This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want.
Why Bad Poetry Still Happens to Good People:
An Appreciation of Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want
Trace Peterson
In The Kinds of Poetry I Want, Charles Bernstein continues to intervene in literary culture through critiques from the avant-garde side of that culture, pointing out wrongheaded aspects within many existing literary norms. But whereas earlier books of Bernstein’s criticism focused on very assertive polemical arguments, this new volume scopes out a variety of rhetorical strategies and affects (autobiography, collaged ephemera, and mourning, among others) to reveal useable concepts about poetics that we didn’t necessarily have names for before. In the process, he encourages new kinds of reading, by asking: how do readers respond when presented with a strong binary contrast? What can we learn about poetics and ideology from those responses? And what can we derive from them that is useful toward producing and reading more weird poems?
The Kinds of Poetry I Want continues Bernstein’s critique of what he originally dubbed “official verse culture” in 1986: the range of problematic characteristics and behaviors displayed by mainstream poetry and its institutions (1986, 247-248). Given that Bernstein himself and the then-marginal avant-garde poets he was fighting for have now achieved considerable success, he has managed to influence a certain portion of the poetry landscape admirably during his jaw-droppingly productive career, making the world safer for weird poems. But though Language poetry and the “post-avant” movements which came after it have won certain battles, the set of problems Bernstein initially described as “official verse culture” still persists, and is back with a vengeance in certain ways. The Kinds of Poetry I Want finds Bernstein looking at the current landscape and asking why this phenomenon still happens at a deep level, despite the changes that he has helped create. In other words, it finds him asking why bad poetry still happens to good people.
The primary official verse culture critique that appears in The Kinds of Poetry I Want describes a contrast between poetry and reality, or between aesthetics and what we might call subaltern status. In the bold opening essay “The Body of the Poem” (originally a response to Bei Dao from 2017 which reads like a manifesto), Bernstein posits a number of arguments such as “Poems can be read as imaginary and symbolic—rhetorical—constructions that we read against everyday life, in a dialectical manner—rather than as representations of everyday life” (2024, 12-13). That seems like a reasonable and true statement which many would agree with. But Bernstein also introduces strong oppositions in order to provoke reaction, and these are where a lot of the real work gets done. One example of such a strong opposition is his assertion that “the poem is rent from the life experience of its composer” and that “The promise of a poem, the kind of poetry I want, is that it refuses reality, even if nothing can succeed at that” (2024,12). These provocative statements, which have an air of paradox to them, are essentially there to make you ask questions, and Bernstein knows this is where minds can be changed or persuaded. In this case a reader might ask: what circumstances or motivations prompted the assertions? One useful answer could be found in the 2021 essay “#CageFreePoetry” where Bernstein highlights the problem that “For many readers of poetry, identification with the poet, solidarity with the moral or political sentiment of the poem, or prior knowledge of the prestige of the poet is more important than the formal, stylistic, or aesthetic qualities of a poem” (2024, 166). In other words, the prioritizing of the poet distracts from the poem itself.
But here my hypothetical reader continues asking: what would a poem rent from the life experience of its composer look like in practice, or what would a reading look like which (like a juror in a trial) discounts any prior knowledge of surrounding biographical context? A passage which could provide an answer to those questions appears in Bernstein’s 2018 essay “UP against Storytelling,” where Bernstein reveals a connection between story and subaltern status. He quotes Amit Chaudhuri:
…the privileging of a narrative that had no outside (globalization) led to the marginalization of the poetic…’Storytelling,’ with its kitschy magic and its associations of postcolonial empowerment, is seen to emanate from the immemorial funds of orality in the non-Western world.” (2024, 327)
That situation specific to Indian poetry is one in which a literary activity—“storytelling”—becomes associated exclusively with the category subaltern in popular academic and reading practices. Bernstein generalizes from the example to point out a wider problem: the value of telling stories about subaltern status in mainstream literary and academic contexts tends to preclude close examination of types of poetry that are focused on weird aesthetic or formal strategies. The alternative Bernstein offers to this problem of storytelling (and what he views as its subaltern virtuousness) is David Antin’s theorization of narrative: “I value poetry that has the transformation Antin finds in narrative, that often goes missing in story or plot” (2024; 329). So the element of transformation in narrative, inspired by Antin’s poetry as a model, helps to cure readers’ problem of an over-emphasis on the poet’s story that prevents us from seeing the poem.
What would a narrative that involves transformation but not storytelling look like specifically from a subaltern perspective? Maybe the answer to this next question can be found in Bernstein’s discussion of Erving Goffman’s “frames” in his “Dichtung Yammer” interview with Thomas Fink from 2018. Or maybe a demonstration of it could be found in Bernstein’s eloquent elaboration of how John Ashbery’s work shifts frames in “The Brink of Continuity”:
The connection between any two lines or sentences in an Ashbery poem has a contingent consecutiveness that registers transition but not discontinuity. However, the lack of logical or contingent connections between one line and the next opens the work to fractal patterning. To create a ‘third way’ between the hypotaxis of conventional lyric and the parataxis of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, Ashbery places temporal conjunctions (“meanwhile,” “at the same time”) between discrepant collage elements, giving the spatial sensation of overlay and the temporal sensation of meandering thought. (2024, 94)
Reading this passage illuminated for me something about Ashbery’s work I had always valued, but previously had no language for. And reading Bernstein’s description of it helps me understand what it is, how the gears of it whir or creak, without souring the aspects of it I found and still find enjoyable as a writer and a reader. Such moments of laser-focused analysis of poetic technique are one of the things that Bernstein excels at in The Kinds of Poetry I Want, and these passages of the book are riveting. More such moments appear in the brilliant final essay “Doubletalking the Homophonic Sublime” where Bernstein describes in great detail Sid Caesar’s comedic strategy of doubletalk, juxtaposing him with Zukofsky as if Caesar’s comedy routines are comparable to the poetics of a great avant-garde poet: it turns out they very much are. He somehow finds a way to describe Caesar’s technique that helps us understand and appreciate it without killing the aspects of it that are funny. And the way he describes it makes it seem like an entertaining language game that the reader might want to try too.
In jumping between these disparate essays while connecting them, shifting frames as I go, I am performing the thought process one might go through while reading this book and trying to make sense of its wide-ranging concerns by connecting different parts of it. The Kinds of Poetry I Want seems to call for very active reading, especially given how collaged sections of it are. Typical of these collaged parts is “Offbeat,” one essay which contains 11 miscellaneous sections made up of different genres, including: letters to Jerome Rothenberg and Claudia Rankine, a blog entry written for the University of Chicago Press blog, two poems, a foreword, two prose commentaries, and a talk given at a conference. Bernstein juxtaposes such elements next to one another without any explanation, Arcades Project-style, in a way that encourages readers to create their own connections between the metonymic elements. In describing The Kinds of Poetry I Want, I realize it has become more challenging to summarize some of Bernstein’s positions on certain topics because his positions have multiplied and deepened in complexity. Some essays here speak in a shorthand, incorporating numerous neologisms (“com(op)posing,” “frame lock,” “multripillocation,” “echopoetics,” “the pataquerical,”) some of which are briefly explained for new audiences, some of which are clear to those of us who have been around, and some of which remain a bit mysterious. There isn’t quite enough room here in a book review for me to do justice to Bernstein’s fascinating notion of “the pataquerical,” though my reactions to that concept haunt what I’m saying in this essay now, floating behind it. This term was one which Bernstein initially developed for the TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice talks series that I curated at CUNY Graduate Center between 2009 and 2011, a series in which I gave various contemporary poets and queer theorists the perverse prompt of presenting manifestos about their writing process. And many of them, including Charles, rose to the challenge admirably.
At moments in The Kinds of Poetry I Want where Bernstein introduces the polemical force of a strong opposition, the claim seems to be implicitly that “The Kinds of Poetry I Want” are the kinds of poetry you should also want, or the kinds of poetry that others should aspire to wanting. At these moments the writing feels like a model of implicit virtue, like it’s trying to set an example. A dizzying summary/overview of such polemical positions Bernstein has taken at one time or another—many of which persist in his thinking today—appears in the 2017 essay “The Unreliable Lyric:”
Not voice, voices; not craft, process; not absorption, artifice; not virtue, irreverence; not figuration, abstraction; not the standard, dialect; not regional, cosmopolitan; not normal, the strange; not emotion, sensation; not expressive, conceptual; not story, narrative; not idealism, materialism. (2024, 21)
If you got overwhelmed trying to figure out how to follow all those prompts simultaneously, you are not alone. The string of oppositional statements prompts strong reactions, as Bernstein knows very well. But he contextualizes this grab-bag of positions by pointing out that they don’t quite accumulate in that sense: “For binary oppositions to intensify their aesthetic engagement, and not become self-parody, it helps if they fall apart, so that you question the difference, confuse one with the other, or understand the distinctions as situational…” (2024, 21) Indeed, the notion of telling someone else their taste should be his taste is anathema to Bernstein’s stated pedagogy as a teacher, which he explains in great detail during the “Dichtung Yammer” interview:
So, in a class, I am more interested in discussing what a student didn’t understand, and why, than what a poem ‘means.’ And I have become adept at spotting poem/reader ‘hotspots.’ The best work I do is when I point to a comment by a student and say—you could reframe this same reaction and look at this this way. Acknowledging the student’s response as legitimate, rather than in need of correction to a predetermined ‘right’ answer, or casting the student as naïve and in need of tutoring, I offer alternatives. In this sense, the student is never wrong. Even if an interpretation is totally unjustified by the text, the interpretation is ‘real,’ so the thing to explore is how did such an implausible (imaginary) reading arise (2024, 270)
This approach, which Bernstein refers to as “a sort of aesthetic therapy,” is aimed at getting readers to open up or step out of a predetermined frame they had been previously limited by. The entire book The Kinds of Poetry I Want is designed in a way that encourages such active reader participation.
Just as often as Bernstein makes strong polemical or persuasive distinctions, he also reminds us how repudiated, marginalized, or frowned upon the kind of poetry he wants is. He makes this move in 2020’s “Eventuality” from “Offbeat” when he says “very few of the poets I most care about have been deemed ‘notable’ outside the inner sanctum of dedicated readers focused on pataquerical poetry” (2024, 28). And in “#CageFreePoetry,” he notes that “For every poem I love, a baker’s dozen hate it, and sometimes I feel (delusions of agency) my endorsement of a poem is sufficient for others to shun it” (2024, 163). These complaints in the book sometimes feel like self-deprecating despair, at other times like a humblebrag about a position he is proud of occupying. Two elements hover in tension: the sense of the critic as highlighting characteristics that others should value, versus the acknowledgment that such characteristics are undervalued by the general public. In the most obvious synthesis or resolution of that tension, the act of taking this book’s advice to heart as a reader might involve rendering oneself marginal or repudiated. This rhetoric works for Bernstein, but would it work for you, if your (subaltern) context was entirely different, or if you had additional obstacles to contend with?
If the kind of poetry that Bernstein wants sees the poem as “rent from the life experience of the composer,” the same cannot be said about the kind of criticism he wants, which in this book increasingly relies upon moments of strategically autobiographical disclosure. In the 2017 essay “The Brink of Continuity,” Bernstein depicts himself as a character, sharing his memories of working with John Ashbery and his partner David Kermani to carefully preserve Ashbery’s recordings for PennSound and to create a virtual interactive version of his poem “The Skaters.” At one key moment he quotes a conversation between them:
At the airport, John and I were drinking, though all I remember is that John was. He said he was uncomfortable with Shoptaw writing about him as a gay poet, that he was concerned that this might be a reductive way to see his work, especially if it became a primary frame. I said the obvious, knowing that John knew it better than me—that his being identified as gay was welcome, indeed liberatory, and, in the case of Shoptaw’s work, elucidating. (2024, 93)
Another example of how difficult it is to summarize or predict Bernstein’s positions, this passage argues a totally different angle of the aesthetics / subaltern problem: here he celebrates John Shoptaw’s theorizing of “homotextuality,” a term that explicitly connects Ashbery’s gayness with his aesthetics. Additional essays in this book which feature the character “Charles Bernstein” remembering things, walking around, talking to people, and doing things, include stories of his interactions with Stanley Cavell at Harvard in “Finding Cavell” (in “Shadows”), his articulation of the complex pleasures and challenges of grassroots literary community curation in “Poetics List,” his comments about the social origins of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in “Too Philosophical for a Poet,” and the collection of forewords and afterwords in the collaged piece “Forewords and Backwards,” where we see Bernstein in dialogue with a number of his contemporaries. In these instances of watching the character “Charles Bernstein” in dialogue with others, we observe how he manages and navigates what was become the information overload of being a poet: the administrative load of doing things for and with other writers, the marginalia of memories that builds up, and the corresponding mourning involved. Or when he talks about his goals are for the contra-official-verse-culture infrastructure (small poetry businesses) he has helped cultivate into something more.
If poetry can truly be said to be “rent from the life experience of its composer” or something that “refuses reality” in the ways that Bernstein describes, what are the possible political implications of this? One useful and surprising answer appears in the 2021 essay “#CageFreePoetry” where Bernstein proposes a hilarious experiment: “What would happen if I gave the kind of flatfooted, clueless, exoticizing reading of the canonical poem that so many champions of Lowell give to poems that are not to their taste” and then follows it up with this analysis:
Written in the New England section of the U.S…Robert Lowell’s poem begins—
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
In contrast to ‘No Images,’ the diction is stiff and suggests that the poem is possibly written by a second-language speaker (as suggested by the missing personal pronoun before ‘Mother’ and the overpunctuation). The poem is strikingly anachronistic—almost sixty years after Un coup de des, it fails to reflect the poetic revolution of Stein, Pound, Eliot, and Hughes: consider the naïve rhyme of ‘bed’ and ‘red’ and the primitivist idea associating a red sun with war. But this first impression can be overcome if we take into consideration the cultural background of the author and read the poem from an ethnographic point of view. The cultural limitations of the poem—it’s ‘uptightness’ and recognition of the difficulty of sustaining heterosexual relationships (‘Now twelve years later, you turn your back’)—become its strength. ‘Man and Wife’ seems to be bruising up against a ‘high’ education and breeding that hamper a freer emotional life (‘too boiled and shy / and poker-faced to make a pass’) and acceptance of more open form (‘tamed,’ ‘you / hold your pillow to your hollows like a child’). That is, once we see that the poet comes out of a repressed, alcoholism-prone (‘boiled,’ an in aesthetically cooked) Anglo-Protestant-American background, once we take in its class origins (‘all air and nerve’), we can see its immediate appeal to other Anglo-Protestant-Americans who may suffer from the same problems, such as emotional and intellectual sedation, drug addiction, or overdosing (Miltown is not a reference to a factory town but to a prescription sedative, a popular form of legal doping in the late 1950s). Yet while “Man and Wife” would be primarily of interest to heterosexual Anglo-Protestant-Americans of the upper crust, the poem gives other reader insight into this unique form of life.”
—But enough of such costume foolery! (2024, 170)
In the context of Bernstein’s essay “#CageFreePoetry,” this episode satirizes moments in our surrounding literary culture where a myopic focus on only the author’s subaltern status may lead readers to condescend toward the author and often to miss key aspects of the poem itself. But there is something else this humorous reversal accomplishes too, an effect Bernstein downplays when he suddenly steps out of it at the end declaring the episode of “costume foolery” to be over. The critique of Lowell also acts as a critique of white supremacy, of the “dominant” hegemonic perspective in literary reception and community historically, which has often gone unmarked or unspoken. The act of making this elephant in the room something hypervisible by condescending to Lowell’s “stiff” upperclass diction and his “uptightness” creates a powerful moment of “punching up.” Instead of leaving the argument open to being read as potentially punching down or as a critique of, say D.E.I., here the punch connects with its target because the framing allows us to see clearly how Bernstein’s ideas can be used to critique white supremacy and its collaboration with class status. Moments like this go a long way toward the kinds of creative criticism I want, and I’m not just a WASP but also a fan of Robert Lowell’s poetry (the powerful undertow and poison in his poems is almost as good as in Akilah Oliver’s).
References
Bernstein, Charles. 2024. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, Charles “William Carlos Williams vs The MLA,” in Content’s Dream. Northwestern University Press, 1986. 247-248.