Charles Bernstein | Pitch of Poetry / 2016

pitching poetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bernstein Pitch of Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)

 

Charles Bernstein’s new collection of poetic essays, Pitch of Poetry is precisely that: a “pitch” for innovative and challenging poetry, and a statement about the “tune” or “key,” the sound of poetry itself. Bernstein’s poetry is necessarily a thing made out of pitch, the black, sticky substance of coal or wood tar:

 

                 Poetry’s the thing with feathers (tethers) tarred on, as

                 in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering).

                 The kind of poetry I want gums up the works.

                      A tangle of truths.

 

    Of course, from the very beginning Bernstein’s always fought for a poetry of leaps and fissures, the in-between’s of logic and irrationality; but here he furthers and refines his argument through, first a series of short essays that reiterate his ideas of “sounding the word,” and what was once called, through his and Bruce Andrews’ promotion, “Language” poetry, restating his concerns with “disjunction, fragment, recombination, collage, overlay, and constellations,” while redefining poetic genres such as “prose poetry,” “free writing,” “The New Sentence,” Williams’ “Sprung Lyric,” eco-poetics, performance, and other possible poetic inclinations, including areas of “translation, transcreation, idiolect, and nomadics.”

       In the second part of the book, the “pitch” itself, Bernstein tackles long and shorter essays on his influences and the contemporary figures he admires in order to define the territory, so to speak: Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, Barbara Guest, Jackson Mac Low, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, John Ashbery, Hannah Weiner, Haraldo de Campos, Jerome Rothenberg, and in the latter category, Maggie O’Sullivan, Johanna Drucker and others (in full transparency, he even says some kind words about me, both my own poetry and publishing). Not all of these essays are equally convincing, but together they lay out a kind landscape which helps any reader comprehend what Bernstein the critic and poet finds of interest, and in so doing establishes a broad range of his bases—the all-important territory of his poetic embracement.

      The next section, devoted to 11 interviews and conversations seemed, when I first scanned this book, to be the least interesting. I’d already read so many other interviews and participated in a few with Charles myself. Yet this large swath of self-revelation is in fact the most poetic and revealing. In several of them, Bernstein—a highly gifted talker who is often given to linguistic arpeggios is particularly charming with foreign correspondents such as the Nepalese Yubraj Aryal, the Canary Island writer Manuel Brito, and the French interview Penelope Galey-Sacks. With these writers he obviously feels freer to restate his interests and turn them over in his own mind, exploring the depths of his numerous poetic commitments over the years. A passage from the Galey-Sacks essay will have to suffice as an example:

 

              You said something interesting at the conference yesterday:

              that the intimations of verse occur on the teleological horizon

              of the possible. Yet you’re also presenting language poetry

              as breaking with convention, and I imagine you mean

              breaking with American convention specifically? How does

              this idea of continuity tie in with the idea of rupture, the

              idea of breaking? You said yourself that there was a con-

              tinuity in your work as well as an evolution—an expansion of

              yourself. You are yourself an expanding poet, and you are

              expanding through language…how do these intimations of

              verse occur on the teleological horizon of the possible? To

              cite Eliot, how do you connect your beginnings with your

              endings?

 

              There are different overlapping strands that twist and loop

              back, as in a Möbius strip or Klein bottle. The issue of con-

              vention is an important one, and it relates to the idea of process.

              The best formulation for me is one indebted to Emerson by

              way of Cavell: “aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new

              forms.” The concept of aversion—which is a swerving-away-

              from—is more appealing and also more audacious than the

              idea of breakage and transgression. Still, in poetry the difference

              between those terms is more about emotion and desire than

              accurate philosophical description or decision. And so there

              are reasons why some poets talk about transgression and

              breakage, or coupure, blows (Le quatre cents coups). And in

              France you have that, of course, partly with the French Revolution

              itself versus the British Revolution; when you’re cutting off

              heads, that’s a vivid image for this spectrum. But what’s interes-

              ting about aversion or swerving—to think of it in Lucretian

              terms—is that you actually feel the process of moving away

              and moving toward rather than a splitting or disconnection or

              decoupling. That’s what I interested in as a poet. I’m interested

              in the rhythmic relationships that occur, moving in, around, and

              about convention. Because my work is entirely dependent upon

              convention.

 

I wish I could quote further, but that would be to repeat the wonders of this book itself.

      Yet, the last section, “Bent Studies,” is the most remarkable, simply because the author jumps onto the tightrope, challenging his ideas and wit to the full. Here, with a “whoosh & higgly hoot & a he-ho-hah,” Bernstein takes on a remarkable cast of “Countrymen, Cadets, Soldiers, Monkeys, a French Doctor, Porters, an Old Man, Apparitions, Witches, Professors, etc, along with the ghosts of Poe, Dickinson, Williams, Blake, Crane, Whitman, Mallarmé, Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Fanny Brice to explore and celebrate his idea of the messiness of real poetry. In the process he brilliantly lampoons academic writing, particularly taking justified pot-shots at D. W. Fenza, executive director of Associate Writing Programs (who argues that it is “morally repugnant” to question the merits of the literary prize system), The New York Times Book Review (which I, myself, have taken to task for their “doublethink” self-complacency), the New York Review of Books, and other official “protectors of poetry” who apparently want their poetry squeaky-clean and sweet, or, as Bernstein implies, to not really want poetry in their lives.

       In a poetry of “pitch” and “tar,” such a vision of the poem simply cannot exist, and Bernstein seems to be delighting in debunking such delimited notions. Personally, I’ve seldom had as much fun in jumping into the muck and mess of the necessary poetry wars before. Pitch of Poetry made me laugh—and sometimes even cry—but never was I bored or disinterested for a moment. How many critical works can be described in that manner? If you love poetry, and you don’t mind a major poet attempting to sell you on his ideas, I’d advise you dive into this work immediately. And if you take your poetry serious, then this book is a must.

       If my title suggests Bernstein might be a kind of genius-devil, the book’s cover probably reveals something closer to the truth, that he is a kind of Christ-like figure nailed to the wall with words.

 

Los Angeles, New Year’s Eve, 2016

Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (April 9, 2016).