wordscape artists
by
Douglas Messerli
Bob
Perelman Primer (San Francisco: This Press, 1981)
Bruce
Andrews Wobbling (New York: Roof Books, 1981)
Charles
Bernstein Stigma (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1981)
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Perhaps the most serious-minded and
influential literary development in this country is the rise of poetry that
basically renounces narrative structures and challenges both symbolic,
thematically unified poems in the tradition of T. S. Eliot and imagistic,
assemblage poems in the tradition of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.
The young practitioners of this poetry, who are often grouped under the rubric
"Language poets," look instead to the Russian Futurists, Gertrude
Stein, and ancient charm songs for their roots. What they share with the likes
of Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, and Stein is an emphasis on the mind in process, a
focus on the jumps, leaps, fissures, cut, aural patterns, and patter of public
and private language – of the phoneme, word, phrase, line, sentence, and
paragraph. How they differ from these earlier poets and from one another is
apparent in three recent books – Primer
by Bob Perelman, Wobbling by Bruce
Andrews, and Stigma by Charles
Bernstein.
As the title suggests, Perelman's poems, speaking of themselves and the
processes through which they were created, serve as a presentation of
elementary principles. Like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and other associated
with "field" poetry, Perelman understands poems as "fields of
speech," landscapes generated by the placement of lips and teeth. But
whereas Olson and Duncan's poems generally refer back to nature, history, and
myth, Perelman's – taking Olson's theories to their logical conclusion – refers
little to "us or use." The poem, for Perelman, is energized by
instant-to-instant shifts in thought and conversation. Meaning is not something
affixed to the poem, or to which the language is directed, but is itself the
language in motion. Language, accordingly, is the necessary and proper focus of
poetry. As Perelman, with Steinian clarity, expresses this idea, "The
proper study of trees is trees."
But as Gertrude Stein anticipated, such emphasis on language in motion
leaves the poet without a past. For Stein that was liberating; but for many
readers and writers, such anti-traditonalism narrows the poetic context. It is
fine to be able to "...predict/The present, hearing a future/In the
syllables' erasing fade," but what of the self, society, and memory as
shaped by past experience? Criticism of such blatantly vanguard poetry is to be
expected in these times of retrenchment. And in their relentless call for the
creation of a new language – their demand for what Perelman describes as
"a new world.../To stomach the images/Floating on the headless/Torso of
the old" – these poets have understandably seem themselves as alienated
from the poetry establishment. Whether Perelman has been affected by such
criticism or by his own self-doubts – he seems to have been free of such
dilemmas in his exuberantly intelligent previous book, 7 Works (The Figures, 1978) – it is evident that, while arguing in
Primer for a "new world," he is simultaneously attempting to locate
the poems within the Great Tradition as he defines it. Throughout the book
there are references to poets as radically dissimilar as Chaucer, Shelley,
Baudelaire, and Rilke; and several of the poems play with quasi-traditional
structures.
Such an attempt at rapprochement is admirable. But, unfortunately, most
of the poets and forms Perelman employs tend to contradict his expressed ideas.
It is one thing for the poet to encourage us to "leap across/Cracks
between words," and quite another for him to structure a series of poems
around variations on the same sentences. The first dislocates, and forces us to
reevaluate and reshape our knowledge; the second calls upon our memory, and
asks us to repeat and reconfirm our understanding. The one challenges most
traditional principles of structure; the other accepts them pretty much on face
value. Throughout his work, Perelman calls for a poetry of linguistic discovery
("Have you ever seen a school fence?") that seldom operates in the poems
themselves. Even the "new world" for which he argues ends up sounding
strangely like the old one of the Romantics:
Each word
Floats through us.
Piney mountains on memory clouds
Visit in starlight, inconstant
("Hymn to Intellectual Beauty")
While it contains beautifully
wrought poems, Primer ultimately fails to marry language-centered poetry and
poetic tradition because Perelman compromises with rather than answers, the
criticisms of those who condemn such poetry in general.
In Wobbling Bruce Andrews
makes it clear that he has no intention of compromising – with either critics
or admirers of his work. He is attempting to create poetry more encompassing
than traditional structures permit: "there are twists and turns in events
and resultants, so, the search for a more inclusive vision – of standing,
falling, sitting still." Structure recalls for Andrews the "vivid
forms," "puzzles," and "games" of childhood which
adults understand as myth; it is "What effects/Character." In fact,
the reader of Wobbling is faced with
several pieces which seem less like poems than crossword puzzles or acrostics.
In "Fidel," for example, Andrews limits himself to the use of only
seven letters: A, E, L, M, P, S, and X; in "Jeopardy," the words are
organized primarily by alliteration; and in the 22 lines of
"Prepositions," there are no prepositions.
Yet the playfulness and humor of Wobbling
merely point up Andrews's sincerity, his conviction that truth is the palpable
and mutable reality of the "social hieroglyphic" we call language.
And in his passion to "purge man from/look of light" – in his desire
to free us from the "antiqued rhetoric" which daily convinces us it
is truth, but is merely a conventionalized imitation of experience – Andrews
issues his "inclusion vision" with the zeal of a missionary among the
uncomprehending natives. If such an attitude occasionally results in
incomprehensible poetry, it also imbues each poem with a sense of urgency and
consequence that draws us in, compelling us to make meaning for ourselves, to
"separate and sort" our lives "out of this confusion and
regard." In poems such as "Gossip," "And the Love of
Laughter," "The Problem of Titles," "Twining," and
"So," Andrews uses a "private speech/That settles self
together"; he builds up a range of semantic possibilities that unites the
reader and poet who together create a new world not on any map.
So Andrews addressed, in part, Perelman's problem of language and the
past; language, he suggests, is inherently tied to both the cultural and the
individual past; but it is only through removing it from those contexts that we
can make it fresh and reform our futures. For Andrews the tradition is not
defined by older poetry as much as it is expressed in the present by the
quality of writing, by the impact of language on the lives of his readers and
himself. Engaging the world through the only medium – the language of mind and
sensation – in which it can be understood, Andrews provides no answers and asks
few questions. What the reader of Wobbling primarily experiences is the
fluctuation of her own thoughts and emotions as she works her way through its
parts. And in this respect, Wobbling is less a book of what is usually meant by
lyric poetry than an imposing and exhilarating encyclopedia of all our loves
and lives.
Charles Bernstein's Stigma is more modest in both size and scope.
While the book lacks the impact of Bernstein's best work – Shade, Controlling
Interests, and Islets/Irritations – it typifies much of his writing.
Unlike Andrews, the crusader, Bernstein is a conciliator, a poet of amends and
recompense. For Bernstein, as for Perelman and Andrews, language, the dominant
enterprise of poetry is also the motivating force of human acts and thought.
But that does not mean that we always recognize it as such. Like the tales of
Samuel Beckett, Bernstein's poetry is riddled with memories of pain, hurt, and
loss which often result in a quietude that the reconciler/lover finds difficult
to penetrate. But Bernstein does not sentimentalize such breakdowns in human
relationships, those "quiet oas[es] of a stall"; for him there is no
value to be found in our isolation, no benefit in being unable to share one
another's suffering. As he says in "March," "Refused for want of
hurting, gain/Else that quiets. . .." Conventional syntax tells us that
there are words missing before and after "gain": "I" (or
"we") and "nothing." Language is the only healer; words
"Like towers make amends...." There is an insistence about
Bernstein's work, a tireless attempt to regain our attention, to "loose
the emotion laden umbrella" and bring us from inertia into discourse once
again. If Bernstein's poetry seems more accessible than Andrews', it may be
because of this incessant prodding of the reader – his perennial attempt to
return us to the "legless hope" of language; to bring us into
"The gravity of a peaceful/Chat...." And if, in all this concern,
Bernstein reveals that he lacks Andrews' faith in being understood, we
recognize that it is because his poetry is more philosophically than
politically inspired.
In American culture, there is a stigma attached, in fact, to such a
preoccupation with words. There is a distaste, almost, for this compulsion to
speak. Perhaps the vastness of our landscape has helped to instill in us a
reverence and admiration for the laconic and concise. Bernstein obviously is
aware that he, Andrews, and Perelman must face the "ageless glowering/At
shudder speed"; in some respects, their poetry goes against the American
grain. That they continue to construct such powerful landscapes of language in
the face of a society that prefers its art realistically precise is testament
to what Bernstein describes as his "hope/Of a future persuasion."
Whether or not they change the course of American poetry, there is no doubt
that it will be said of each of them, as Andrews has written of himself,
"he made language in his own eager style."
College Park, Maryland, 1982
Reprinted
from The Village Voice, 1982
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