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.