making the mind whole
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Bernstein, Controlling
Interests (New York: Roof Books, 1980)
In the past few years, Charles
Bernstein has gained national reputation for his involvement with what he and
others have described and defined as “Language” poetry. But that reputation has
accrued more as a result of his theories than of his poetic output (amazingly,
nine books to date); and, invariably, it is more of his poetic practices than
of specific poems of which his critics and admirers write and speak. Much of
this focus has been inculcated by Bernstein himself; like Ezra Pound earlier in
this century, Bernstein (as well as other “Language” poets) has felt the need
to write about writing almost as actively as to write poetry. Indeed, for this
author, as for many contemporary writers, there has been a purposeful
equivocation of the linguistic activity of creating a poetics by which to live
and that of creating an artifact. That Bernstein’s particular poetics,
moreover, has been perceived as a kind of “warrior” movement–is a poetics that
has enraged as many readers as it has engaged–has helped to divert attention
from his poems to his allegiances.
Concomitantly, it is clear that many critics of contemporary poetry find
it terribly difficult to discuss a particular poem that is not about something, but is something “fixed” in perpetual
process. Reflecting this, obviously, is the conversion from New Critical
practices to Phenomenologist, Structuralist, Semiotic, and other
methodologies–all shifts from a reading of the poem to an exploration of what
causes and determines the poetic act. But although this has been a healthy
antidote to the textual stupor into which American critics of previous decades
had fallen, for younger poets it has resulted in a radical disregard of their
writings. This is particularly unfortunate in this instance, for not only have
Bernstein’s ideas stirred and stimulated the literary community, but his poems
are some of the most original and imaginative of American lyric verse. Those of
his recent collection, Controlling
Interests, especially lie in wait for a contextual reading, if not for an old-fashioned textual one.
Certainly, these poems represent a great many of the “Language”
strategies. Passages from “The Next Available Place” and “Standing Target” can
almost be read as paradigms for the extensive use of alliteration, onomatopoeia,
aural and visual punning, syntactic fragmentariness, enjambment, and outright
glossolalia that characterize much of “Language” writing. In such passages–
Dread, scuzzy.
Perhaps Polish (polish). I
feel rearranged,
mandate a macaroon. Cuba,
Taiwan.
Indubitable dauntress fraudulent as ever
attempting a
view: binary, bisected, by the seaside,
beside myself.
... (“The Next Available
Place, p. 32)––
Bernstein evinces his commitment to a poetry of thinking in process and
demonstrates the “controlling interests” of a literary mode that permits the
“leaps, jumps, fissures, repetitions, bridges, schisms, colloquialisms, trains
of associations, and memory” that are integral to the music and rhythm of
contemplation “as it is being lived in a body” (see Bernstein’s essay,
“Thought’s Measure,” collected in Content’s
Dream). In these poems, there is an enigmatic, charm-like effect, an almost
cabalistic quality which is alien and even frightening to a society that still
believes that reading a poem is related to an explication de texte.
What Bernstein’s poetry demands of us is that we be intuitive as we are
analytic, that we use the right side of our craniums as much as the left.
Reading a poem, Bernstein’s writing implies, is an act that permits the reader
to bring the irrational into touch with reason, that allows the reader to hear
the unspoken self in the voice of its hegemonic sister. Meaning, accordingly,
is not a closed system; the author does not declare ideas cloaked in poetic
language, but rather, through his language explores a range of ideas and
experience.
The first few lines of “Sentences My Father Used,” for example,
seemingly abandon the reader to a landscape of uninterpretable fragments:
Casts across
otherwise unavailable fields.
Makes plain.
Ruffled. Is trying to
alleviate his
false: invalidate. Yet all is
“to live out”, by
shut belief, the
various, simply
succeeds which. Roofs that
retain
irksomeness. Points at
slopes. Buzz over
misues of reflection
(tendon). Gets
sweeps, entails complete
sympathy, mists.
I realize slowly,
which blurting
reminds, or how you, intricate
in its. .... (p. 21)
Who or what is “casting” in the first line of this passage? Of what
“fields” is the poet speaking, and why are they “otherwise unavailable?” Who or
what “Makes plain” in the second line, and what is being “made plain” or
“explained?” Who or what is “ruffled,” and does the word here mean “irritated,”
“undulated,” or “gathered along one edge?” Who is trying to “alleviate his
false,” and where is the object? What
is “false?” These and dozens of such questions understandably may discourage
the uninitiated reader. Yet he who would turn away would miss the point and
experience of reading this remarkable work. For, the meaning does not lie in
answers, but in the very questions which the poem generates. The
“indeterminacy” of this sort of poetry, as Marjorie Perloff argued in her Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), permits
us to receive its images as “living phenomena,” as words that exist in a fluid
and plastic relationship.
It doesn’t really matter that we cannot determine immediately who or
what “casts across” the “fields,” for the action occurs even without its
subject, an action that not only “reveals” or “manifests” itself (“makes
plain”), but also “begets” (another meaning of “makes”) a “plain,” a flat or
level field. Similarly, it isn’t important to know who or what is “ruffled,”
for the word alone serves to signify simultaneously a “vexation” or
“irritation” (perhaps because the fields are “otherwise unavailable?”), a
sudden “undulation” (of the flat “plain?”), and a “gathering [of people] along
one edge” (of the now available
“fields?”) The following phrase introduces a male subject through the pronoun,
and the reader cannot help but connect him with the previous actions and with
the title of the poem. But even this new information is framed in aposiopesis,
is cut off in mid-sentence, so that the reader must continue the process of
relating word to word, line to line in order to discern the object of the
father’s “false” (“faults?”). Like a detective, the reader must (re)construct
the details, must (re)build the poem to its meaning. As the author implies in
the first lines, one comes to “realize” the poem “slowly,” “through surprising
details that hide more than announce” (p. 21).
In saying this, Bernstein is not arguing for obscurantism, but for a
poetry in which the reader must use all of his or her faculties, in which he
must “listen” for meaning as well as look for it. The reader of this poem
cannot read merely at the level of the denotation or connotation of the words,
but must experience their rhythms, sounds, and patterns the way one might read
a score for orchestra. As any musician knows, a successful interpretation of a
symphony depends not only upon reading notes, but upon playing with the nuances
of phrase, rhythm, volume, pitch, and timbre; similarly, Bernstein requires
that the performer of his poem attend to all the nuances of language.
That is not to suggest that in a poem such as “Sentences My Father
Used,” style outweighs content. The attentive reader soon discovers that the
poems do have denotative/connotative meanings. As we (re)construct the poem, we
encounter the poet’s father, a man who has gone through life in “shut belief,”
with “a sense of purpose divorced from meaning.” Having put “everything....into
the business,” he is isolated from family, friends, and life itself. The
concerns of the poem–“Could life have been different?” “Is there hope for
change, a possibility to ‘recover what was in your pocket, the watch your /
parent gave you if you would only mind / the hour’” (p. 27)–are issues that
might have been raised by any Modernist poem.
But it is here that Bernstein’s reader is rewarded. In the hands of a
lesser poet, such questions would be answered with an image, symbol, or
statement of reconciliation (or perhaps nonreconciliation) introduced into the
poem by the author, or, at most, generated by a series of authorial devices
which inherently would exclude the reader from involvement. In Bernstein’s poem,
however, the answers derive directly from the language and the reader’s
commitment to it. For the sensitive performer of the poem, I suggest, the
“field” of the poem’s beginning is gradually perceived to be not merely a field
to the edge of which the poet’s father has come to alleviate his “false” or
“faults,” to be not only a “canvas of trumped up excuses” for the father’s
evasion of “the chain of connections,” but also to be a field through which the
reader must journey, a terrain of pain and missed opportunities through which
the reader must search with the poet (and through the poet, with his father) to
bring meaning back into touch with purpose. If the reader is successful in the
linguistic (re)construction, he eventually comes to view the “field” or “plain”
of the poem from a new perspective, by the end of the poem, things are, indeed,
“made plain,” as from the windows of a “plane” the reader glimpses the
“gleaming lights” which “waken the passengers to the possibilities of the
terrain” (p. 26), lights which enlighten us to new ways of seeing and signify
the potentiality of reuniting that individual vision with society. Depending as
they do on each of our interpretations, upon the consciousness which each
reader brings to the poem, these new ways of seeing, these “possibilities” are
“dreadfully private”; not everything can be spoken. But, if we have followed
the flux and reflux of the language, with the poet we share a breakthrough at
poem’s end, as the pain and isolation which the poem has recounted is
transformed into the “pane” of the “plane” window, which “gives way,
transparent, / to a possibility of rectitude” (p. 27).
It is this “possibility of rectitude,” the potential for righting or
correcting the individual’s and society’s refusals to participate in the act of
making meaning which Bernstein offers in nearly all the poems of this
collection. The first poem of the book, in fact, focuses on that very problem.
In “Matters of Policy,” the reader is asked to participate with the poet in an
exploration of the failures and successes of contemporary American culture, a
culture that has assimilated and now presumes the great technological
advancements of this century, a society that, through “electricity” and
“Speed,” has seemingly been given more time for amusement and, thus, has
achieved a greater worldliness than any society in history. As the poet
somewhat cynically observes:
....Electricity hyperventilates even the
most tired
veins. Books strewn the streets.
Bicycles
are stored beneath every other staircase.
The
Metropolitan Opera fills up every night as the
great
masses of the people thrill to Pavarotti,
Scotto,
Plishka, & Caballe. The halls of the
museums are
clogged with commerce. Metroliners
speed us
here & there with a graciousness
only
imagined in earlier times. Tempers are
not lost
since the bosses no longer order about
their
workers. Guacamole has replaced turkey as
the
national dish of most favor.
.....(“Matters of Policy,” p. 4)
In such a post-Mauberlian world, guacamole may have cast out turkey (as
“croissants” have replaced “absinthe” [p. 1], but, along with the poet, what we
most care about / is another sip of....Pepsi-Cola” (p. 1). For, the benefits of
change have engendered not only extreme eclecticisms, but an insatiable desire
for change itself, as if it, too, were a consumer product; “Even nostalgia has
been used up” (p. 4). Our perspective has shifted from despair for what we have
lost to impatience for what the future is about to bring. The “wasteland” has
metamorphosed into “a broad plain in a universe of / anterooms” (p. 1), into
one boundless waiting place.
But what is most disturbing, Bernstein hints, is not that we wait, but how we wait. There is a “spirit / of the place–a certain je ne sais quoi that / lurks, like the
miles of subway tunnels, electrical / conduits, & sewage ducts, far below
the surface” (p. 3); there is a passive acceptance of the future that is of far
greater import than the customs and values we have surrendered. As we (like our
reporters) “sit around talking over Pelican Punch tea about the underlying
issues” (p. 5), there is a danger that we will fail to note our own demise,
there is a possibility that we may become the “matters of policy” – the subjects of a course of action. Will we be
determined by or will we determine our future technology? The poet fears that,
although there’s now “plenty of time,” there are few individuals “with enough
integrity or intensity to / fill it with the measure we’ve / begun to crave”
(p. 7).
Indirectly, these are issues raised by John Ashbery’s early poem, “The
Instruction Manual,” a work which, at moments, Bernstein’s poem seems to parody
in its search for answers. Both poets seek to revitalize the technological
society in which they find themselves through the creative act of
thinking/making a new world out of language, and in pursuit of that, both
interweave the technical language of the word-day world with more lyrical
evocations of exotic landscapes. But Ashbery’s dream-tour of Guadalajara, “City
of rose-colored flowers,” reappears in Bernstein’s poem as a farcical journey
to a
....relaxing change
the sofa,
Alexandria, Trujillo. You looked
into my eyes
& I felt the deep exotic textures
of your
otherworldliness. A tangle of thorns bearing
trees,
extensive areas in Asia, Australia, South
America. Rye,
oats, &c. The tall grass
Prairie of the
pampas of Madagascar, Paraguay
& the
Green Chaco. ..... (“Matters of Policy,” pp. 5-6)
While Ashbery fantasizes paradisiacal scenes that reaffirm the
imagination, Bernstein hallucinates in a series of associations that
disintegrate into a mere listing (“Lobsters, oysters, / clams, crabs, tuna
fisheries, shrimps,” p. 6), and immediately relapse into the surrounding
technological structures:
(1)
The use
of easy
& fair surfaces along the general paths
followed by
the after flow. (2) At & near
the surface
of the wave profile. (3) Proof
of good
design. (4) Submerged
bulbs.
.... (p. 6)
Similarly, Both Ashbery and Bernstein look for a resolution between the
languages of the visionary and the technocrat in the vernacular of the tour
guide, who, if unable to express the full meaning of such voyages, at least can
summarize events. And for Ashbery, in fact, this is the best we can hope for, a
kind of poetic jargon, half-way between the dreamer and the society in which he
lives:
How
limited, but how complete withal, has been our
experience of Guadalajara!
.......................................................
And as a
last breeze freshens the top of the weathered
old tower, I turn my gaze
Back to
the instruction manual which has made me
dream of Guadalajara.
(“The Instruction Manual,” Some
Trees. p. 18)
For Bernstein, however, twenty five years later, there is an inherent
ridiculousness in such a compromise, and the poet and reader are mildly mocked
for believing in such simplistic solutions:
At last, the
cabin
cruise is over & the captain gently
chides farewell to us with a luminous laugh.
(“Matters of Policy,” p. 8)
While Ashbery’s vision derives from a basic juxtaposition of
antithetical positions, for an aesthetic of collage with roots in the Hegelian
dialectic, Bernstein’s poetics, with its traces of American Romanticism,
functions in terms of the simultaneity of object and experience. Any “answers”
that “Matters of Policy” proffers to the questions it has raised result from
the synchronism of reality–which I have expressed in my own poetry as the
“seams in seems”–rather than from accommodation. Everywhere in Bernstein’s
poetry there is an immediate, nonsymbolic simultaneousness of meaning. Language
for Bernstein is both creator and agent of ideation, and it is in the words as
objects, accordingly, that the potential solutions of our culture’s dilemmas
lie. Although, along with the poet we may fear that our society is more
interested in buying and selling art than in creating or experiencing it (“our
museums are clogged with commerce”), there is a possibility that the museums
can become places of social intercourse (another meaning of “commerce”). The
cause of the constantly changing colors of the sky of which the poet writes is
probably pollution, but the shifts of the hour and the season can also produce
dazzling changes of color. Although “hyperventilation” usually results in a
“black out,” an intake of extra oxygen can be temporarily invigorating, and, as
applied to medical technology such as breathing apparatuses, it can save lives.
It is our capacity to understand this simultaneity of things in and
through language that will determine whether, as individuals or a society, we
can “fill” our cravings. We must understand that the “measure” with which we
fulfill our desires is not simply a “capacity,” but also is both “a course of
action” (a “matter of policy”) and a “standard” by which our future can be
constructed. Like the poet, who, upon completing the voyage, takes out his
“harmonica” and “bang[s] out some scales,” we must create our own “measure,” we
must devise our own means of survival through the language, music, rhythm, and
beat of life. If we can accomplish such measures, like the bongo player in the
candy store with whom the poem closes, our meaning will penetrate the silent
inaction of the world around us.
In nearly all of the poems of Controlling
Interests. Bernstein reveals his desire for an fascination with the
concomitance of the individual and the world, of all language and experience.
But simultaneity, as I suggested earlier, functions in his work not merely in
terms of meaning, but in terms of nearly all the senses, in terms of the actual
texture and sounds of the words and sentences he uses. It is this texture, this
entangled density and richness of syntax, which is the meat of his poetry, but
which, in its very impenetrability, is lost in any standardized reading. Yet,
it is this maze of seemingly superfluous matter that is the most important
aspect of his work; for it is in his “forensic bouts with the subterranean,” as
he puts it in the last poem of the book, that he “hears the way the world
hears,” permitting him to allow readers with radically different experiences
and sensibilities to draw simultaneously upon the poem for their range of
private associations and understandings. It is this attempt to “portray a /
version of that timeless time, ...that our nostalgia clings to and our reason
discounts” (“Island Life,” p. 77), I argue, that is Bernstein’s most original
contribution. For this reason, I have described my couple of readings as
contextual, readings with the text,
as opposed to readings of the text.
No one reading of a Bernstein poem could ever be complete, and that is the
wonder of each. My readings, thus, must not be seen as “fixes” on these poems,
but should be understood as one reader’s attempts to bring his unspoken
feelings about Bernstein’s writing into touch with a more analytic critic. It
is this kind of synchronism, this act of making the mind whole, which Bernstein
ultimately asks of his readers and fellow poets in his poetry and criticism
both.
Philadelphia, 1982 /
Reprinted from Paper Air, III, no. 1
(1982).
