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.