by Douglas Messerli
Charles Bernstein Attack
of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
"I'm not joking, and if I seem to talk in circles, it
just seems that way."
Raymond Chandler, The
Big Sleep as quoted in Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems
That is not to
say that Bernstein has no prejudices, that he posits no values behind the
diversity of poetic approaches he discusses; it's simply that his way of
argument is inclusive rather than confrontational. As the author himself writes
in the addendum to his essay, "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind
Poetry?"
I am
as partial and partisan as anyone. Preference and selection are
a
necessary part of aesthetic judgment. Yet, my radar might be the
exact
map of another person's exclusions, just as another's exclusions
might
be a map to my paradise. The relation of these two ideas
(conviction in one's aesthetic judgment and its inevitable limitations)
is
not irreconcilable but dialectical.
For Bernstein, the dialogical approach is everything.
Disagree with me, and we have something to talk about, Bernstein repeats time
and again throughout these pages. In short, he is a nice guy who believes in
poetry with the devotion of a devout rabbi or priest.
But then, I
forget that Bernstein has often shaken up institutional organizations and
angered noted individuals in and outside the poetry communities. As Marjorie
Perloff begins a short conversation with the poet, published in this book,
"Charles, almost twenty years have gone by since that fateful MLA [Modern Language Association meeting] when you delivered the lecture "The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA" (1983). I still remember what a tempest you caused and how furious the old timers like M. L. Rosenthal were at your demolition job. You were, in those days, a great fighter against "official verse culture."
I myself recall a
dinner party where I had invited several poets of what might be described as
the "second generation" of the New York School, furiously chastising
me for my publishing of Charles' work, and proclaiming, as Bernstein himself
discusses in Attack of the Difficult
Poems, that he was a theorist instead of a poet. "Apparently poets
can't talk and tie their shoes at the same time," as Bernstein might quip.
But it is still
difficult for me to comprehend why anyone in love with poetry would not want to
embrace a work that so humorously and passionately offers ways for readers to
enter the texts and speaks for the importance of poetic endeavor.
Bernstein's work
sets itself up in the first essay, "The Difficult Poem," as deflating
the fears readers may have approaching a work that appears to have a vocabulary
and syntax that is difficult to understand or that makes one feel
"inadequate or stupid," in short, a poem that requires a struggle to
appreciate and find meaning. Like a friendly dentist, Bernstein—employing the
comic gestures of a science fiction film—reassures readers that the
"problem" is not theirs alone, and requires just a little painless
effort to turn the reading experience into a joyful discovery.
Soon, however,
things quickly turn more serious, as Bernstein seeks ways to help students
everywhere deal with poetry. In "A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic
Imaginary and Curricular Practices," the author takes the reader through
his own experiences in the classroom as he proffers a "radically
democratic" approach to teaching, encouraging students to read diverse
works that raise more questions than answers. For Bernstein this begins at the
door of the university or college, where he makes a plea for "enriched
content, especially aesthetic and conceptual content, over a streamlined
vocational goal orientation."
Along the way,
Bernstein takes on issues of university tenure (he thoroughly supports it as a
way to protect the whole thinking-questioning process), academic standards, and
numerous other issues. A short quote will have summarize Bernstein's
intelligent criticisms of current academic values:
And
what of academic standards? Aren't these the dikes that protect us
from
the flood of unregulated thought? Or are they like the narrow Chinese
shoe
that deforms our thinking to fit its image of rigor? When I examine
the
formats and implied standards for peer-reviewed journals and academic
conferences, they suggest to me a preference for a lifeless prose,
bloated
with
the compulsory repetitive explanation of what every other "important"
piece
on the subject has said. Of course, many professors will insist that they
do not
subscribe to this, but the point is not what any one of us does, but
the
institutional culture we accept.
That these clear-minded queries about college and university
policies come from a professor who has published in nearly all the major
academic journals, as well as in hundreds of smaller literary publications,
speaks volumes, and helps to convince us of his protests.
Throughout Attack of the Difficult Poems, moreover,
Bernstein gives specific examples, not only of how to structure a program that
will better allow students to think and question poetic art, but specific
classroom tactics to encourage their explorations. I suggest that any young
(older too) teacher of poetry might find Bernstein's suggestions useful for the
classroom, and helpful in showing how to approach texts that may at first seem
beyond the students' grasp (although it is, just as often, the other way
around, I am afraid).
Bernstein goes
much further, discussing the whole history of language and poetry, comparing,
for example, the early use of the written poem in Homer's day (when it served
less as a finished text than a reminder of the oral performance) to the current
alphabetic text that is a thing in itself.
Along the way, in various essays, the author considers the
effects of the computer and digitalization of poetry (many aspects of which he
refreshingly embraces), and in a brilliant discussion of "Making Audio
Visible," helps readers to understand the importance of hearing poetry
(read by the poet or a performer; Bernstein argues for the value of numerous
hearings) to help in the experience of a work. His and his students' creation
of PENNSOUND, a large audio archive available on line, has been, perhaps, one
of the most important acts in preserving poetry as an oral force in our time.
My favorite essay
in the book is "Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist
Poetry and Lyrics," in which Bernstein considers a wide range of poetic
voices from Zukofsky and other Objectivists to American folk music and popular
Black lyricists such as poet James Weldon Johnson. His inquiring mind takes us
from Oscar Hammerstein's II lyrics for "Ol Man River” to the altered
lyrics in the performances of singer, political activist Paul Robeson. By the
end of the essay, I found myself spending hours in tracking down various online
recordings and performances, as well as rereading song lyrics (I had already
published a volume of American song lyrics of the 19th Century) of this period,
all of which I found fascinating and illuminating in comprehending the more
"difficult" works of Zukofsky, Oppen, Eliot, and others.
In later essays
in the book, Bernstein explores poetry's relationship with art and forms of
poetry that are as much at home in the art gallery or museum as in a poetry
anthology. His brilliant analysis of poetic frauds played out in presses and
poetic publications by figures such as Alan Sokal, Max Harris, Yasusada (Kent
Johnson), and others, is filled with the tension between the desire to satirize
or mock social and political poetic strictures and the failure to live up to
the sacred trust of the reader, publisher and author, to say nothing of the
larger community.
Along the way are
other mischievous and funny inventions that pepper the more erudite
conversations, and, just as Bernstein has promised, sweep up the reader (at
least this reader) into the arms of poetic euphoria.
The author ends
this phantasmagoria with a very funny, but also somewhat frightening, satire of
a Galileo-like recanting for all the ideas he has promulgated throughout. As
the recantings of Bernstein's "Recantorium," build up in pace and
absurdity, the recantings themselves grow into recants, so that by work's end
no one can possibly determine whether the poet is recanting his own ideas or
his recanting of his ideas, or, possibly, his recanting of the recants
("And for this I recant my cant, cant and recant."). But there is a
dangerous double sword to this silly performance that seems to suggest that the
reader still may hold with the nonsensical viewpoints that the author is now
purportedly embracing. And if that is so...well then Bernstein's brilliant
arguments have had no effect, a possibility that at least this reader simply
cannot imagine.
Los Angeles,
July 15, 2011
Reprinted in Los
Angeles Review of Books (July 2011).
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