through the walls when Bernstein read “The Pitch of Poetry,” presumably a pitch or two too high, in the panel Reconceptualizing the Lyric. The conference frame encroached on the performance frame, to the amusement of everyone in the audience and, if my memory serves, to Bernstein himself, who took it in his stride, but who did not significantly lower his voice (I doubt he could even if he tried).

While this anecdote might suggest that the MLA convention is not conducive to the kinds of conference presentations Bernstein wants, not to mention the kinds of poetry, such a conclusion would be too rash. In “95 Theses,” Bernstein explains his view on the MLA as a context for his work: “Contrary to what some members feel, I have always found the MLA convention, with its knowledgeable and often enthusiastic listeners, an ideal place to present my work” (2024a: 15). In the recent essay “Which Side Are You On?” he spells out even more clearly how the conventions that, in his terms, “often seemed like a giant sensory deprivation tank” were essential contexts: “The positive reception of my Ciceronian style, not to say stand-up, was greatly enhanced by this environment” (2024b: 93). What’s the use of a frame if you can’t break it? Or, rather, how break a frame if there is none? With these considerations in mind, of course the MLA convention is ideal.

Characteristically, for Bernstein, writing always generates more writing (again, all this writing); texts bring about texts, poems bring about poems, bring about essays, bring about speeches, bring about criticism, bring about poetry as criticism, bring about email conversations and interviews and letters that then later become new essays or even poems, which in turn is only a fraction of an enormous output of everything from email lists to radio programs to cult online repositories such the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound, all of which can and do generate more writing. There is a capaciousness that seems to know no bounds and thrives in excess.[3]

There is also an “endless quest for material,” as he admits in an interview with Perloff, elaborating on the practice of collecting spoken language from different contexts and in different registers, using it for his poems (Bernstein 2011: 248). This endless quest seems to me to pertain just as much to the repurposing, or recontextualization, that forms such a vital part of Bernstein’s method: culling material from the surrounding world and wealth of language in the everyday (much like Williams did in his poems of the everyday and in works like The Great American Novel with its vast collection of competing registers) is really only the first step, just like the poem is only the second.

There are also third, fourth, maybe even fifth steps, where materials get transposed, recontextualized, rethought, or reframed—where the quest for material turns toward the already-collected materials to think anew about their potentialities. Nothing is really ever final, as demonstrated most aptly by the revised obituary for David Antin, included in its original form with the author’s hand-written notations in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, with the explanation of how, at a memorial event for Antin, “I presented a commentary on my obituary, adding to it and contradicting it, based on notes I made during the first part of the program” (2024a: 338). The movement of material, as it were, is at least as important as its careful emplacement on the page of the poem, where it resides permanently but also, as it turns out, sometimes provisionally. In “Dichtung Yammer,” Bernstein elaborates on one particular iteration of this method, the frequency one, where the most common words of chosen previous works are sampled to create new ones: “I’m mining (and minding) the earlier works to create alternate versions via vectoral data slices,” a method that he notes recalls the “distant reading” of digital humanities (2024a: 266). The new context for the already-written is in itself generative, for “the same line is not the same depending on who said it or what the context is,” as Bernstein explains in Pitch of Poetry (2016: 199).

It is telling that the anecdote of the publication of All the Whiskey in Heaven contains an observation on the process of selection to the effect of sculpting “from a large mass of writing” (2024a: 118). Bernstein elaborates on this in the 2010 interview “Chicago Weekly” with Daniel Benjamin, collected in Pitch of Poetry, where he describes this collection of selected poems as one in which

. . . the poems, taken from thirty years of work, are repurposed to be part of this new serial work, with the book as organizing principle. For the selected, I wanted to suture together disparate, even opposing, forms, in order to create a mobius rhythm out of the movement among the discrepant parts; the meaning is as much in the space in between as in the poems themselves. Each poem does have its autonomy, but the book as a whole works more as an installation than a collection. (2016: 243)

Installation seems an apt term also for the most recent book with its bringing together of various forms not with the aim of creating a sense of perfect balance or unity, but with movement at the center of the project: movement in both spatial and temporal terms. We are journeying through decades of conversations and ideas, but always somehow in tune with the most pressing questions of our current moment, just like texts moved from a previous context generate new ideas and spark new connections in new arrangements.

The pieces collected in this book at times strongly imply more writing to come, as in “95 Theses,” where the final thirty-one have been left blank, to be filled in by the reader, but, one thinks, why not, at some later point, by the author himself, picking up a thread begun years earlier. Blanks and gaps open up for new takes and essays expanding on or developing something already-written further. This ties in with Bernstein’s own claim of his work’s provisionality, in the essay/conversation “Too Philosophical for a Poet: A Conversation with Andrew David King,” where he states that “I see my books as provisional exhibitions” where “other constellations are implicit” (2024a: 119). Here we see an example of Bernstein’s preference for the term constellation, which he elaborates on in “Dichtung Yammer”: “Books inside books create more possibilities, clusters, webs, matrices—echoes. More strings attached” (2024a: 271). Uttered as a comment on the organization of Topsy-Turvy (2021), this also provides a fruitful guide to other works, even if the units might not be “books,” but something else. While provisionality as such might be construed as a charge against his work—as a sign that a Language Poem ends randomly, by chance, rather than design—I take the provisional exhibitions to be highly and most consciously curated at each stage, in each iteration.[4] Provisionality does not here mean impressionism or incompleteness, but instead an affordance for movement and reconfigurations that produce new meanings and potentialities.

Constellation and frame, along with provisionality, emerge as central terms for Bernstein’s practice: terms from the worlds of avant-garde art and pragmatics respectively. Taken together, they seem particularly able to accommodate the vast span—volume, spread—of his work in different genres. They provide a language for discussing essays, speeches and comedies just as they do for approaching long, slender poems replete with mid-word line breaks, centered on the page, like “Thank You for Saying You’re Welcome” and “Truly Unexceptional,” in Near/Miss, the latter so slim that it almost “dis-/sol-/ves” as its words are stretched out, like a Giacometti sculpture, across the two pages it spans (2018: 56). They are also helpful in approaching one-sentence poems like “A Unified Theory of Poetry” in Topsy-Turvy, which is briefer than its title and simply reads “I don’t think so” (2021: 75). They allow for a description of the poem on the page just as they accommodate the movement inherent in repurposing or reframing when items from one poem or essay are morphed into something else, be it a poem or a work in another genre, or are remediated through performance.

It is not surprising that these terms largely come from and are employed outside of the realm of literary theory or literary studies. Bernstein’s poetics is founded on the interactions between fields, unceremonious in the face of the disciplinary. I spend my everyday academic life in the company of linguists working within interaction, multimodality, and Conversation Analysis (CA), so when I came across Erving Goffman’s name in Bernstein’s description of framing in “Dichtung Yammer,” I realized that we have mutual friends. Goffman is a household name in my department for his importance to pragmatics (from this perspective, it figures that Bernstein would term his poetics largely “pragmatic” in “The Humanities at Work” in Pitch of Poetry [2016: 225]). Goffman’s Interaction Rituals (1967) was one of the readings for the obligatory linguistics course in my PhD training some fifteen years ago. Maybe this type of work, more than anything else, is what best prepares someone for reading a poet like Bernstein?

At the beginning of Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), Goffman takes the reader for quite a ride. This occurs already in the book’s preface, which constantly draws attention to itself as a preface that is commenting on its status as a preface, and which also posits a number of ‘what ifs’ for the reader to consider. While a preface is known to be a place in which to adjust reader expectations and speak candidly about a book’s limitations, often apologizing for what is to come and thus actively framing the work for the reader, what would happen if a writer instead did something else, like comment on the preface or state who didn’t help with the book’s making, rather than who did? What if, Goffman asks, “I had said: ‘Richard C. Jeffrey, on the other hand, did not help’” (1986: 18).[5] As he concludes the preface and this series of examples, he states: “That is what frame analysis is about” (20).

Characteristically, The Kinds of Poetry I Want offers no guiding preface by the author to manage reader expectations, but its wonderful foreword by Paul Auster (also repurposed, from a 1990 reading as well as from the 1996 Why Write?) provides the reader with important clues, calling Bernstein a “trouble-maker” as well as “unpredictable” (2024a: ix). Playing with the frame, altering expectations, and shifting cues to move the reader from one realm to another, one genre to another, one set of ideas to another—all of these are prevalent elements in Bernstein’s constantly evolving repertoire. He states it himself in the essay “Offbeat”: “Poems, the kind of poetry I want, use reframing as a process” (2024a: 29). Reframing is also something that the reader actively does: “Reframing is the reader’s response, at least if the reader wants to take the ride offered. . .” (2024a: 29).

The frame as such is almost imbued with magic, or, as Bernstein writes in the poem “Nowhere Is Just Around the Corner” in Near/Miss: “A frame / is like a rabbit pulled from a / hat in Dallas, 1948” (2018: 23). Bernstein’s shifting or provisional frames are deeply connected to surprising leaps of language—to catachresis and the unexpected pairings of words—let’s call them slant pairings, to echo the concept of slant rhymes, known for their defamiliarizing and vaguely troubling effects. It is no coincidence that the word “ostranenie” occurs in the poem “Catachresis My Love” (2018: 33). When “words pop up in surprising slots,” as Perloff has termed this practice (2021b: 168), it is also a matter of framing: the slots are frames, emplaced within other frames, but inside the frame we find something completely different from what the frame (and here it may be a syntactical frame as well as a semantic one) promises. While the term slot might seem to signal mostly something quite stationary and fixed, conditioned by the syntagmatic axis, there is a strong sense of movement unleashed by this element of surprise. Thus, we manage to maintain in two or more places at once; we are on our way somewhere (what the statement ought to say) only to discover upon arrival that we were going somewhere else all along (what Bernstein says). As he explains in “Dichtung Yammer,” “Substitutions are the tissue of my text, whooping and Whorfing and generally making merry, at least for a time, before the mood turns black” (2024a: 262). Calcified sayings, connotations, and rote language use all ensure that we recognize the expected end point, so that we are sure to realize that we have in fact ended up somewhere else. Perloff has a handy description of this practice too, as Bernstein’s proclivity for “creating whole poems out of faux-aphorisms” (2021b: 169).

Embedded in the exploration of the versatility and at the same time boundedness of language, we actually encounter another link to Williams, who would return to the idea of language as enslaved and in dire need of being set free in a fashion that only the poem could bring about. To his mind, only Gertrude Stein had ever managed to effect anything coming close to such a liberation. “It’s the words, the words we need to get back to, words washed clean. Until we get the power of thought back through a new minting of the words we are actually sunk,” Williams writes in the essay “A 1 Pound Stein,” (1969: 163). Stein, according to Williams, “has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had” (163). In a relationship between language and capitalism, where the latter has enslaved the former, words need new minting: they need to be entextualized. I do not propose that Bernstein’s goal is some kind of end of referentiality or final loosening of language from connotations, and even if it might be possible to find traces of such a stance by searching through every single recorded statement he has ever made, a statement to the contrary comes to mind, where in fact he claims that we rely on referentiality: “You really can’t strip yourself of the associative qualities that words have” (2024a: 24). Mikhail Bakhtin would have agreed. As he pointed out in “Discourse in the Novel,” an essay that I have always found useful rather for the discussion of poetry, “Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions” (1981: 293).

Despite this inherent stickiness of language, there is something in the movement between frames and registers that allows for that “power of thought” that Williams was after and hoped to reclaim in his essay on Stein. In “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs propose the idea that “performance potentiates decontextualization” (1990: 73). Performance has the potential to make discourse “extractable,” specifically through “entextualization,” which loosens it from the previous contexts in which words have occurred (73). While Bernstein relies on the echoes of his echopoetry to carry over into the new context, so that the reader’s references are activated, it would not do to have the old contexts move in too heavily on the new work. The trick is to achieve a state in which they are both equally activated at the same time. As Bernstein notes in “Thelonious Monk and the Performance of Poetry,” “all reading is performative / & a reader has in some ways to supply the performative / element when reading—” (1999: 19).

Constellation, the other term suggested here as a fruitful way of getting at what happens in Bernstein’s work, is linked to frame and framing, since what is framed can appear in different constellations or frames can cut through the material at various points, including or excluding something. Provisionality, too, is related to this practice, as it allows for a reframing, or a rethinking of constellations, which can become reconstellated, if there is such a word. “Don’t revise. Rethink,” as Bernstein writes in “Catachresis My Love” (2018: 35). This brings us back to Spring and All and the prose that Bernstein defended at a time when others dismissed it as rhetoric, a term used to communicate dislike, rendering this prose especially suspicious, as the opposite of the poem, or at least of the venerated lyric poem. In “95 Theses” in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, Bernstein directs us to what I have always found the most compelling feature of his work: the dialogue between poetry and criticism. The twentieth thesis states: “Criticism, scholarship, and poetry are all fonts of rhetoric. The aversion of rhetoric is an unkind kind of rhetoric” (2024a: 16). A statement like this explains why Bernstein found it important to criticize those who, as he viewed it, undervalued what they saw as Williams’s “rhetoric” in Spring and All, as opposed to what they understood to be “poetry,” by which they meant lyric or lyric-adjacent poems, taken out of their context in the work as a whole. If, indeed, poetry is a font among several “fonts of rhetoric,” as Bernstein suggests, then the separation was incomprehensible to begin with. If there is some precedent for what Bernstein so often does in mixing poetry and criticism in Williams’s work, and especially in a text like Spring and All, then it is here that we find it. As Alan Golding has pointed out, for Bernstein, “Williams’s disjunct critical prose influences later prose poetry” (2022: 207). Bernstein has developed the call for the blurring of boundaries much further, but the impulse was there in Williams’s work too. As Hazel Smith has argued, “Bernstein’s enthusiasm for Williams’s work stems at least partly from Williams’s penchant for the unusual and his contempt for a passive acceptance of traditional conventions” (2024: 33–34).

In thesis fifty-eight of “95 Theses,” Bernstein states that “the aversion of disciplinarity requires discipline” (2024a: 18). This aversion was shared by Williams, who wanted to tear down the walls between disciplines to create interactions between English and the sciences, and to whom thesis fifty-seven would also have made perfect sense: “Redefine English in ‘English department’ as the host language not the disciplinary boundary, where English is understood neither as origin nor destination” (Bernstein 2024a: 18). Williams was thinking along the same lines. In the piece “(A Sketch for) The Beginnings of an American Education” in the posthumously published The Embodiment of Knowledge, largely composed in the 1920s, Williams too questions the emphasis on English: “A good beginning in this case would be to abolish in American schools (at least) all English departments and to establish in [their] place the department of Language—of which the English could be a subsidiary—one of the divisions—or not, as it may be desired” (1974: 146). “It is not a language that is desired—but language,” Williams stresses (146). As for the centrality of literature, “all scholarship begins” in “the department of letters” (147). In “Frame Lock,” an essay that began as an MLA speech and upon which the ninety-five theses constitute a comment, and which relies on ideas from Goffman’s Frame Analysis, Bernstein even suggests that English should be seen more as “the host language” of a course of study that is actually about literature in a broad sense, about the humanities, and the history of ideas (1999: 96). Indeed, that students should read beyond literature in English and also delve into other literatures, including, but not limited to, continental European literature. The Bernstein of “Frame Lock” is reminiscent of the Williams of The Great American Novel, with the use of an antagonistic voice built into the text, constantly questioning the writer, asking things like “But aren’t you conflating literary and academic writing?” (1999: 97). In Williams’s 1923 anti-novel, the mocking, questioning voice says: “Do you mean to say that art does any WORK?” to which Williams’s speaker replies “—Yes” (1970: 170). These voices in opposition represent the traditionalist views maintaining the hegemonic status quo of academic discourse as well as of poetry.

The speech delivered at the 2023 MLA Convention ended up not being collected in a Special Issue I was editing for The William Carlos Williams Review on the same topic, as Bernstein rightly saw his new book as the necessary context for the essay. For Bernstein, as we know, the context matters and is essential for the constellation. It forms a frame, just like the MLA convention itself does, and this movement between frames, and from speech to text, is in itself crucial. When I first asked him if he would consider doing something on the anniversary of his 1983 MLA talk, he wrote, characteristically, “put me down for ‘The Academy [Still] in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA at 40.’ As I type that, I can feel a whole ’nother speech coming on!” (pers. comm., February 25, 2022). Sure enough, by the time of the conference, the title of the presentation had been changed to “Free Thinking: Spring and All versus The Waste Land at 100,” like the essay now featured in The Kinds of Poetry I Want. A shift in frame, yet again.

At the beginning of this essay, I stated that Bernstein often mentions Williams in The Kinds of Poetry I Want. A glance at the index, in a number game gesturing to the one Bernstein himself performs in the essay “Free Thinking,” with its “highly unreliable tally for the combined mentions of a poet by the New Yorker and New York Review of Books” (2024a: 159), reveals Williams’s place in the larger ecology of references, with Eliot appearing on nine of the book’s pages, Pound on twenty, and Stein on thirty-one. Williams appears on sixteen, coming in ahead of Eliot, but after Pound and Stein. Even if Williams is not the most frequently mentioned poet in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, there is an unmistakable kinship in the insistence on aesthetics, in how poetry matters as form. As Bernstein admits in the essay he ended up writing for the Special Issue of the William Carlos Williams Review, “It’s the performative nature of Spring and All that inspired me” (2024b: 93). Much of the prose in Spring and All is devoted to a testing of the boundaries between poetry and prose, a teasing out of the potentialities of forms of language. Williams concludes that poetry is “new form dealt with as a reality in itself,” as opposed to prose, which is “statement of facts concerning emotions, intellectual states, data of all sorts—technical expositions, jargon, of all sorts—fictional and other—” (1986: 219). As for the form of poetry, to Williams, it “is related to the movements of the imagination” (219). He writes: “Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination—the perfection of new forms as additions to nature—prose may follow to enlighten but poetry—” (226). On the formal difference between poetry and prose, Williams proposes that “form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated” (226). It is always tempting to focus on Bernstein’s recurring discussion of the opposition between the lyric poetry condoned by official verse culture, on the one hand, and avant-garde poetry on the other, in terms of the former’s reverence for personal experience and sincere feelings and the latter’s insistence on form and materiality. However, this opposition is in many ways just a prelude to the most intriguing aspect, which, to me, is the exploration of poetry’s aesthetic affordances. In “The Swerve of Verse,” discussing Lucretius, Bernstein contends that Lucretius’s “verse . . . is there to ensnare, to pull readers into an aesthetic/conceptual experience that cannot be put into prose. It goes beyond the resources of prose in making palpable its (initially) counterintuitive philosophy. . .” (2024a: 111).

If The Kinds of Poetry I Want promises a poetics, the essay “Offbeat,” offers a relatively clear summary of what that poetics might entail: “I want poems that are ecstatic in the sense that they exceed moral and political discourse. Poems as sensation, as performance, as aesthetic, doing rather than stating” (2024a: 33). Exceeding the bounds of discourse, breaking frames, and cumulatively moving through contexts in shifting constellations, propelled by but also critically interrogating the resources of our ever-expanding media ecology—such, it seems to me, are the kinds of poetry Charles Bernstein wants. And while there are important points of divergence and significant differences between the two—surely enough to fill at least a couple of essays—by and large, Williams would probably have agreed.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.  

Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88.

Bernstein, Charles. 1999. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2001. Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975–1984. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Originally published in 1986 by Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles.

Bernstein, Charles. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2016. Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2018. Near/Miss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2021. Topsy-Turvy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2024a. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2024b. “Which Side Are You On?” The William Carlos Williams Review 41, no. 1: 86–96.

Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. First published in 1974 by Harper & Row.

Golding, Alan. 2022. “‘What About All This Writing?’: Williams and Alternative Poetics.” In Writing into the Future: New American Poetries from the Dial to the Digital, 197–217. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. The essay was first published in Textual Practice 18.2 (2004): 265–282.

Perloff, Marjorie. 2021a. “‘Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?’: Recalculating Charles Bernstein’s Poetry.” In Evaluations of US Poetry Since 1950, Volume 1: Language, Form, Music, edited by Robert von Hallberg and Robert Faggen, 221–244. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Perloff, Marjorie. 2021b. Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Hazel. 2024. “No Ideas but in Technology: William Carlos Williams, Concepts of the New, and Electronic Literature.” The William Carlos Williams Review 41, no. 1: 30–57.

Williams, William Carlos. 1969. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions.

Williams, William Carlos. 1970. Imaginations, edited by Webster Schott. New York: New Directions.

Williams, William Carlos. 1974. The Embodiment of Knowledge, edited by Ron Loewinsohn. New York: New Directions.

Williams, William Carlos. 1986. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 1, 1909–1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions.

Notes

[1] Alan Golding (2022) clarifies the relationship between Spring and All and the merging of poetry and criticism in Bernstein’s and other Language writers’ work excellently in an essay whose title also zooms in on that very same Williams quote from Spring and All.

[2] This panel resulted in a Special Issue of The William Carlos Williams Review, in whose introduction I write more about the historical moment in 1983 and its relation to the 2023 panel. See “Spring and All no Longer in Peril.” The William Carlos Williams Review 41, no. 1 (2024): 1–11.

[3] While I here consider excess in relation to sheer mass, it has previously been used to describe Bernstein’s poetry and what Perloff has termed its “baroque excess” (Perloff 2021a: 238).

[4] For a discussion of this alleged “formlessness,” see Perloff 2021a: 222.

[5] To be sure, Williams knew how to make use of the preface as a space for artistic innovation, not least in the prologue to Kora in Hell that includes letters from Pound, Stevens, and H.D., but also in the preface-like introductory section of Spring and All in which he simply declares about his ensuing experimental work that it is likely that “no one will want to see it” (1986: 177).

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

Groucho Marxism: Charles Bernstein’s Kinds of Poetry

Michael Davidson

                                                “I am for avant-garde comedy and stand-up poetry” (350)[1]

                                                “Am I just a voice crying in the wilderness, or am I a just voice                                                                     pleading aggrievement?” (163)

The Secret Word

In the opening of the 1950s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, the MC, George Fenneman would introduce Groucho Marx: “And here he is, the one, the only…”–leaving a blank for the audience to shout: “GROUCHO!”–followed by the theme song, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” Groucho, cigar in hand, would then display the “secret word” for the day which, if one of the contestants said it, would drop down from the ceiling, attached to a duck with a cigar (on one occasion, the duck was replaced by Harpo and on another, by Mamie Van Doran), and Groucho would hand the lucky winner $25.00 (later this amount was increased to $100.00). Fenneman would introduce our two guests for today’s quiz and step off stage, leaving the floor open for Groucho’s witty, often acerbic, repartee with the couple. As for the duck falling from the ceiling, these were the halcyon days of early television when the medium was figuring out how far it could go, what visual tomfoolery one could get away with. Ernie Kovacs was the inventive impresario of the medium, Spike Jones was its resident composer, and comics like Cid Caesar, George Burns, Henny Youngman, Milton Berle and others exploited the physical limits of the black and white screen and the unpredictable qualities of a live audience. Groucho’s verbal wit and arch retorts were somewhat improvisational, but they also subverted the interview format by endless asides and miscues. Was this avant-garde comedy or stand-up poetry?

In Charles Bernstein’s terms, the secret word for today is “pataquerical,” a nonce formulation for his aesthetics that could easily apply to Groucho’s humor. What he calls the pataquerical is “a flickering zone of counterfactuals that allow for possibility, reflection, intensified sensation, and speculation” (11). In an earlier essay in The Pitch of Poetry, “The Pataquerical Imagination”, Bernstein finds one of its sources in Poe whose “Poetic Principle” expresses the scandalous belief that poetry “has no concern either with Duty or Truth” and that personal taste is superior to transcendent ideas” (Bernstein: 2016, 299). He also relates it to Marx’s critique in The German Ideology of young Hegelians for their belief in critique as a value for its own sake rather than as a dialectical process “that has no end point but like a Klein bottle doubles back on itself…” (Bernstein: 2016, 296). In its invocation of Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the pataquerical is a poetics of process, irresolution, and speculation and as a result cannot be confirmed by an appeal to “convention, accessibility, compromise, refinement, or humanist literary values,” qualities abundant in what he labels “Official Verse Culture” (OVC [296]). It is tempting to see the pataquerical as a version of what one interviewer calls Bernstein’s “Groucho Marxism,” his fusion of comedy and subversion, borsht belt humor and social critique. Against “aesthetic illiberalism” that neutralizes and normalizes, the pataquerical is like the duck, a “secret word” that drops down to interrupt the show and surprise the audience. Bernstein’s new book, The Kinds of Poetry I Want serves as a brief on the pataquerical in its multiple forms, both aesthetic and political.

The title and much of its imperative are taken from Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1961 book, The Kind of Poetry I Want, which advocates “A poetry that is—to use the terms of red dog–/ High, low, jack, and the goddamn game” (MacDiarmid qtd. 153). There’s plenty of the red dog in Bernstein’s poker hand–from Lucretius, Sartre, and Tao Te Ching (high) to Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk, and Cid Caesar (low). And the variation on MacDiarmid’s title stresses the multiple “kinds” of poetry Charles wants, wanting itself being a value seldom mentioned in aesthetic discourse. Writings about poetic value that posit some universal standard or monadic formal closure are countered by a word for unfulfilled desire: the kinds of poems he wants are the kinds of poems he finds lacking.

The book is divided into three “acts,” each of which is subdivided into multiple “scenes” containing a wild mixture of genres: interviews, poems, homophonic translations, protestant letters, erasure texts, midrashic commentaries, concrete poems, and aphorisms. The range of genres is matched by the book’s heteroglossic display of idiolects—from broad-based comedy to stentorian jeremiad, from one-liners to flat-footed howlers, from scholarly analysis to cliché and bad puns. This variety reflects the venues in which earlier versions were published or given as talks. The lengthy interviews are among the most important statements of Bernstein’s poetics; his responses to questions from Vicki Hudspith, Thomas Fink, Braulio Paz, Andrew David King, Feng Yi and others give him a chance to elaborate on his favorite issues and incorporate often moving autobiographical information. He is a generous respondent, providing extended answers with attendant asides and detours that deflate some of the interviewers’ more ponderous questions. The book concludes with one of his most important essays, “Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime,” that deals with the phenomenon of translations based on the sound of words rather than sense–from Zukofsky’s Catullus and David Melnick’s Men in Aida to his own collaborations with Leevi Lehto and Richard Tuttle. The tutelary genius of homophonic sublime is Cid Caesar whose doubletalking in nightclub routines involved a virtuoso highspeed imitation of various foreign languages, a routine that animates the essay’s opening remarks:

Never met a pun I didn’t like.

    I’m a veritable Will Rogers, with plenty of roger but without the will to say enough’s       enough already. All instinct. Like a Brooklyn Ahab stalking a whale in the backyard or a     curmudgeonly Odysseus hurtling towards his sirens.

But wait a sec.

This is not the opening of a nightclub act. (349-50)

But in one sense the essay is a kind of nightclub act using homophony to provoke other kinds of associations beyond the auditory.  

In keeping with the parodic qualities of Jarry’s pataphysics, Bernstein engages in a wide-range of speech genres—from mock-didactic oratory (“I come to you today at the 138^th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association…” [155]), literary prize announcements (“…no one can doubt that this work is one of the most ambitious books of poetry published in our time” [312]) and hyperbolic jargon in recommendation letters (“What distinguishes Danniello, and makes him such a strong candidate for admission to our doctoral English program, is his deep animosity to literature” [319]). Like Pope and Swift before him, Bernstein tilts at the canons of approved public discourse by mimicking their authorizing rhetoric. Idiolects are more than ventriloquized satire; they carry the weight of their institutional provenance, the authority of the professoriate, the publishing industry, the academic marketplace through which literary culture is formed and reinforced.

The Kinds resembles several of his previous collections, A Poetics, My Way, Attack of the Difficult Poem, The Pitch of Poetry, in its eclectic variety, but one through line is the work of Jewishness in an age of cultural cancellation and identity politics. He invokes T.S. Eliot’s infamous worry in After Strange Gods (1933) that “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable” (Eliot qtd. 155).  As a self-declared free-thinking Jew himself, Bernstein recuperates free-thinking for the kinds of poetry he wants—that of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Larry Eigner, Hannah Wiener, David Antin, Johanna Drucker, Jerome Rothenberg, not to mention the borscht belt comedians he invokes. At one point he modifies Charles Olson’s opening to his book on Melville, Call Me Ishmael, by saying, “I take RACE to be the central fact for those born in the Americas. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy” (33). In a way the substitution of “race” for Melville’s “space” recognizes the degree to which American manifest destiny of expansion was authorized by the erasure, relocation, and marginalization of racial others—including Jews.

Which is not to say that Bernstein has not addressed Jewishness in previous works. Here, however, the theme is supported by his use of “midrashic antinomianism” that links Jewish rabbinical commentary with American Protestantism, or as Bernstein might say, Reb Ben Ezra meets Emily Dickinson (164). Both parts of the phrase stress the Word as an infinite possibility, unsettled in its meanings and tolerant of its misunderstandings. Midrashic antinomianism could apply equally to avant-garde writing or Jewish humor: “Groucho Marx’s jokes are allegories of escape and especially escape from being defined. The Jewish comic, like the Jewish poet, dodges, deflects, evades, ducks” (45). Bernstein devotes many passages in the book to his own relationship to secular Jewishness, growing up in an assimilated household, albeit, as he has said, with Jewish and Zionist identifications.[2] Antisemitism was prevalent in Bernstein’s early life at Harvard and became linked in his mind with more conservative literary traditions, often, ironically enough, traditions reinforced by Jewish academics and poets. In a lengthy letter to Paul Bové included in the book, Bernstein discusses Lional Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination as an example of cultural consensus among Jewish intellectuals of the cold war period who also “dodged, deflected, evaded and ducked” in order to assimilate. Trilling was not a Jewish neocon of the Commentary variety like Norman Podhoretz or Hilton Kramer, but he nevertheless embodied an “Arnoldian figure of a high culture where Jews might be heard if not seen as such“ (298). Thinking of Trilling’s student, Allen Ginsberg and his Columbia classmate, Louis Zukofsky, Bernstein sets up a contrast between the “illiberalism” of Jewish Cold War intellectuals and writers who confronted antisemitic headwinds by different means.

In The Kinds more radical strains in Jewish cultural traditions are linked to avant garde practices, but Bernstein realizes that experimental poetics itself has recently been attacked for its presumed racial exclusions. With events such as the Mongrel Coalition for Gringpo manifestos of 2015, Janet Malcolm’s attack on Gertrude Stein in the New Yorker, Dorothy Wang’s reconsideration of the “Poundian-Objectivist-New York School-Language-Conceptual tradition,” Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s critique of the “white room” of academic writing programs, experimental writing is suddenly under the microscope for its whiteness and, in Malcolm’s case, Fascist complicity.[3] In Natalia Cecire’s terms, “Experimental writing is a white recovery project” (Cecire, 2019: 34). Implicit in these responses is the idea that formal experiment erases identity, both personal and cultural, and that its endeavor is purchased by silencing minority voices, histories, idioms. Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptualist performance of Michael Brown’s medical autopsy would be the most notorious version of such practices and has been the object of numerous anti-racist critiques. Identity, as Bernstein acknowledges, “remains a volatile issue for the poetics of invention,” nowhere more evident than in antisemitic attacks:

Ezra Pound’s attack on Jews as rootless cosmopolitans echoes in today’s culture debates. The ahistorical/revanchist quest for a deep or authentic identity as the sole property of a single group, which has fueled the rise of the global right, is toxic for the kind of poetry I want. (39)

This toxicity, however divisive, fuels a good deal of the book’s tone of aggrievement (more on this later) and its attempt to understand the precarious status of Jewish writers as both outsiders (“rootless cosmopolitans”) and poetic innovators. Bernstein seeks to realign a politics of race and anti-racism with rootlessness as both a cultural and aesthetic value, not by advocating a revolution of the different but by bringing more of Groucho to the Marxian table.

Taste or What I Want

The pataquerical has an ethical component in its emphasis on the unfashionable, the mundane, the awkward, the banal. By exposing the all too familiar (and thus disparaged), Bernstein hopes to create an expanded field of knowledge against fixed and accepted standards. Poems that win prizes and appear in The New Yorker or New York Review of Books or that are taught in creative writing programs are, in terms Bernstein develops elsewhere, “absorptive,” drawing the reader into the poem, affirming what one already believes, while effacing the ideology and historicity of its production.[4] The agonized voice of Lowell or Plath gives way in the 1970s and 1980s to a more self-effacing voice, what Charles Altieri calls the “scenic mode”: “The task is not to transform the social but to make voice an index of how we can register the complexity of the given and thus develop our personal powers for responding to experience” (Altieri, 1984: 36). Official Verse Culture (OVC) is somewhat of a red herring today, however, since its confessionalist prototype is rather out of fashion. And more to the point, OVC now includes many of Bernstein’s friends and fellow poets who appear in those venues and teach in those programs. Perhaps mainstream poetry is a necessary fiction by which to measure the poetry one wants.

Bernstein asserts the positive value of taste in defining his poetics, and in this respect counters Kant’s privileging of aesthetic judgment and disinterestedness over taste by asserting his own will to choose. Kant says when we put something on a pedestal as beautiful, we presume that others must find it so (“the delight in an object is imputed to every one” [Kant: 1952, 53]). But if we speak of something being beautiful for me we judge based on interestedness and quotidian circumstance. In the aesthetic tradition from Kant and Baumgarten to Arnold, Eliot and the New Criticism, judgments based on personal taste are lesser forms of appreciation since they do not aspire to universal assent. But its minority position allows for greater freedom: “[Larry] Eigner may well be an acquired taste. But for the kind of aestheticism I want, all tastes are acquired. You feel it on the tongue before you prize it in the mind” (167). Here affect trumps reason; we taste pleasure before we digest it as pleasurable. There is a risk that in claiming personal taste as a value he engages in a specious form of aestheticism that argues for specificity as an end in itself. Occasionally that risk produces a kind of aesthetic nervousness: “Am I just a voice crying in the wilderness, or am I a just voice pleading aggrievement?” (163).

The term “aesthetic nervousness” is used by Ato Quayson to describe the encounter of an able-bodied person with someone with a disability. He explains that this encounter may be startling or uncomfortable, but it also instructs one about the body presumed to be normal. I’ve adapted Quayson’s term to describe the aesthetic nervousness deriving from an encounter with the “different text”–one that refuses absorption, veers in unpredictable directions, poaches on other idiolects and speech genres. The phrase also refers to Bernstein’s willed fence-straddling around his voice–whether a Cassandra or an Achilles. In both cases—the reader’s confrontation with the unsettling text or the poet’s ambivalence about the impact of their words—a kind of revelation is possible.

Disability theorists might call the knowledge gained by such a revelation as a form of “cripistemology,” how living with physical or cognitive difference produces alternate forms of knowledge, ways of seeing, hearing, thinking. Bernstein addresses this issue in his essay on the pataquerical in The Pitch of Poetry by referring to the work of disabled poets such as Jennifer Bartlett, Hannah Weiner, Jordan Scott, Amanda Baggs and others whose work is a direct outgrowth of neurological and developmental conditions. A cripistemological approach to their work is antithetical to what many people regard as triumphalist compensation where, because of a physical or cognitive limit, the poet “adapts” to another sensorium or medium. Rather, cripistemology describes a critical perspective on social norms and conventions derived from living in a different bodymind. Bernstein’s own perspective is formed by living with a form of cognitive dyslexia that impacts his spelling and word order and, beyond that, inspires his verbal wit:

Then again, the comedy I use is sometimes linguistic pratfalls: mistakes proliferate. That may be a way to cover my own cognitive dyspraxia, my tendency to invert words and letters and confuse left and right. Freud called such slips of the tongue parapraxis. And that’s another root of pataquerics (234)

For Freud “slips of the tongue” or parapraxes signal the eruption of repressed content, an unconscious substitution of a wrong word to cover a word with traumatic associations, often of a sexual nature. Dyslexia, however, is not about repressed sexual urges (Bernstein might beg to differ) but is a neurodevelopmental condition relating to language processing and the ability to form words and word sequences. His dyslexia is evident in poems like “Defence [sic] of Poetry,” a response to an essay by Brian McHale that deals, in part, with Bernstein’s work and whose academic prose is undermined by the poet’s dyslectic inversions:

My problem with deploying a term liek

nonelen

in these cases is acutually similar to

your

cirtique of the term ideopigical

unamlsing as a too-broad unanuajce

interprestive proacdeure. (Bernstein: 1999, 1)

I’ve discussed this poem elsewhere but see it as an instance of Bernstein’s displacement of reasoned discussion (a poet’s response to his critic) by neurodiverse means.[5] Its title invokes Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” (also a response to a critic, Thomas Love Peacock) but its typographical errors, often based on McHale’s language, transform a speech or writing “defect” into a generative repurposing of the critic’s language. In his essay, McHale speaks of difficult poetry deploying a kind of nonsense (e.g. versus “common sense”) that “ should be valued for itself, not as “a critique and demystification of current language practices” as he claims language-poets advocate (McHale: 1992, 25). Bernstein would rather speak of the “ideological” importance of those practices, the degree to which nonsense makes sense by unsettling expectations, and undermining seriousness. What I have called the cripistemological is when an ableist truism—your speech defect must be fixed—is cripped by exploiting the means of vocal production differently–in other words, to use error as another kind of sense. “Poetry, the kind of poetry I want, is not the unmediated expression of truth or virtue but the bent refractions, echoes, that express the material and historical particulars of lived experience” (43).

What I’ve called the ethics of the pataquerical appears when the counter-intuitive, counter-factual aspect of the poem creates, to paraphrase A.N. Whitehead, speaking of propositions, a “lure proposed for feeling” (Whitehead: 1960, 284). The end of the poem is the opening of (lure to) possible alternative avenues of meaning, sensation, knowledge. The book’s opening work, “Ocular Truth and the Irreparable Veil,” illustrates–quite literally–how a text “opens” possibilities by “closing” off its textual surface. “Ocular Truth” is a heavily redacted version of several prose essays, words and phrases blacked out to reveal a second hidden or alternate text. The poem’s title, based on Othello’s demand of Iago that he provide “ocular truth” of Desdemona’s infidelity is here complicated by a poem whose ocular truth is both revealed and obscured by blacked-out passages. One discerns a complex unweaving of several political themes concerning racism and cancel culture in a work that cancels portions of its prose. In the poem’s most readable (least censored) section, Bernstein responds to a New Yorker article by Peter Schjeldahl about the controversy over the cancellation of several exhibits of Philip Guston’s work.[6] The art critic sees these cancellations based on Guston’s representation of Ku Klux Klan images as “exemplifying divisions that are splintering the United States,” including attacks on cultural institutions, curricula, and public forums (Schjeldahl: 2020, 78). In his article Schjeldahl refers to those “cosmopolitan” audiences who complain of such cancellations and who espouse openness to troubling material against those who argue that an exhibit displaying racist subjects curated by an all-white staff is repugnant. Schjeldahl is of two minds, wanting to see the show but sympathetic to those “who neither find humor nor seek subtlety in racist symbology” (Schjeldahl: 2020, 78; Bernstein: 2024, 8). Bernstein seizes on the contradiction of an art critic who uses “cosmopolitan” to refer to an elite, culturally blinkered art audience when the term has historically been applied to Jews—like Philip Guston. It is as though one racial client has erased another, a fact embodied in a text censored like parts of Pound’s Pisan Cantos or Cold War FBI files. “Surely the problem,” Bernstein says in the poem, “is that Guston’s [word blacked out] figures are too legible—especially when coming from rootless cosmopolitans and cultural Bolshevists” (8). This is the conundrum that pervades the tone of aggrievement: that the cancellation of one form of art for revealing racism cancels an artist who is the historical subject of racism. Bernstein’s erasures, then, are perhaps the most “ocular” way to illustrate this conundrum. It is probably significant that Schjeldahl’s article was written on the cusp of the 2020 Trump election, an event that anticipated a more pervasive and troubling erasure of culture.

A Voice Pleading Aggrievement

The inaugural poem of this book sets the tone of aggrievement that permeates many of the essays and interviews. In one section Bernstein provides a mock blurb for an imagined anthology called “Alter Kockers”, using the Yiddish term used in Jewish comedy for an “old shit” and that includes “centuries of poems of bad advice and denial, guaranteed to pour salt on wounds large and small from poets who developed exquisite expertise in nursing ‘old wounds in old age…” (285). This may be Bernstein’s rueful comment on the resentment that comes with aging, now satirized in an anthology distributed by the “You Bet Your Life! Press’s Dorothy Parker collection.” It may also be a reference to the feeling of world-weariness in the current political battle over relevance. The Right is aggrieved at Wokeness while the Left is aggrieved at the Right’s aggrievement. Aggrievement is different from Nietzsche’s use of ressentiment to describe the resentment of the slave class at their subservience, placing the blame for their oppression onto the dominant class. Trump-era aggrievement would seem to be transactional, a zero-sum game of accusations and retribution rather than a dialectic of masters and slaves.  Today’s aggrievement is a vicious circle: “A nightmare is haunting America and Europe; its slogan could be: ‘I am aggrieved by your aggrievement’” (42). The danger as Bernstein points out is a depoliticization and a “reversion to instinctual loyalties” (42). Aggrievement takes several forms in the book, despair at the failure of the poetics with which Bernstein is identified to accomplish a revolution in aesthetic tastes and practices. He is also aggrieved at the ways that this poetics has been attacked for its whiteness, elitism, racism, cosmopolitanism, the latter term marking the return of the repressed antisemitism associated with rootlessness. And finally, aggrievement describes the historical moment of Trump’s ascendency, his attacks on knowledge, culture, science, immigrants, and people of color.

But a final association with the term is the hidden “grief” in aggrievement, and here Bernstein’s own grief over the tragic death of his daughter, Emma, haunts his concerns about a world in a perpetual agon. To hear “grief” in aggrievement, is to rescue feelings of loss out of social resentment and suffer the calamity of one’s aggrievement: “The enemy of my enmity is my calamity.” Or again, “When the child dies, the father dies. It’s a mortal wound. What disappears in death grows wild in imagination” (152). Aggrievement may be the ontological form of dialectics, the way bottomless melancholia may be harnessed for resistance and critique. The mortal wound of a family’s loss cannot be healed, but it produces a wild imagination in the breach.

Conclusion

Being aggrieved can lead to a vertiginous binarism: “hatred of the avant-garde is prerequisite for entry into any official verse culture worth its smelling salts. the avant-garde is a

good target because it is, indeed, populated by fascists, miscreants, and malcontents…” (157). But surely the former holder of the Gray Chair of Poetics at Buffalo, the Donald Regan Chair at Penn, Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the Bollingen Prize— protests too much. This contradiction between the scourge of OVC and its invited guest speaks to Bernstein’s pataquerical imagination, attacking binaries by occupying them. OVC may be a straw man for a condition that doesn’t exist, but that’s no reason not to witness its impact, suffer its disregard. The “essays and comedies” as his subtitle to The Kinds indicates are spirited responses to various occasions and provocations, a chance to talk back to interviewers and interlocutors who, in some cases, have a much too sedimented notion of what he’s up to. Like Groucho, he unsettles those assumptions by not sticking to the point, going off on tangents, quoting a few lyrics from a Rogers and Hart musical.

The Kinds of Poetry I Want, like much of Bernstein’s work, courts its own instability, Neither a book of criticism, poetry, vaudeville act, or some kind of hybrid genre it’s all of the above and a good deal more. The book’s willingness to be uncool, even silly, makes it vulnerable to attacks by both conservative critics and Marxist scourges, attacks he encourages. The provocative nature of Bernstein’s often unfashionable positions is an occasion for dialogue, contestation, response. But as I’ve said with regard to its treatment of aggrievement, there’s a cost to being rootless, and the book records the historic implications of this condition as well as his own relationship to that charged condition. Like his friend, David Antin whose talk pieces fall between the stools of poetry, philosophical discourse, and stand-up/ improv, Bernstein’s pataquerical imagination pursues a poetics of errancy, what he calls “Aversive thinking” (“Avoid frame lock, trouble consistency” (341). In this book’s mosaic of genres and literary styles he avoids frame lock almost successfully. Emily Dickinson in one of her letters to Higginson, says, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” (Dickinson: 1986, 208) In Bernstein’s case, if a word falls from the ceiling, he knows that’s poetry.

References

Altieri, Charles. 1984.  Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 2024. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 1999. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 2016. The Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—. 1992. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cecire, Natalia. 2019.  Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetic of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Davidson, Michael. 2022. Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error. New York: New York University Press.

Dickinson, Emily. 1986. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McHale, Brian. 1992. “Making (non) sense of postmodernist poetry.” In Language, Text, and Context: Essays in Stylistics. London: Routledge): 6-35.

Olson, Charles. 1947. Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Plath, Sylvia. 1981. “Lady Lazarus.”  In The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper and Row. 244-47.

Quayson, Ato. 2007. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Schjeldahl, Peter. 2020. “Us Cosmopolitans.” New Yorker 96.32: 78-79.

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1960. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Harper and Row.

[1] Charles Bernstein. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Page numbers for all subsequent references to this volume will appear in parens without the title.

[2] For a full account of Bernstein’s early life see his interview with Loss Pequeño Glazer, “An Autobiographical Interview,” in My Way, pp. 229-52.

[3] On the Mongrel Collective see Alec Wilkinson, “Something Borrowed.” New Yorker, Sept. 28, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson; Janet Malcolm, “Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Got to Heaven.” The New Yorker November 6, 2006; Dorothy Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014; Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room.” Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 20, 2015 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-program-era-and-the-mainly-white-room/.

[4] See Bernstein’s “The Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics, pp. 9-89.

[5] See Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error, pp. 78-81.

[6] Peter Schjeldahl, “Us Cosmopolitans.” New Yorker 96.32 (19 Oct., 2020): 78-79.

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

Withstanding the Horror of What We Are: Charles Bernstein’s “bent studies” Beyond the Loops of Intentionality

Kacper Bartczak

I am not American. I am Polish. I speak Polish and American English. I read Polish and English. At times, when I think better of myself, I read German. For example, the Austrian German of Wittgenstein’s early diary entries, lined side by side with their English counterparts, thanks to the loving work of Marjorie Perloff. So I shuttle between the bilingual recto and verso on the pages of this book, and I read. My reading then is in – what – English or German? Or maybe it is still in Polish? And what about the shuttling itself? Is it Polish, German, or English? Hopefully – none. Still, I am not American. But what is America, or where is it?

Emerson (2001, 126) wrote about those who live in conformity: “Their every truth is not quite true. . .every word they say chagrins us.” Charles Bernstein is an American in a sense that is completely lost on vast areas of our contemporary culture. It is a culture of some large scale  malaise, the core horror of which is the undermining of the American project I have learned and taught about for all my life. To my grief and chagrin, I sense, feel, and hear about this undermining, almost on a daily basis now, even here, in my home on the outskirts of Łódź, Poland. Bernstein is American in one of those senses that Stanely Cavell speaks about when he envisions America as a goal or idea yet to be arrived at. A large part of striving to arrive at that place consists in continual strife against the conformity of established ways of speaking and thinking. Cavell (1989, 69) quotes Emerson on conformity, in his New Yet Unapproachable America, as part of his elaboration on the idea of self-reliance, which, as Cavell also demonstrates, is a form of “aversion [as] conversion.” At a different place, Cavell (2003, 113) calls this stance “aversion [as] the countering of diction,” an act of inquiring into the condition of our conditions. Drawing on those core sources, the always-already open American canon, Bernstein (2011, 78) creates his plea for “a poetics of poetics,” or a poetic practice which he wants to be “provisional, context-dependent, and often contentious” (2011, 75). Those whose truths and words “chagrin us”, more so today than any at any other time in the last century or so, live in a place they call America (or Poland, for that matter, as their counterparts do over here), without realizing that they dwell in a state of insulation, creating a culture marked by “its inability to listen to itself” (Cavell 1989, 69). But America, this new yet unapproachable place, is elsewhere.

There exists a region of vitalist reverberation that consists in the skill of participating in the excesses available to the human speaking organism, in which the separation of word and object, mind and body, thought and action fall off as dead weight of stale arguments. This is a truly American region, where word and world meet beyond the philosophical conundrums of reference or argument based in rule-based, conditions-laden epistemologies and ontologies. In his essay “Finding as Founding,” Cavell (2003, 114) connects this mode of being to “[Emerson and Thoreau’s] vision that the world as a whole requires attention, say redemption, that it lies fallen, dead.”

Much more than any physical region, this America is a non-geographical, redemptive predisposition, in which a state of attentive inclusiveness is achieved, which the Polish scholar Tadeusz Sławek (2014) called “the community of the world,” in a book length study under this title. Within this larger community, all forms of matter – humans, non-humans, language, the beliefs or criteria shaped in it, and material objects – are brought to their proper life, back from where their lie stagnant when left to norms. The America in question is not a place, then, but a mode of active predisposition which conjures up a region. As Lyn Hejinian (2000, 153) wrote, in this region “the materials of nature speak.”

But how do they do it? Are they all, and at any given time, endowed with life and vibrancy of their own, without human agency, as some contemporary post-humanist thought sees it? Or is there an alternative way, one that by-passes the discussions around the limits of the anthropomorphic, some sort of alternation in our seeing the nature/culture divide? Bernstein’s “poetics of poetics”, or poetics of performance, his poetico-philosophical ongoing program in which the event of the poem, its intense “Now./ Not now. / And now. / Now” (2016, 300), as Bernstein puts by way of quoting Gertrude Stein,  affords an exhilarating entry into this alternative. His is a continuation of the Emersonian, Whitmanian, Thoreauvian, Jamesian (I mean William James, whose “radical empiricism” stands, among other influences, behind Hejinian’s thinking about poetry) and finally Cavellian program of relearning to inhabit the world by relearning our own condition of being language using animals.

It is a continuation by radicalization. One of its effects is keeping linguistic innovation in the poetic game long after the dissipation of all sorts of linguistic turns that dominated humanities toward the end of the previous century. Another is such rechanneling of that program that it can now inform swaths of contemporary multi-national poetics. Finally, Bernstein’s contribution is in making us attend more closely to some of the key concepts in Cavell’s discourse, notably those related to the notion of poetic object and, intentionality, and its meaning or meaningfulness. If the materials of the worlds truly spoke, what would they say? And would we be able to understand them? Whose would be the intention that stirs those utterances and what would be the intended meanings?

With all of its rampant diversity, its refusal to fall in line with any generic categorization, Bernstein’s latest title, The Kinds of Poetry I Want, continues that line. The Cavellian themes are not prominent, and yet they inform the volume unmistakably. We hear them first in the very title. Its semantic and grammatical form is a ruse, a promise of an answer that will be both fulfilled and broken. It will be broken, because after reading the volume we will understand that there is no poetry that Bernstein wants, or prefers, that could by kept within the boundaries of a kind, a category, or a genus. And yet, this very erasure of the essentialist conceptual scheme standing behind the idea of the “kind” of any linguistic utterance, particularly one that wants to be poetic, the erasure that bursts out the available conceptual bounds, is precisely the kind of poetry Bernstein has wanted and has taught many of us to want too.

The kind of poetry Bernstein wants, is an intensification of the main line of what I understand to be American – the art that helps the human linguistic organism to make its way amidst forms of boundless excess, learning to appreciate it, to see it as a political model, sustaining one’s vitalist position, without getting pulverized by chaos. Names and categories exist in Bernstein’s discourse as temporary and provisional energetic nodes that serve as grist for the situation of the poem. They often become preposterous mock catalogues demonstrating to us the futility of trying to arrest the poetic flow – they are madness in response to our madness of classification. One example is a poem titled “Solidarity is the name we give to what we cannot hold” (Bernstein 2010, 221-23). It is a parody of the urge to classify poets and poetries. Yet, the speaker paradoxically becomes a poet by denying throngs of the categories – aesthetic, theoretical, geographical, political, others – of poets miraculously, and, as we can see, preposterously, amassed by the existing discourses.

This method is echoed in the current publication in a piece called “No Hiding Place.” A long list of lines beginning with the phrase “I thought language poetry was” revisits and reasserts the various aspects or characteristics that might have been used to describe Language poetry. Some of those may be funny or non-sensical, for example: “I thought language poetry was sympathy without tea” (Bernstein 2024a, 36). Most, however, seem to originate from earlier discourses of theoretical debates around Language poetry, in which they had been used with a clear intent to signify stable meanings. And yet, when amassed in the new piece, the characteristics seem to work against each other. A melee of features results. Its very profusion annuls the project of arriving at a final shape of the object in question. The text returns us to the very heart of the anti-programmatic ideal of Language poetry, which was an avant-garde without a set of rules, more a site of communal language-oriented practice and an ongoing inquiry into the question of its maintenance and livelihood than a pursuit of a program.

It is in such apparently self-absorbed linguistic passages, where the foregrounded aspects of language – grammar, word choice, rhetorical productivity – create an impression that the world has been obliterated by discourse, that the world in fact returns, much more vividly than in topical poetry. In another early poem, a short piece called “The Kiwi Bird In The Kiwi Tree”, we read: “I want no paradise only to be / drenched in the downpour of words, fecund, with tropicality” (2010: 142). These become a “fundament be-/yond relation, less ‘real’ than made” (142), which leads us to Bernstein’s insistence, pronounced elsewhere, that poetry is a difficult faith in having a world by agreeing that writing is its own reality. In another early text, Bernstein (1986, 50) writes: “I want in my writing a texture of wordness opaque and alone.” This one also which carries an epigraph from Thoreau: “I was determined to know beans.” While the title plays with the idea of the palpable presence of the objects of the world, the suggestion here, an idea in which Bernstein takes after Cavell, is that no particularity – no direct contact with the materials of the world – is possible without the textured wordiness founding our actions in the world. That is why, “these words, or those in poems, are not used to describe events in the world that have already occurred…. but to attend to the internal event that is taking place in it” (50). In other words, it is only within the event of the poem, an artificial space of its attentiveness, that the world has its truest event itself.

The event of the poem is Bernstein’s version of the Thoreuvian and Cavellian call to reinhabit the world by redeeming it from the conformity of settled meanings. This theme appears early in the new volume, in the opening text-performance – a piece densely marked by erasure and elision – titled “Ocular Truth and the Irreparable Veil.” Interestingly, its dense elliptical play quite openly gets us in the vicinity of the Emersonian/Cavellian thematics. Its mock epigraph, a disfigured utterance – “Nature is too much with us, [ellipsis in the original text] or [ellipsis in the original text], / Little we see in culture, that is” (Bernstein 2024a, 3) – is a mini-vortex recycling themes from Thoreau. It is only by remaking our culture and actively reimagining it that we can find the right measure of our distance or proximity to nature. In other words, if we treat culture as an artificial thing, we should see nature as such too, beyond the limit of the myth of the given. The aversion to this myth is signaled in the very first line of “Occular Truth”: “’Deficit’ is always the given, [ellipsis in the original text] fate, [ellipsis in the original text] acknowledgement / [ellipsis in the original text] of limitations or blindness” (3).

Here, the given is “deficit”, but also “fate”, what Emerson theorized long ago as necessity and limitation. The composition of the line works with the truth value of this statement but also away or around it, through a rhythm of elisions. As a result, the existing argument enters an altered space. This is Bernstein’s own version of the aversive practice of “finding as founding,” a Cavellian device, now performed on the Cavellian/Emersonian material. It resurfaces openly later in the poem, in one of its few more complete, least elliptical paragraphs, in which Bernstein connects the Cavellian thought to his own post-secular reimagining of religion without the absolute. In this model, the living word is Emersonian “life”, a permanent avoidance of being based in declarations. The existing words, discourses, utterances are enabled, by the event of the poem arranged by Bernstein, to reenter their proper state of the flow, in which they live by acquiring a new connective aura in a new environment. Hence, in the fragment in question, rather than proposing a discussion on the issues of the absolute or its non-existence, the poem proposes itself, its own space, or “body” (the very next piece in the new volume is titled “The Body of the Poem”). In it, the question of the absolute is replaced by the “urgent task of finding, and making, truth: Finding by making, making by finding, finding by founding, making by foundering” (Bernstein 2024a, 8). If general or abstract concepts, such as the absolute, are included in the work catalyzed in this new space, so is the existing transcendentalist textual and conceptual corpus. Echoed, and distorted, the Cavellian discourse is fed into the event of the new poem, which thus rescues it from congealing into a final truth, or meaning as settled cognitive content. It is performed, as Bernstein would say, with the hope of obtaining a new spin.

Cavell himself will return in the book, in a section called “Shadows…”, where Bernstein offers a memory of his teacher. He focuses on Cavell’s method of teaching a philosophical text by bringing words, phrases and sentences alive through treating them as script, staging them. If a philosophical text has a point germinating in it, if it has a cognitive content, it can only exist in, with, and through the linguistic material it was originally composed in. Philosophy must be relived in its own materials and for that purpose it must be rehearsed, like music, improvised like a composition, in front of a new audience: “He turned phrases of Thoreau’s around the way Miles Davis turned a musical phrase of Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep Is the Ocean’ or Thelonius Monk (a favorite of his) lifted and reworked the chord changes of ‘Blue Skies’” (Bernsten 2024a, 72). Teaching philosophy becomes a practice of “sounding” the language – that is the material – of its source, a method which fleshes out Thoreau’s original action, as it was theorized by Cavell: “By sounding the sentences of Walden, Cavell was able to sound the limits and possibilities of his thought, as Thoreau had sounded the depth of Walden Pond” (73). In an earlier piece, Bernstein (2024b, 274) said that through his method Cavell succeeded in “making the words [of Walden] his own and making them ours, too, as active listeners” (emphasis added).

What happens when the language of a text, such as the text of Thoreau’s Walden, is made “ours”? First off, there is felt a removal of the line dividing the text of philosophy from the text of creative literature. The text becomes a multidimensional object in the process of its coming into being and we are now able to participate in it – in the event of its unfolding meanings. We enter the area of the Cavellian concept of the intentionality of the artistic object. Philosophy is at its best when it can be treated as a poem, or another object of art, about which we know, as Cavell puts it, that they were “intended”, or “meant”, in a sense that they were meaningful to us as creators or recipients (the line between the two gets fuzzier and fuzzier the deeper we proceed in the process). In Cavell’s reading, what Thoreau managed to do was to bring language – the ordinary language of men in the street – back to the state of aliveness. Reinstating vital exchanges between objects of the world, his own finite bodily condition and his language, Thoreau returned us to an awareness of our responsibility for the habitat, a space that the Polish scholar, Tadeusz Sławek called “the community of the world”. Such community comes to life in a space which only comes to being through an act of care and commitment. The position of the subject in this act is of exactly the same kind that Cavell describes when he talks about the intentionality of the objects of art, such as poems.  

This argument is presented in Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say, a study about which Bernstein (2024a, 72) confesses in the new publication that it “completely absorbed him,” immediately when it was published. Cavell argues, partly against the New Critics, that an object of art is made of materials, but the task of the recipient is to find a mode of seeing how they were part of an action that was a form of care for them. It is this care that he calls “intention” – a kind of position on the part of the creator, to be re-enacted by the recipient, which treats the material of the new object as endowed with meaning. It is important, however, to pause and consider the meaning of what Cavell means by the terms intention and meaning. Objects of art are materials, which, like ordinary language of the street for poets, or everyday objects or paint for visual artists, are suddenly bestowed upon with special attentiveness. Cavell (1976, 197) asks: “Could someone be interested and become absorbed in a pin or a crumpled handkerchief,” and goes on to explain that, in the case of an artist, this would not be an ordinary sort of interest or absorption. Much more than that, such absorption, intended to result in turning the materials in question into objects of art, must have been a form of enhanced care: “Objects of art [do] not merely interest or absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them” (Cavell 1976, 197-98). This attentiveness is at the heart of what Cavell treats as the nexus of meaning and intention: “we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people… the ‘mean’ something to us” (198). Within the space of the art object, the materials become “meaningful”. However, importantly, this meaning is not the same as the cognitive value of utterances: “they mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do” (198, emphasis added). He then reinforces this point, later in this important paragraph, by adding: “A work of art does not express some particular intention as statements do” (198). Instead, works of art “celebrate the fact that men can intend their lives at all” (198). This sense of the concept of meaning and intention is at the heart of the vibrant creative line that leads from Thoreau to Bernstein, and it is crucial to the position that I signaled above, one that is expressed in Lyn Hejinian’s calling for a kind of poetry that will let “the materials of nature speak”.

The subtlety and complexity of this line becomes more clear when we put is side to side with the way the concept of intention is used by the argument of a group of scholars referred to as intentionalists. Cavell is sometimes called upon by them as an ally who has helped clarify the vexed problem of the intentionality of the work of art, by showing intentionality to be a position that is shaped as we move deeper into the work of art. But the attempt to recruit Cavell to the intentionalist camp seems to narrow down his general point, and more particularly, his reading of the American transcendentalist position, formulated in Emerson and Thoreau, and adapted to the shapes and forms of contemporary poetry, the poetry that has digested the findings on the nature of language-world relations offered not only by its historical lineage (from Romanticism, via modernist experimentation, to its continuations), but also by large areas of philosophy (Wittgenstein and Heidegger, especially, in the case of Cavell, a group adumbrated by Derrida in the case of Bernstein) and attendant literary theory.

In the seminal essay “Against Theory,” which inaugurated the intentionalist position, Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp argued against the understanding of intention and interpretation offered, through his reading if Husserl, by E. D. Hirsh, on the one hand, and Paul de Man’s deconstructive radical separation of literary language from intention and meaning on the other. It is the Hirsh part their argument that interests us at this point. Let us recall the basics. Language is not random noise – ran Michaels and Knapp’s main line of argument, which is fundamentally ontological. It is a form of intentional action, an act behind which stands an intended position of the person who speaks. Should a bunch of sticks or other materials, washed out on beach sand by the ocean look like letters, or even more surprisingly like lines of a poem, we should resist the sense of wonder, get back to our better sense, and recognize the pattern for what they are, on their fundamental ontological level, which is nothing else than a bunch of sticks, not a text, so reading the patterns for poetry would be naïve and childish. The bits and pieces of matter on the sand have been aligned into a pattern only resembling writing; they are not writing, because writing and language in general is matter organized into a code in which the message is intended by an agent capable of such intending. Our very ability to read a text rests on the initial act of generous endowment: prior to proper reading, or communication in general, stands our decision of circumscribing groups of signs and putting them generously inside the set or class of intended communication, which in practice means positing the intentional speaker as their originator. To read groups of noises as language at all is to be “already committed to a characterization of [their producer, or their very source] as the speaker of language” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 726). This position entails intentionality. A speaker is a speaker of language, not just a primate producing inchoate babble, when we posit intention to communicate. For or a group of marks or sounds to be recognized as language, “we must already have posited a speaker and hence an intention” (726).

Further, intentionalists take a purist stance on the identity of intention and meaning. In this, they radicalize E. D. Hirsh’s Husserlian position, and press for sticking to the latter’s starting point of identifying the meaning of the text with the author’s indented meaning, and thus eliminating interpretation thought of as an activity that requires a theory-based method. In that Husserlian position, the meaning of the text “is, and can be, nothing other than the author’s meaning” which, so the argument goes, “is determined once and for all by the character of speaker’s intention” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 725). However, against Hirsch’s own argument, Knapp and Michaels draw a more radical conclusion from it. Since we already read a text as text, not a freakish coagulation of chaos into text-resembling chaos, and further assuming we guess the meaning of the text, we also immediately have the author’s intended meaning, as one and the other are the same: “The recognition that what a text means and what its author intends it to mean are identical should entail the further recognition that any appeal from one to the other is useless” (725).  

This is not to say that they deny the fact of the indeterminacy of utterances. However, on their view, the problem is trivial. Even if there is a margin of indeterminacy, it is limited, if one sticks consistently to Hirsch’s own initial drawing an equal sign between meaning and intention. Indeterminacy is eliminated, when we simply go on and add “information about the intention” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 726, emphasis original). For Knapp and Michaels this is as far as we should go and Hirsh errs when he chooses to reach further by proposing that the author’s intended meaning be recuperated by the project of the theory of interpretation. Arguing against the formalism of the New Critics, Hirsh went a bridge too far by mistakenly imagining “a moment of interpretation before intention is present” (726). “But if meaning and intention really are inseparable,” they add “then it makes no sense to think of intention as an ingredient that needs to be added; it must be present from the start” (726). The only thing we do on the way from indeterminacy to determinacy is to gather more information about the speaker. The authors of “Against Theory” were struck dumb by Hirsch’s failure to see the consequences of his own argument: “In one moment he identifies meaning and intended meaning; in the next moment he splits them apart” (Michaels and Knapp 725). The split is a trap, a Pandora’s box, a calamitous moment of letting into play the risky business of interpretation as an activity severed from the intentional structures of the creator’s mind and requiring a theory, thus condemning utterances and texts to the catastrophic indeterminacy of meaning, a separation from the monolithic identity of meaning and intention, writ large in the fundaments of the ontology of the text.

This is one of those positions in which the apparent seamlessness of reasoning masks throngs of problems. What does it really mean to “add information about intention”? Moving from ordinary language communication to the space of the work of literature itself, especially contemporary literature, we are facing very often a plurality or at least a strong disturbance of the unity of the speaker. The limitation of the arising indeterminacy by simply adding more information about the speaker becomes a task that often misses the point about contemporary poems. And, further, what about the necessary difference between the author and speaker, highlighted already by the New Critics, or the empirical and implied authors, theorized by W. C. Booth (1961), the difference whose indeterminacy was shown as inherent to the work of literary texts by the entirety of deconstruction, not just Paul de Man, but also Jacques Derrida? Problems mount.

In order to bring their argument an inch closer to the experience of modern literature, from modernists to the present day, intentionalists needed to clarify that they were not after the primitive idea that texts are governed by contents of the author’s mind prior to the creative process. The solution is found in G.E.M. Anscombe’s theory of action. Michaels utilizes it in order to demonstrate that intention should not be mistaken with one of the causes prior to the text. Instead, it is rather a modality of proceeding with the action of composition. Anscombe’s argument belongs in the area of the philosophy of action, and Michaels (2016) presents it condensed in the formula “I do what happens”. The model is complex, as Michaels himself admits, requiring us to see beyond some initial positions that seem contradictory, but it seems to encapsulate something that confirms Michaels initial position – the identity of meaning and intention.

With Anscombe’s on board the model is now enriched with an analysis of what happens in the act of composition. In short, the action makes sense only if it is governed by a difficult equilibrium: the unity of the mind’s internal sense of its intentions and of what happens outside of it. In meaningful action, and, by extension, in artistic composition, one obtains an organic coherence between one’s (internal) sense of where one is going with the materials utilized in the process and with what happens to those materials for the external viewer. The philosophical argument itself is complex, but a core element remains consistent with Michaels’ initial argumentation: for an action to count as meaningful, there needs to be a strict accord – even if it be completely unavailable to the external observer – between the internal mental state (intention) and the external result of action (what happens to the materials). Michaels sums up Anscombe’s complex discussion of meaning and intention by describing a situation where the full meaning of an outward bodily gesture (giving someone a hug while having really intending the gesture as strongly ironic) is only apparent when we have access to the internal intention: “you can’t have what she calls ‘a correct account of the man’s action’ without knowing not exactly what he was thinking but rather what he was meaning” (Michaels 2016).

This is also the point of tangency with Cavell, as seen by the intentionalists. For Cavell, as we have seen, objects of art make sense when we see properly how they were meaningful to the artist. Moreover, those areas of meaningfulness are only uncovered, according to Cavell, when we allowed the work to “direct you further into the work” (1976, 227). For the intentionalist camp, this position signals a strict alignment of the work of art as action, external form, and internal intention. They read Cavell to derive a picture of the seamless alignment of meaning, intention, material form of the work, all of which are corelated to constitute immanent purposefulness of the work. Concluding his discussion of how works of art “are a celebrat[ion] of the fact that men can intend their lives at all,” Cavell calls upon Kant’s concept of “purposiveness without purpose” (1976, 198). This treatment of Kant by Cavell is appropriated to the Marxist/Hegelian perspective by Nicholas Brown (2019, location 321), who says: “The way to the meaning of a work lies not away from the work to its intention understood as an event in the mind of the artist, but into the immanent purposiveness of the work. Meaning, then, is never a settled matter; it is a public ascription of intention.” Brown connects this idea to the Cavellian vision of the intentionality of the work of art, its “ensemble of immanent, intended form” which is the primary “fact about artworks for as long as there have been artworks” (location 321). The key word here is “fact.” The immanent unity of form, intention, and meaning awaits there to be discovered. As such it is itself exempt from discussion. As Brown says, this perennial “fact” about artworks, is “not itself an interpretation” (location 321). Interpretation, then, is merely a phase. At the end, literatures offers facts of meaning.

This kind of intentionality is a fair way of placing works of art and their materiality firmly within the arena of the social discourse. The fact that a work of art is an intended composition, an arrangement of materials – words, paint, other – in a given shape, and that the artist intends the materials to be recognizable to the community, as well as his or her arrangement of them to appeal to them, suggesting various possible meanings – all this is rather indisputable. But the intentionalist insistence on the identity of intention – so conceived – and meaning, strikes one as too rigid and narrow when confronted with vast areas of contemporary poetry. What about works of art in which the publicly available and recognizable materials are used in ways that simply defy the everyday protocols of meaning making, the established ways, conventions and language games within which meaning – understood as recognizable cognitive content – is available?

For instance, how does one approach a works such as Joseph Cornell’s box composition or a poem by John Ashbery, for that matter. In both of these, the intentional side of the work – understood along the lines we have seen accepted by Cavell and the intentionalists – is quite clear: a box by Cornell or a poem by Ashbery will use publicly available materials (discarded bits and pieces of various props or objects in the case of one and platitudinous expressions in the case of the other), the intention being clearly to work with them, the work being meaningful to the artist, a position that in turn is likely to make them “meaningful” to the recipient, sparking their intense interest, care, awe. Both Cornell and Ashbery create arrangements of materials which are “intended,” if we think of intention along such lines, with the help of Michaels and Anscombe’s discussions. However, in the case of at least some works of art this model conflates the “meaningfulness” of the work, occurring for both the artists and the receiver, with its “meaning.” Coming back to Cornell, or Ashbery, or Bernstein, for that matter – can we really move smoothly from the intentionality-as-meaningfulness arising in the work to the meaning based on the intentionality of a subject envisioned as a unitary entity? Unlike the original arrangements of materials utilized in a Cornell box, an Ashbery poem, or a Bernstein poem-as-performance, these artistic objects are composed precisely for the purpose of doing something to the original meaning: undermining it, verifying it, distorting it beyond recognition, mocking it, at times shattering it completely, erasing it, and often undermining the unity of the cognitive operations which obtain in normal communication processes. The ultimate result of those actions is laden with a range of indeterminacy not to be eliminated by finding any information about the creator.

Cavell’s elaborations on what Thoreau was doing at Walden are instructive again. The goal of Thoreau’s action was to leave behind the area of communal meanings which were felt by him to have already degenerated into life-obstructing dead weight. The method was to bring oneself back to the scenes and situations where the linguistic ability of the human organism is recovered. Cavell’s Senses of Walden abounds in passages in which the effort goes to show how Waldens’ project of healing himself and the community of the depression called “quiet desperation” requires finding a position where language is reassumed in all of its wild unpredictability. The narrator of Walden is an experimental poet, who, like Whitman and Dickinson, does not so much speak, as relearns to do so, which really means that he devises a new language, one which his neighbors would not yet be ready for.

It is of paramount importance to notice, as Cavell does profusely, that the endeavor often entails getting lost, losing not only objects, but even the sense of purpose. “The writer comes to us from a sense of loss,” says Cavell (1992, 51), but this condition is not so much overcome in the course of the experiment, as fully explored, embraced, and lived. Here, what Cavell (2003, 110) called, after Emerson, “finding as founding,” signals a constant dialectic of getting closer to the self and doubting it: “the fate of having a self… is one in which the self is always to be found; fated to besought, or not; recognized, or not” (Cavell 1992, 53). The self becomes one of the materials of the world, and it is reconfigured and reexamined. Cavell again: “the first step in attending to our education is to observe the strangeness of our lives, our estrangement from ourselves” (55). Frequent scenes in Walden show the narrator wandering aimlessly, roaming the woods, sensing one’s own wildness. The stated “business” of the author in his Walden is to “live deliberately” (Thoreau 1992, 61), to reexamine one’s human finitude, which means to re-find one’s present moment. Thoreau wanted to: “improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too” (11). This is a project of building one’s own sense of temporality, one’s own “now,” definitely a forerunner to Bernstein’s “now” of the poem. But such actions ultimately mean an entry into strange spaces where what we call meanings simply fall off. Here is one example from Walden: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips” (188). The “what-how-when-where” is the whirl of the unitary subject’s intentional sphere at its existential level – the conundrums and messiness of our daily engagements. The “dawning nature” of the fragment is a suspension of that loop.

It is worth noting, too, that such estrangement of the self also means the defamiliarizing estrangement of the materials of the world. Thoreau attends to bits and pieces of nature, sometimes with clear purposiveness – whenever he is involved in building, measuring, planting. But there moments of sheer wander or just suspension of practice, as when he stretches on the sheet of ice to observe air bubbles beneath it. The extended passages of the text which depict such proto-actions are interesting instances of lifting the inanimate matter and making it enter the area of discourse. Commenting on Thoreau’s actions, Tadeusz Sławek (2014: 46) states that Thoreau’s operations in the domain of Walden strip what we know to the raw and “bare existence,” a formulation that echoes Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life”. Further, Sławek also says, fully assuming the voice of Thoreau, or sounding Thoreau’s voice for his listeners, the way Cavell does in Bernstein’s reminiscences, that, when engaged in such baring down existence to its bones, “I have my being on the ‘edge’ of words,” where I am “in community with the cacking ice” (46). Stretched on the sheet of ice, and then carving its piece to better examine it, Thoreau does not – whatever the intentionality of the act itself may be – produce meanings. Instead, he does precisely what W. B. Michaels advised us against doing – disregard ontological boundaries and treat the accidental materials of the world as text. This is where “letting the materials of nature speak” begins. The action is past the divisions between the linguistic/intentional and non-linguistic/non-intentional. Instead, this is precisely what Cavell (1992, 53) called “an exploration”, in which “you do not know beforehand what you will find,” a revision of the conditions which condition not only the received epistemologies but also ontologies. It is only in this mode that Thoreau can enter an area in which “materials of nature speak,” as a result of which he confronts general linguisticity – not meanings but the general potential of meaningfulness, a mode of action which spills beyond the unity of the intentional subjects. Rather than revisiting a specific “language” – a monolithic loop of meanings and intentions – Thoreau enters a wildness the interaction with which teaches him that there is an endless variety of ways in which to speak.

What Thoreau does to the materials of the world found in nature, Bernstein does to the materials of language found in our world. His “now” of the poem is what “nature” was for Thoreau, a suspension, or better, a bursting out of the intentional loop. The point of which he has been making us aware is that the materials of language constitute a set that is much bigger than words, phrases, sentences. Treated as they are in “the kind of poetry he wants,” materials of language burst out, proliferate, hybridize and morph in spaces that obliterate the separations between the eyes of our minds and the so called external world; they become this world, which is a world whose course is determined by us, animals endowed the gift of communication. But the gift is the task. What Thoreau did to the materials of nature, Bernstein is doing to the materials of language – he lets them speak, again.

Which is also to say that he brings them to life. Reading the texts of intentionalists on the role of the works of art in public discourse, one learns a great deal about how important they are to the political significance of art. However, there is also in those writings a sense of a closed loop. The immanence of form, intention, and meaning keeps the producer and receiver in the terrain of the public debates almost too rigidly. The work of art itself becomes, on the intentionalist reading, such a limited area, the limitations concerning not only the meaning of the work – this question now finally being settled by establishing the fact, not to be disputed in this discourse, of the unity of meaning and intention – but also the status of the artist, his or her self-knowledge. It is right to admit that the creative process is capable of instigating an organic unity – a modality of bringing form, intention and the dynamics of the process itself into a unison. However, by adding “meaning” to the mix, one easily ends up with a sense of stinginess, as if we were robbing art of a larger generosity we should expect of it – not a meaning, but an opening into meanings, or bursting of what we know, including the author’s self-knowledge.

It would be fair to say, for example, that strong, even magnetic or mesmerizing unity of intention, action, and form was achieved, in the paintings of Jackson Pollock. And it would not be very difficult to describe this unity – in fact this is mostly what art critics have been, rightly so, doing when dealing with this kind of art. But having arrived at accurate descriptions of those amazing artistic fits, are we now ready to admit that we have thus arrived at their “meaning”?

And what about the artists’ knowledge of themselves, one that attends the formula “I do what happens”. Crucial to Michaels and Anscombe’s theory of intentional artistic action is that the artist – the kind of artist immersed in the emergent intentionality of the work, not one misguided by the intentions held in their mind prior to the work – still knows what they are doing. Michaels (2016) stresses repeatedly, in relation to Anscombe’s formula, that, despite some apparent contradictions, that is “committed [to the idea] that an intentional action is something that I know what I am doing without observation.”  However, any good artist will tell you that, indeed, when caught in the process, they “know what they are doing.” Some of them would call it being in the flow. Perhaps the strongest, most intense varieties of such immersion happen to the artists who employ bodily movement, such as dancers. When successful, they definitely know what they are doing, even with their eyes closed.

But is this really the kind of knowledge of the self that is called upon in utterances we produce in other areas of the social discourse – political debates, social issues, court cases, family disputes, etc. etc.? Even more importantly, should it be this same kind of self-knowledge – the kind of self-assertive knowledge of the self which we are obliged to call upon as we fulfill our obligations to the discursive, argument oriented moments of our lives? Isn’t it the case that the current social and cultural chaos is amassed precisely because what everybody around us seems to be so busily doing is to assert and reaffirm what they always already know about themselves? And, even worse, that this kind of self-knowledge is not altered, let alone changed, even when it features as an ingredient of the creative process, it being totally co-opted by the existing political stances?

Bernstein’s model offers a much needed respite, a disturbance of those continuities. Instead of using the space of the poem’s creative process to reassert his (or his readers’) identity and position on “meanings,” he organizes events which push the participants into the edges of the debates now at session. The event of the poem occurs by means of the materials of those debates, but is not contained within them. Spatial metaphors fail here. Materials are simply so turned that we were able to observe a different dimension – the strangeness of ourselves as we are normally engaged with them.

Thoreau’s existence “at the edge of the word” becomes the event-of-the poem as part of what Bernstein (2016, 297) called his “bent studies,” which is “to move beyond ‘the experimental’ to the untried necessary, newly forming, provisional, inventive.” The even-of-the-poem is the primary device and probing tool in this anti-program. The source of the concept is Poe, with his insistence that a poem be a purely aesthetic event. Bernstein explores this program, by showing it consistent with the practice of a line of poets that transgresses the trite divisions between epochs. In his argument, Poe is joined by Dickinson, Whitman, and Stein, all of whom busied themselves not with “meanings”, but with organizing poetic space “where meanings are,” the “now” of the poem. The  point – the intention – is to view the dynamic chaos of the existing social debates, and, more particularly, to become more attuned to the deeply masked struggle between rationality and madness that goes behind the masks of official debates. Bernstein’s poems as performances thrive on that edge.

Let us review some examples, starting with the issue of self-knowledge. “Poets are fakers / Whose faking is so real / They even fake the pain they truly feel,” says the speaker of a piece called “Autopsychographia,” from the volume Recalculating (Bernstein 2013, 3). True and safe enough – we almost feel that we read a classical aphorism. But things soon get muddy: “And for those of us so well read / Those read pains feel O, so swell / Not the poets’ double header / But the not of the neither”. A doubleness gets involved, but also lack, introduced with the intense punning of the phrase “not of the neither,” very close to “know of the nether” – the active kernel of vacuity.  This bit, place irritatingly right at the black heart of the poem interferes intensely with any sense of the unity of meaning and self. The interference is reinforced by the fact that the poem is a translation of a piece by Fernando Pessoa, a writer notorious for fictionalizing autobiography. Do poets lie about their lives? They do, necessarily so, the poems, as forms of this falsity, being truer events of their lives than any normative autobiography could envision. There is a higher level of interaction between truth and falsity, one that exceeds the confines of the debates about meaning and intention, on which the falsity of the poetic event is the best version of what happens, an impossible merger that is underscored at the end of this short poem:

And so the wheels go whack

Ensnaring our logical part

In the train wreck

Called the human heart (3)

Whose life is being celebrated here–Pessoa’s? Bernstein’s? Their poetic representatives? Is the whole business one of treating the blatant falsity of the poetic reports as the highest form of truth, a final resolution to the classical battle of mind vs. heart? It is not enough to say that a poem, or a translation of one, is just a “fiction” of the self, a necessary one, as Wallace Stevens would have insisted. Bernstein raises the stakes. What if the literary piece is not a poetic condensation of the tensions that rift an individual life, perhaps even that of the poet’s. Instead, a poem like this one battles against any attempt at reducing that individual life to a statement whose truth value would be continuous with statements whose truth and meaning might be required on other social occasions, such as writing one’s autobiography, where one shows how one’s life was beset by contradictions. Whatever the meaning that might be offer by “Autopsychographia,” it will not be found in the intentional sphere of a subject emergent in the compositional process, because no such unitary subject takes shape. The play of doubleness does not resolve to a unity, this being prevented, as I have noted, the kernel of sheer negativity active at its center. It is this active negativity that is preserved, saved from the intentional stances, so much needed in the other areas of our lives, where we argue points.

In the writing belonging to the area of the “bent studies,” the order of the day is not to offer meanings, but to instigate meaningful bursts of meanings and convince the reader to hold on to the blast wave. This is precisely what has been happening in Bernstein’s recent books. His innumerable poems, speeches, essays, parodies, travesties, improvisations work with the existing protocols of meaning and rationality, as if he wanted to give them a check-up. The poems become vortexes of positions, where the rational meets its other, sense is shown as meshed up with nonsense, the serious with ludicrous, etc. Ultimately, however, bent studies is a plea for the necessity of withstanding this chaos, endlessly taking up the task of finding one’s way within it. There is a madness in this writing, one that exceeds even the various familiar formulas or clichés which see art as madness controlled. On the contrary, is the profusion of Bernstein’s output really “a controlled” form of madness? Neither when dealing with the entire body of the bent studies, at their current shape, nor when dealing with their individual instances, can we be entirely sure if we are dealing with madness tamed by method or something else. Ane yet, the whole bet of the project is that this is precisely what we now need.

Let me finish with one other example. In a poem called “On Election Day,” also from Recalculating, we go over a series of statements of what is found to happen on such an auspicious date. The syntactic parallelism of the form brings to mind Whitman’s catalogues – his tireless lifting of the endless scenes of human diversity so that they become part of a larger structure, not just the poem, but the poem-as-state. But where Whitman aimed at unity, Bernstein’s offer is the opposite. His catalogue is a litany of materials whose emotional, factual, generic or cognitive status simply never adds up. In the poem, Bernstein (2013, 55) opens with a plain, if a little surprising line: “I hear democracy weep, on election day.” What follows is a cauldron of plain fact (“the sister does her washing”), nonsense (“the frogs croak so fiercely, you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth” or “cats take tea with the marmoset”), poetic metaphorization (“Your eyes slide, on election day”), poignant observation (“The streets are filled with brokered promise”), a metaphysically tinged confession (“Slowly, I approach the voices dark”), comedy (“the sperm cannot find the egg”), and so on. Among this tumult, there is the fact of the vote being open to all: “the miscreant’s voice the same as saint’s”. All of those acts are followed up or preceded by weeping.

Does the poem celebrate democracy’s secular creed – the centrality of the ritual of voting? To an extent, it does. But it also contains an element of mourning whose tone is indeterminate. Is the weeping serous or comical? The more preposterous eventuality is that the mourning might actually be real. Democracy in the poem proves a burlesque, a pageant of of imperfection. But treating any such statement as the meaning intended by the subject who is emerging in the action of this poem would be a solution obtained at the expense of other possibilities. Even more importantly – is there a unitary subject emerging in the space of this poem, one who fully knows what they are doing? On the contrary, there is no level of the poem at which it reduces the tension between the tone of mockery and of the elegiac.

Yet even if we were finally able to learn the tension – after all, life is full of contradictions, and democracies especially tend to produce messy realities – there lurks a level which, surprisingly, stands against that messiness. What do we make of the lines which touch on the burden of metaphysics? Why are the dead so closely listening in on the chaos, and why are there so many premonitions of death or dying? Democracy, a secular device, enters the post-secular dimension, where our daily uncertainties and mess negotiate the certainty of nothingness. There is not one, but several levels of contradictoriness in this poem. Perhaps it is the very impossibility of containing this kind of plurality in any unitary structure of meaning and intention that the poem enacts. Such could be its ultimate defense of democracy – a system ambitious enough to ask that we withstand the impossibility of the closure of meaning and intention, in various dimensions of our lives, individual, social, political, metaphysical. 

Bent studies is poetry’s venture beyond the necessary level of meanings onto the even more necessary reexamination of the sanity of the rituals which spawned them. Democracy might be a masked duel of sanity and madness. The bad news, then, is that it is vulnerable to schemes of well-informed lunatics, skillful at posing as the guardians of sanity. Commenting on Poe, the alleged founder of “bent studies,” Bernstein (2016, 308-309) wrote: “Poe’s uncanny revelation is that the insane are perfect mimes of rational order… They have convinced us that they have overcome the insurrection of the lunatics and restored order.”

But the real point of Bernstein’s writing is that the two camps are not so easily told apart. There is no platform from which to offer the final judgement. The point is to withstand the horror – the Real element of democracy – without succumbing to the false promise of its attenuation. It is this skill that is asked of us lest we slide into a different kind of horror, one of truth revealed. The writing of the field of bent studies is the necessary practice in this hard and bitter skill.

References

Bernstein, Charles. 1986. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2010. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bernstein, Charles. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2013. Recalculating. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2016. Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2024a. The Kinds of Poetry I Want. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Charles. 2024b. “Out Walzed Stanley.” In Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind, edited by David LaRocca, 273-276. New York: Bloomsbury.

Booth, Wayne C. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. Kindle edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 1989. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 1992. The Senses of Walden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2001. “Self-Reliance.” In Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 120–37. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Hejinian, Lyn. 2000. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Michaels, Walter Benn, and Steven Knapp. 1982. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 723–42.

Michaels, Walter Benn. 2016. “‘I Do What Happens’: Anscombe and Winograd.” NonSite.org, no. 19. https://nonsite.org/i-do-what-happens/

Sławek, Tadeusz. 2014. Henry David Thoreau: Grasping the Community of the World. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang AG.

Thoreau, Henry David. 1992. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. 2nd ed. Edited by William Rossi. New York: Norton.

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

Notes Toward Approaching Charles Bernstein

Andrew Levy

Please click the linked title to access the essay.  

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

“Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee”: 95 Conversations with Charles Bernstein

Mark Wallace

1/ Charles, your essays frequently highlight the importance of conversation: “I only know what I think when I am in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialogue… I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations…. Dialogue’s the center of what I do” (“Groucho and Me,” 41). Poetics thought of in such a way becomes a relationship, a dynamic, an involvement both with oneself and others that’s always available for revision and rewriting. Sometimes that involvement with others is also what writers need to find their way out of: “The kind of poetry I want is as averse to expression of solidarity and community as it is to univocal self-identity” (“The Body of the Poem,” 13). But obviously, an involvement that one wants out of is still an involvement.

2/ In recent years, when I begin reading one of your essays (my responses to your books of poems are different), I often think, “I’ve heard this before.” And that’s not surprising. Both your writing and your teaching (and the connections between the two) were essential elements of my Ph.D. education at SUNY Buffalo between your arrival there in 1989 and when I finished my degree in 1994. Of course there are always new details, new wrinkles, additional elements, but the basic framework, with concepts that may be phrased differently at different times, like “aesthetic justice,” and the body of writers to which you most frequently refer, are familiar to me (“The Body of the Poem,” 11). And yet, curiously, I find while reading that I feel startled by remembering just how familiar these things are. Your ideas, and the process of thinking through them that happens in your essays, have gone into my consciousness, and under it.

Your essays remind me especially of conversations that took place when I was a student in your classes. Reading your work brings me back to my own past, to how many of your ideas regarding poetics are foundational ideas for the work in literature that I’ve been doing in the years since. The question for me is what I’m going to do when I recognize the significance of your work on mine. What’s my role in this conversation between us?

3/ A thought is a form of motion, and it’s impossible not to move. Even if you stay mostly where you were, the ground that you stay on changes anyway, as the world around also alters itself. While other writers’ essays often tell me their conclusions, yours more frequently show the motion of your ideas, how they don’t stay still. Your essays seem like responses not just to changing conditions but to the condition of change. Interactions. Questions. Avoidances. Refusals. Conversations.

4/ “Where am I going to go with this?” is a question I find myself asking in response to the movement that goes on in your essays.

5/ Avoiding “doctrines and positions” or not, there remains a lot of fight in your essays, a struggle against the status quo, against institutional norms and institutionally powerful opinions, against overly assertive certainties coming from nearly every corner of the literary world. An arguing back against various points of view, especially those that want to limit aesthetic possibility. Sometimes the arguing back is direct, sometimes indirect. In your phrasing I sense echoes of Muhammad Ali: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

In fact, one of the things I find notable in The Kinds of Poetry I Want is how much fighting it involves. It’s not that I didn’t expect this exactly, it’s the sheer amount of it over the course of the book. That’s not a criticism of the essays, but instead a recognition of the contexts in which they came into being, one in which avant garde and other experimental literary practices were routinely rejected by most, nearly all, of the most prominent and institutionally powerful poets and literary critics in the U.S. during the now over-fifty years that your work has been appearing in print.

Some of these essays, especially ones like “Stein Stein Stein” and “Summa Contra Gentiles,” are organized like catalogues of your conflicts with others. Some of the most distressing conflicts (to me anyway, and maybe to you?) are those with writers and scholars who might be in other contexts mostly in agreement with your point of view, like Barrett Watten (“Summa Contra Gentiles,” 317-318).

It’s no wonder that you have to mention (and more than once) that, physically, “I’ve never hit anyone” (“Summa Contra Gentiles,” 293). It’s like a necessary disclaimer: No writers were physically assaulted during the making of this poetics.

6/ The Poetics List (1993-2014) you founded at SUNY Buffalo was a forum in which many conversations often became something like verbal boxing matches, although that was hardly the only kind of dynamic in play on a forum designed around the possibility of conversation. On at least one occasion that a lot of people remember, a writer threatened to punch another writer. Of course we both know how gendered male the verbal boxing match over poetics is.

Although there is also, to state the obvious, a lot of fight in women poets too.

7/ Despite my sense of familiarity, I always find something new in a new book of your essays, even a book like The Kinds of Poetry I Want, which collects essays written over a long period of time, quite a few of which I’ve read before. Beyond classroom discussions of Louis Zukovsky and Bernadette Mayer that led us to Catullus, I don’t recall much conversation about Roman poetry in my time working with you at SUNY Buffalo. But there it is in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, an essay built partly around translations of Lucretius, especially what he tried to say about what could not be seen, could not be counted on, did not fit with people’s perceptions of the world: “A central problem for Lucretius was how to articulate a view of the world that is aversive to (that swerves from) what is visible, that seems to push against what intuitively seems to be the case” (“The Swerve of Verse,” 112). What is the importance of the exception to the rule? Of that which doesn’t fit our assumptions? Of the thing or moment that doesn’t conform to our predefined categories or ideas? Of the things we can’t see because they don’t fit the way we’ve been trained to see?

8/ Conversation has been central to my own poetics, as well as a key part of my fiction, in which dialogues are often where the action is. An interest in literary dialogue began for me before I was acquainted with your work. When I was an M.A. student at SUNY Binghamton from 1986-88, I co-authored, along with my friends Joseph Battaglia and Keith Eckert, a small set of chapbooks of multiple-author poems (rengas and variations on that concept) influenced by the book Renga: A Chain of Poems (1971), with an introduction by Octavio Paz and co-authored by him, Jacques Roubaud, Eduardo Sanguinetti, and Charles Tomlinson. One of the things I liked about poems from the time I began writing them seriously was the immediacy of interaction possible in a multi-author text. A line of poetry bounces off other lines, off other people, off problems in poetry and problems beyond poetry.

8/ The notion of a poem or a literary press as a conversation played a central role in the group publication projects I worked on while a Ph.D. student in the years I was studying with you. Leave Books was initially a chapbook press that the graduate student co-editors (Juliana Sphar, myself, Brigham Taylor, and later Kristin Prevallet and Pam Rehm) believed was a way of creating a dynamic interaction of voices. Poetic Briefs, edited by Elizabeth Burns and Jefferson Hansen in graduate school and afterwards, a publication to which I often contributed, frequently used the format of the conversation for its explorations in poetics. The one publication project from that time of which I was sole editor, the small poetry magazine Situation, was based on the idea of poetry as an interaction (that is, a conversation) with the materiality of the world. All these publications (and others came later) were funded wholly or in part by the Buffalo Poetics Program. You and other faculty in the program encouraged students to engage in conversation both in class and in publication. To rephrase Gertrude Stein, “the conversation was spreading.” As it did, and does.

9/ A key sign of one’s work having an effect on the world is that others pick it up and do something with it, move it with them somewhere. That doesn’t happen for every writer. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, or for a long time. Even excellent writers can be forgotten. But from early in your literary work, it seems, you have been creating or helping to create conversations between writers.

10/ In the academic context, quoting and citing authors is fundamental to making a work recognizable as criticism or scholarship. At its best, quotation becomes a way of continuing important conversations. At worst it becomes a marker of acceptance of conventional academic authority (with its potential access to the resources that such authority might offer), as you have often pointed out: “Professionalized scholarly writing often seems to play off a list of master-theorists who must be cited, even if the subject is overcoming mastery” (“95 Theses,” 15).

11/ In the last two decades I have not devoted much time to in-depth scholarly or critical writing. While remaining engaged with reading such writing, when I have time, I’ve found myself more engaged with the possibilities of poetry and fiction writing. And I’ve also found myself frustrated with how the dynamics of authority and access to resources operate on the way one is allowed to write an essay for publication in academic journals. I still love to write reviews of books. Most of them I simply publish on my blog.

12/ Certainly, poetry and fiction aren’t free of problems of authority and power. Yet I myself find in them a broader range of possibility than in academic writing. I might once have cared too much (why “too much”? do I mean “more than I wish I did”?) whether my essays would be academically acceptable. This is an issue many people who want to work in the academic context have to face. Maybe caring more than I wish I did about what is academically acceptable is one of the reasons I moved away from writing criticism and poetics, although of course there are many publications not directly connected to academia that will publish essays on poetics.

13/ An essential element of the conventional academic essay is that it focuses on a single main argument. In the usual hypotactic structure of argument, there is a main argument, and then there are secondary arguments that are subsets of the main argument. In contrast, many of your essays in The Kinds of Poetry I Want and elsewhere are what I might call “list arguments,” or more exactly, a list of different conversations, some of which might not even qualify as “arguments” (what makes something qualify as “argument”?). Maybe the term “list essay” is more accurate. A list is not inherently paratactical, since concerns are likely to reoccur. But the implications of its form are more paratactical than hypotactical.

14/ At first, while reading around in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, I’m not able to see how my loosely scattered responses to the book will add up to an “argument.” But one list essay especially catches my attention: “95 Theses.” Reading that essay helps me figure out how I will write an essay on your book.

Martin Luther’s work titled “95 Theses,” published in 1517, stated the specific ways he wanted to break with the ideas and corrupt practices of the Catholic Church, a stance which reminds me of your own attitudes regarding the practices of the academic and literary professions. Luther wanted to redefine the religious tradition he had inherited. Seeing the title of your essay made me think of my father, a longtime historian of European and American Protestantism, who died in February 2021, and who often talked to me about Martin Luther.

Thinking of my father in this context reminded me of a brief conversation you and I had about my father, regarding something he once said to me: “I was halfway through writing my second book before it occurred to me that how I wrote a book was important.” As a historian, he wanted to get information and theories across to readers, but he found himself, unexpectedly, confronting both rhetoric and aesthetics. It’s possible to write a book without thinking much about aesthetics. It’s even common. It’s even common among people writing poems. People learn that poems are written a certain way and then they write them that way, without much questioning of “Why is this what a poem should be like?” Art and literature without a conscious exploration and questioning of its own aesthetics.

I can’t say that I think my father ever became an impressive stylist. But at least his prose became more energetic.

15/ You write, “I like to think the relation of one work to the next in one of my books is comparable to the twisting, inside-out movement of a Möbius strip” (“Offbeat,” 27). To the extent that metaphors (comparisons between things) can provide good descriptions (imperfectly but revealingly), I think this metaphor works well.

The idea of the Möbius strip reminds me of a conversation I’ve often had with you (or more accurately never with you, but with myself about your work) in relation to the concept of the poet-critic. To a greater extent than any contemporary I can immediately think of, your work blends the two roles, with every poem nearly an essay / work of criticism, and every essay nearly a poem. Disjointedness between the structures and goals of the two is inevitable, of course, and the slippages between them appear differently in different of your works. But there’s a more consistent drive to mingle the poem and the essay in your work than in the work of other contemporary poet-critics I can think of.

16/ Without active questioning, whatever one is doing slips back towards the conventional, the accepted, the conservative in the sense of I take it on faith (often without even knowing that I’m taking it on faith) that this is how it’s done. Towards accepting the world we have received. Which is one of the things that Martin Luther was criticizing about the Catholic Church, along with the decay and corruption that had crept into the Church because of its failure to examine the relationship between belief and action. As Luther realized, it can be a big mistake to take your own religion on faith.

17/ I think of Robert Creeley saying, “Sometimes I just want to sit in a chair and be there.” I heard him say this in person once. I don’t know if he ever said it in print. The desire to find a stable place from which one doesn’t have to question the world or one’s role in it can be very powerful. In my story collection Walking Dreams there’s a story called “Design For A Chair Not A Chair” that concerns the construction and destruction of chairs and of people’s lives. We might want to sit down and be there, but the chair we’re sitting in is part of history, and history is written in language… and so are we. We don’t become one with things but can only express and enact perspectives towards them. Of course, the ur-text now for all chairs of this kind is a pipe in an artwork by René Magritte: the exemplary text we’re bound to reference when we realize that when we try to understand and connect with the things of this world, we often end up among our own drawings and words.

18/ Speaking of Robert Creeley, one result of the fact that it’s (some of) my own education at stake when I’m reading your essays is that reading something you have written often throws me back into specific conversations I was part of as a student. In “Shadows” you discuss a conversation involving Robert Creeley that took place in a graduate seminar (59). I was a student in that seminar, and I was there that day. As these things tend to go, I remember another part of the conversation than the one recounted in your essay.

The class was taking place in the big seminar room that was also, if I recall correctly, partly your office as David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters. It had a long row of windows and was on one of the top floors of the building. The day was cold, there was snow on the ground, and it was cloudy, maybe not snowing at the moment but sure to be snowing again soon, as is often true in Buffalo. There was another university building of similar height not far away. When a student claimed to be disappointed by Creeley’s response to a question, and either before or after (I think before) Creeley claimed that he was disappointed too, Creeley pointed out the window. On the roof of that opposite building, in the cold, standing in the snow, was a university maintenance worker leaning over something (I remember this clearly) then straightening up again. “How do you think he feels?” Creeley said.

The point seemed to me about labor, about class, about the nature of disappointment and how it was parcelled out to others. About (in a terminology I don’t remember using then but is common now) privilege. Leaving aside that some of us in the room, whether before or later, might have done maintenance work ourselves, for the moment at least we were indoors, discussing poetics among a group of ambitious and contentious people in a way that might lead to possible opportunities for us. It was only other people who had the responsibility right then of keeping us warm and dry in the building during our discussion.

19/ Oh, disappointment. The feeling that we have gotten less than we wanted or (more full of ourselves) than we deserved. How do we handle our own disappointment (and with writers there’s a lot of it) or the disappointment of others (and there’s a lot of it). Is there anything poetics can do about it? Will a conversation about it with others help? Even if we share our disappointments?

20/ Where do we get our thoughts from? From ourselves and other people. Which ones do we go on thinking, and which do we try to get rid of or change? People converse with others. People converse with themselves. I try to think of what language would be without conversation and I find I can’t imagine it. If sometimes we need words for ourselves alone, certainly most of the reason we need words involves the reality of others, that we don’t know what they’re thinking or feeling unless they talk with us.

21/ Of course there won’t be 95 conversations in this essay, just like there aren’t 95 theses in your essay with that name. I never intended that there would be. But the fact is, there easily could be. The conversations we have in our heads with others are ongoing and continue until we reach that point when there are no conversations in our heads anymore. There is always space available for them: “64. The rest of these 95 theses intentionally left blank” (“95 Theses,” 19).

23/ “Nearly touching are the ethical realm of our obligation to others and the aesthetic world of our freedom from such obligations” (“Offbeat,” 26). This line alone seems to me more valuable than many whole books of poetics have been. It raises and then answers a question I hear poets and critics wrestle with endlessly, often without satisfying answers. The way it’s more usually discussed: If my poems carry with them an ethical responsibility to others, doesn’t the way I write them also carry that responsibility, in that I have to write in a way that will foreground and make legible to those same others the ethical responsibility I have towards them? Doesn’t my responsibility to them require that I write in a way they can accept and understand?

23 bis/ But if I am required to limit what I must write about, and the way I must write it, because of what others want it to be, doesn’t that mean I may not be able to write it ethically? If the structures I might need or want to write in, and the content I might need to write, are constrained by what others are supposedly demanding of me before they give me permission to write, might the requirement that I receive their permission become exactly the block that prevents me from achieving what I’m trying to? That would not be ethical. That would be a world of language (and people) in chains. Which is too often exactly what we have.

24/ What if writing ethically sometimes requires that I refuse to write in a way I have been given permission to write? I think this question is part of what your point speaks to. Maybe what and how I write need to find their own way. If I take writing to be at least partly the discovery and development of my own relationship (in writing) to a given particular problem, don’t others have the responsibility to allow me the full range of freedom I might need to find how and what I want to say?

They do, of course. But that doesn’t mean they’ll behave responsibly.

25/ “There is no one sort of American poetry and certainly no right sort—this is what makes aesthetic invention so necessary” (“Offbeat,” 25).

Absolutely so, although much of your book points to the inevitable corollary: that the continued existence of new possibilities for what a poem might be depends on a writer considering what the ramifications of the subject matter, the aesthetics, and the relation between the two might become in a given work. It transfers the responsibility for the significance of the poem away from a predetermined standard of what that significance might be, because there is no outside authority that can give the writer certainty about what’s right or wrong. Decisions about aesthetics and ethics are part of what the poet has to think through, has to enact.

And of course your statement does not assert that all poems are by definition the right sort of poems. As you also say: “anything is possible but only a very few things get through that eye of a needle that separates charm from harm” (“#CageFreePoetry,” 162). Instead, whatever percentage of poems get through whatever critical needle eye is in question, many poems reveal difficulties and shortcomings in thinking through the problems connected to poetic invention, whether on the level of aesthetics or content or the relation between them.

What’s at stake in writing the way I’m writing? What’s at stake in speaking about this subject? Prior answers to these questions in prior poems do not provide enough help. They can provide guidance and example, but not certainty or an answer.

26/ The act of composition is the act of the radical risk inherent in the freedom (never absolute, because it is always constrained by what we can imagine and the circumstances in which we imagine them) of the moment of composition. Sometimes, a poem has to be dared into existence.

27/ In the face of the radical risk (offered and posed) by the moment of composition, I find a lot of the more conventional stances of the 20th century (and indeed the 21st) to rest on premises that feel so blatantly limited that I want to call them “prejudices.” And in fact if they were premises made about people, it would be much more obvious that they are prejudices.

28/ Consider the following lines from Charles Altieri that are part of your ongoing conversation with him:

“I will argue that only an explicit sense of purposive activity can fully engage the world in a way that addresses the density of our sense of the event-making poetic powers that have an impact on history, albeit usually local versions of history” (“Too Philosophical for a Poet,” 126).

“But the more poetry becomes an internal system, the more difficult it becomes to specify how it might affect life beyond the poem” (“Too Philosophical for a Poet,” 127).

What seems to me remarkable about Altieri’s points is his assertion that only some kinds of poems, written in some kinds of ways, can have an “impact on history.” He suggests that if a poem “becomes an internal system,” by which I think he means one that does not explicitly present its “system” to readers, then it becomes harder to “specify how it might affect life beyond the poem.” But what is the “system” of a poem? The philosophy that it explains as well as embodies? Is the “system” of it something other than itself? Some part of itself but not the whole of itself?

29/ Surely the life that a poem has beyond itself is not determined by itself, but by what others in conversation with it make of it, whatever or however the poem might say what it says.

30/ And surely it’s often not possible for anyone to specify exactly how a poem might affect, or did affect, other people and situations. It could be in some cases an appropriate question for a historian or literary scholar. Even if understood historically, much of the effect a poem has on life is found in the reactions of the people who respond to it, and most of those reactions are undoubtedly lost to time. Perhaps Altieri means “historical effects that can be documented”?

31/ Altieri seems to want a poem that will speak to history in the right way. Which is what? A poem that is “Addressing the density of our sense of the event-making poetic powers.” Whose density? Whose sense? Which particular poetic powers are “event-making”?

Whatever his answers to those questions might be, poems that speak to history in “wrong ways” (which would be what?) also make history. Given what history is, surely poems that speak in “wrong ways” have often made more history than poems that speak in “right” ones. I think for instance of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the racism and sexism involved in believing that only white men can make the world sane and rational, and in promoting a colonizing project of the Philippines as an attempt to achieve that end. Or the poems of Rupert Brooke, which promoted a romantic view of WWI which was widely believed in England, a war in which he was soon killed. Both Kipling and Brooke wrote immensely popular poems that reflected and influenced people and history for generations.

32/ It seems then that lurking in Altieri’s terms, many of which are hard to pin down, is an idea that only one kind of poem is the right kind of poem for affecting history.

33/ “There is only one kind of person that is the right kind of person for affecting history.” Leaving aside that it’s quite possible for someone to say that, when applied to a person it nonetheless feels more transparently absurd and, dare I say, prejudiced.

34/ Are persons, then, more complex than poems? Do poems need to be simpler than people in order to find the right way to be effective? Isn’t it more likely that, given that a poem is often a highly developed example of what a person can do with a language, that what we can do with language in a poem is, if not complex in the exact way that people are complex, at least contrastingly complex? Complex along parallel lines that sometimes meet and sometimes wander away from each other.

35/ I wonder why it is that people, and often the very smart and informed and sensitive people who read poems, often try to reduce poems to one main goal, and often a very simple goal. Your writing is nearly constantly fighting back against this problem. I think of the more common rhetorical frameworks I hear now: 1) A poem must have heart, must speak to the emotions of readers. 2) A poem must have a politics that speaks to the facts of injustice and inequality. There’s a third, though its profile is lower: 3) A poem must try to do something different than has been done before. This can be an issue either of aesthetics or subject matter or both.

36/ One thing that I like about your focus on aesthetics is that it doesn’t necessarily foreclose on the possibilities of emotions or politics. Instead, it allows poems to explore emotions or politics from new angles. So why is it that, so often, those insisting on a focus on emotions or politics demand foreclosure on the possibilities of aesthetics? And certainly, there have been some arguments in avant garde theorizing which suggest that some subject matters, such as “the personal,” are irrelevant.

Why can’t a poem speak of emotions and politics, or use aesthetics, differently than other poems, or explore them differently, or even sometimes avoid (some of) them? Why can’t they all be considered relevant elements of poems without having to state unequivocally that one must dominate the others?

37/ It occurs to me that people who care about poetry are often as concerned about controlling what people might become as they are about controlling what poems might become. And there are certainly important reasons for that, given what people are capable of, however unlikely it is that any such instance of controlling will succeed.

38/ And probably we should be at least as concerned about what people and poems have been until now.

39/ Perhaps the measure of poetry’s humanness, and relevance to the human, but equally its measure of resistance to the human, resistance to any single instance of treatment or understanding, is that poetry will always be more, and more various, than the kinds of poetry that you or I or anyone might want: want poetry to be, or want of or from it. Poetry retains in that uncontainable abundance a mystery that stands at a distance from us, a space for uncertainty that goes beyond any of our all-too-human intentions.

References

Bernstein, Charles. 2024. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want. 

A Few Glances at The Kinds of Poetry I Want

Bob Perelman

Since the early 1970s, Charles Bernstein has been a key figure in innovative U.S. poetry, as poet, public intellectual, and engineer of its collective discourses (e.g, the Buffalo Poetics List; Penn Sound). The Kinds of Poetry I Want is an extensive collage drawn from this half-century of poetic activism, each piece displaying his lifelong passion for his art and his unfailing generosity toward his fellow practitioners. The writing at all points is a pleasure, serious and comic in unpredictable rhythms, the formidable learning worn lightly. Every word counts (sometimes than once), but the large intellectual interventions are never in doubt.

Readers will meet a variety of genres, tones, and looks: poems, poem-like constructions, ditties, essays, bits of essays, introductions, interviews, translations (homophonic and otherwise), homages, collaborations, obituaries. But such a list should be taken with a grain of salt since one of Bernstein’s key poetic goals is the erasing generic boundaries, or if not erasing, then blurring them with a kind of borscht belt sfumato.

The range of material that Bernstein engages with is large. There is his assiduous attention to a complex modernist-to-contemporary poetry scene, American and to an increasing extent global; but there are also serious dealings with decidedly noncontemporary figures: Cicero, Lucretius, John Lyly, Robert Browning. Often, Bernstein is addressing his own work, but the self-interest is collaborative since he’s responding to interviewers who are asking him about his writing, editing, poetics.

Some pieces are recent, a few go back decades, but the overall arrangement isn’t chronological. While the three large groupings of the book are labeled Act One: Pixellation; Act Two: Kinds; Act Three: Doubletalk, I can discern no narrative arc to these numbered divisions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is more like a well-organized but non-sequential scrapbook put together from a long, fast-paced career.

The introductory note to “95 Theses” will give a sense of the interwoven mix of times present throughout the book. I’ll quote it in its original italics:

“95 Theses” commemorates “Frame Lock,” a talk I presented at the 1992 MLA Annual Convention, and which was collected in My Way: Speeches and Poems and “The Practice of Poetics” written a decade ago for Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature (David Nichols, editor; MLA, 2007), collected in Attack of the Difficult Poems. (15)

A bibliographic note at the end of “95 Theses” tells us that it was originally published in Profession in 2016, that it was written for a panel at the Kelly Writers House at Penn, and that the panel’s title came from a seminar Bernstein taught in 2015 (19).

Counting up times and venues, we have 1992, 2007, 2015, 2016; an MLA talk, two of Bernstein’s previous books, a publication in an MLA collection of essays, a panel at Penn, and a graduate seminar. In other words, “95 Theses” (like every piece in the book) arises from all aspects of Bernstein’s career. The end of the introductory note, obliquely informing us that “95 Theses” is incomplete, defines another occasion: “I retired a few years after writing this, so take it as something of a swan song, or, anyway, duck soup. I leave the reminder of the theses to be filled in by you” (15). That last sentence reframes this instantiation of “95 Theses” as an occasion for our collaboration.

The opening gesture of the book, the epigraph to “Act One: Pixellation,” is, surprisingly, from the pre-Shakespearean John Lyly’s Euphues: “In fayth Euphues thou hast told a long tale, the beginning I have forgotten, the middle I understand not, and the end hangeth not together” (1). I haven’t read Euphues, so I don’t know how significant self-criticism is there, but when I read this as something Bernstein is writing, it seems familiar: the pratfall, the wisecrack, the refusal of the normative, the shrugging off of sententiousness. Here, the beginning is saying the beginning is a problem, a typical comic snafu. But in poetic terms inhabiting someone else’s words (citation, appropriation, plagiarism, uncreative writing) is a well-known procedure for Bernstein and for a number of the writers he celebrates (Tan Lin, Kenneth Goldsmith).

(While my received sense is that Euphues is the quintessence of fustian fussiness, could its endless dalliance with words-for-words’-sake also be reimagined as an early form of the avant-garde language play?)

The opening piece, “Ocular Truth and Irreparable [Veil],” is visually one of the most radical pieces in the collection. Pages of short to medium prose paragraphs have been rendered intermittently illegible by black bars of redaction. There are spaces between the paragraphs so they look like an email or blog post, not an essay. The tone of what we can read seems serious but informal. Sometimes a few words are blacked out, sometimes almost all of a large paragraph. Page 4 is mostly blacked out; on page 8, only about 5% of the words are illegible.

It’s hard not to focus on what we can’t read, what’s behind those bars of black ink. But it’s also possible to start reading the black bars themselves, which although they are a-lettristic, are in another sense completely literate. They always block out specific words and participate in the horizontal divisions of the lines into letter-spaces; they are never gestural, painterly; rather, they’re bureaucratic: they have already read what we are trying to read, and they are saying that this word, these words are not for us.

I’ll quote some of the piece here, substituting x’s in brackets for the black bars.

[xxxxxxxx] forming an unbreakable bond [xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Too high a price, no doubt; paid by individuals who were not part of making the deal. (5)

My citation makes words preponderate over black bars, but for the reader of the book this paragraph is something like 4/5ths blacked out, the black bars making big dramatic no-go areas. What is being talked about under all that ink? We look back to the unblacked-out words. What “unbreakable bond” are they talking about, bought too dearly and unfairly? Is this bonding among captives on the Middle Passage? Or it could be something completely other. We are reading shreds of mostly blacked-out history. In the last legible phrase (“Too high a price . . . paid by individuals who were not part of making the deal”) the compassion for those who had to shoulder the unjust debt comes through.

Other redactions make for simple jokes:

I think you’re pronouncing the name wrong. It’s [xxxxxxx] Nabokov not Nabokov. (7)

Reading this I can’t help but think of the moron joke, where the phone rings at midnight. Moron 1: Is this eleven eleven? Moron 2: No, it’s one one one one. Moron 1: Oh! Sorry I woke you up. Moron 2: That’s alright, I had to get up to answer the phone anyway. I assume that somewhere in that blacked-out patch is a cue to pronunciation, reminding us it’s NaBOkov, not NABokov. But what we see on Bernstein’s page is making a joke at the expense of our knowledge of the correct pronunciation. The typography is identical–Nabokov, Nabokov–our knowledge supplies the punch line: Nabokov is not Nabokov. Identity, meet yourself as non-identity.

In the midst of these legibility conundrums and ontological tusslings, Bernstein is always an engaged public intellectual, as becomes evident in an almost completely legible paragraph near the end of the piece where he’s bristling at Peter Schjeldhal’s use of “cosmopolitan” in a New Yorker article reacting to the controversy around MOMA’s showing Philip Guston’s paintings containing KKK imagery. Bernstein writes, “Surely the problem is that Guston’s [xxxxxx] figures are too legible–especially when coming from rootless cosmopolitans and cultural Bolshevists” (8).

With only one word blacked out, the passage is completely legible, like the Guston it’s discussing.

“Rootless cosmopolitans,” the label Stalin slapped on Jews and modernists, is being redeployed by Bernstein as one of the flags of “the kinds of poetry he wants.”

A few pages earlier, an isolated paragraph contains something of a credo: “Truth is diasporic, the Holy Land is exile” (5). This is another kind of redeployment; Bernstein is using the power of religious language to celebrate antinomian openness.

The varieties of tone in the excerpts I’ve quoted make a good illustration of Bernstein’s stance against frame lock (tone lock).

But this doesn’t mean that all in the book is non-identity, ambiguity. “Voice” may have been a decades-old target of innovative poetics, but take the opening of Bernstein’s introduction to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: “I’ve always been confused by the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. I mean if something is really beautiful, isn’t it also sublime? Well, I see already I’m getting off on the wrong foot. And what do feet have to do with poetry anyway?” (207) The faux-naive confusion about the sublime and the beautiful; the second faux-naive joke about feet and poetry–these are vintage Bernstein turns.

For the record, Bernstein is very capable of using the terms deftly and normatively: “People sometimes think fragments and disjunction underscore a lack of relation. In My Life, the metonymic structure sparks intensive unconscious, intuitive, felt connections, which can be more intense that logical or plot-driven ones. My Life may not have a plot, but it’s crackling with narrative.

“Each sentence is beautiful. The work as a whole is sublime” (209).

It’s not easy to do justice to the scope of Bernstein’s project. To give some further sense of it, I’ll gesture to two quite disparate comparisons: S.T. Coleridge and Sid Caesar.

Coleridge is not mentioned in the book, but it strikes me that Kinds is not unlike STC’s Biographia Literaria in that it situates the poet’s poetics within a narrative of the poet’s career. Bits of autobiographical content appear throughout the book, but especially in section sarcastically titled “Summa contra Gentiles.”

The title is another case of Bernstein’s use of strategic redeployment. Aquinas was addressing Gentiles, i.e., non-Christians, whom he intended to convince by reason: “I have set myself the task of making known, as far as my limited powers will allow, the truth that the Catholic faith professes.” Bernstein redeploys this in his opening epigraph, “I have set myself the task of making known, as far as my limited powers will allow, the truth that the poetic faith professes” (285). And of course Bernstein is using “gentile” in an opposite sense, as he goes on to narrate transition from the Jewish enclave of his upper West Side youth to the decidedly non-Jewish Harvard, where he experienced the shock of being “First Gen,” which was like, he writes, going “to another planet, but without spacesuits” (287).

The “First Gen” section (286-94) details that bumpy journey–encountering antisemitism, meeting Stanley Cavell, the 60s; his mother’s distant regard of his career; his father’s letter to Harvard pleading not to expel Charles, who “meant well” (287). It’s touching, and straightforward–and in places quite particular: two pages are devoted to the young Bernstein setting the record straight in the Harvard Bulletin after being misquoted by Michael Kinsley (and the mature Bernstein keeping the facts briskly legible).

Another section, “Roman Gods in a Punic Land” (397-12), narrates Bernstein’s unlikely ascent into academia, starting with William Spanos inviting him to give a reading at SUNY Binghamton. The quest starts small: “It was one of the first times I had been invited to speak at a university . . . . I took a small plane from LaGuardia . . . . It was snowing” (308). He brings de Man’s Resistance to Theory on the plane but leaves it in the seat pocket (unread, and never to be read). At this point de Man has major prestige and his essay, “The Resistance to Theory,” is to go into a book of essays edited by the MLA. But the passage of time will change the valence of the particulars. Now de Man is a damaged figure, and “years later,” Bernstein writes, “my essay, ‘The Practice of Poetics’ was included in the same MLA series” (308).

Every page in The Kinds of Poetry I Want testifies to Bernstein’s successful trajectory from neophyte to widely-read poet-critic and widely-traveled academic to boot. There is still loads of truly entertaining, battle-tested testimony in support of the outside, but Bernstein is more than outsider now, as the italic bibliographical material that I’ve quoted demonstrates: it is complex but clear, usable, exact, perfectly normative. It’s a dialect he has mastered and quite a distinct one. Most of the writing in the book is, as I’ve said, shifting, open, unpredictable, where the ever-present bibliography is in the service of accuracy, sure retrieval, making sure past doings are permanently recorded.

One last model: Sid Caesar, who Bernstein devotes 20 deeply scholarly and humane pages to. Caesar and Bernstein were both verbal virtuosos, but Caesar couldn’t assemble, let alone write, Bernstein’s many-lobed essay, “Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime” (349-397) a great social and sonic investigation into sound poetics, translation, Yiddish, Esperanto, internationalism, hearing and mishearing. Sid Caesar is just one part of this–but a central part as Bernstein devotes pages and footnotes to close readings/hearings of Caesar’s sound.

I conclude with it because Caesar’s sonic genius, so well-trained and so improvisatory, certainly has inspired some of Bernstein’s flights. Caesar’s complex position of inside/out outside/in is useful to keep in mind when reading Bernstein.

Here’s Caesar describing how he started: “My love of music . . . led me to appreciate the melodies and rhymes of foreign language. I learned my signature double-talk, which was a fast-paced blend of different sounds” (367). Another description describes him working in his family’s restaurant on the lower East Side, where the families would separate into groups, “speaking Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, French, Spanish, Lithuanian . . . I would go from table to table, listening to the sounds. I learned how to mimic them, sounding as I were actually speaking their language. They weren’t offended” (368-9).

Bernstein describes Caesar as performing “a multilectal collage epic poem in real time and space” (368). There’s a most useful utopian whiff in this going between different tables of language–maybe it’s not world peace, but it does show difference as a sturdy source of connection and amusement.

This doesn’t describe what Bernstein is doing, but it does suggest some of its scope. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a highly interconnected, wonderfully useful compendium articulating and celebrating the poetry and poetics of what was, what is–more or less “is,” local blackouts apply–and what, for all any of us knows, might happen next.