Charles Bernstein

Optimism and Critical Excess (Process)

This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended. As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry. As a way to extend ideas about closure-the rejection of closureinto the discussion of essays and critical writing. To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to say: completed saying. So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or make problematic any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive.

The Difficult Poem

All of us from time to time encounter a difficult poem. Sometimes it is the poem of a friend or a family member, and sometimes it is a poem we have written ourselves. The difficult poem has created distress for both poets and readers for many years. Experts who study difficult poems often trace the modern prevalence of this problem to the early years of the last century, when a great deal of social dislocation precipitated the outbreak of 1912, one of the best-known epidemics of difficult poetry.

Living Tissue/Dead Ideas

Think of dead ideas as deposited in language and writing, as the compost heap in which present language and writing grows. Suppose dead ideas as comprising an historical unconscious lived out as perception, as smell and taste, as speech. Imagine consciousness resounding with an inexhaustible repository of ideas, as a cave to be mined. And consider poetry as that mining, so the incorporation of dead ideas (call them prior texts) into a work is not simply collage or a familiar, almost comforting, defamiliarization technique, but the spiritual domain of poetry, its subject (subjectness) percolating through. Ideas not dead then, though their origin is past. Or ideas dead only in the way a culture may die, be lost, its people vanish without records or monuments or memories. Ideas, then, not so much dead as submerged, melted, transubstantiated, absorbed; everywhere informing but no where fully explicable. Yet such ideas are neither solace, as a past to which we can turn, nor tools to represent the present. In this sense, dead ideas are not the stars but the heaven in which the stars gleam, not tools but tolls.

The Body of the Poem

American poetry has been plagued from the start by an irreconcilable conflict between aesthetic illiberalism and aesthetic justice. Aesthetic justice is the resistance to morality in pursuit of the aesthetic, where the aesthetic is understood as a temporary, flickering zone of counterfactuals that allow for possibility, reflection, intensified sensation, and speculation—what I call the pataquerical. Aesthetic justice occurs when intuitive preferences outfox rationalized principles. Judging as “elitist” poetry that challenges the status quo of anhedonic rationalization and expressive normalization is a right-wing stink bomb in Leftish clothing. Using contagious accessibility as a test of poetry delegitimizes nonconforming aesthetic exploration. The atavistic message, to the washed and unwashed alike, is that nonconforming thought or experience is unavailable to them and a threat to their nativist identities. The repression of the aesthetic by moral expressionism is a nullification of the possibilities of identity, privileging the expressive or autobiographical in name only, while actively negating unregulated identifications, desires, fears, and confusions. Suchmoral regulation is an affront to the “calling” of poetry in and as miscegenation in favor of purity and the cant of authenticity and “spirituality.” The “ancient enmity” of which I speak here, echoing Bei Dao’s echoing Rainer Maria Rilke, is not between great poetry and an uneventful life but

Wreading, Writing, Wresponding

Laptops are open and everyone’s online and chattering away at the same time. I pass around a yellow pad and it circulates from one person to the next, in zigzag order, for the length of the seminar. The participants are writing an ongoing serial collaboration and will continue to work on this, during the class, for the full fourteen weeks we meet. Each week one student takes the pages home and posts a verbatim transcription and an edited version. From my laptop I project, on the large LCD display screen, the index of the class listserv, to which everyone has posted their work for the week.

American Poetry After 1975: Editor's Note

I have had the pleasure of editing two previous special issues of boundary 2—“43 Poets (1984)” (vol. 14, no. 1/2 [Autumn 1985/Winter 1986]), and “99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium” (vol. 26, no. 1 [Spring 1999])—as well as a cluster, “Swedish Poetry and Poetics: A Gathering” (vol. 29, no. 1 [Spring 2002]). A “dossier” on my work (poems and interviews) was published in the fall issue of 1996 (vol. 23, no. 3). For this special issue on American poetry after 1975, I have gathered work from a set of literary scholars who are redefining the field, focusing mostly on those who have published their first book in the last decade. I have also included a few older hands along with a few poems. My focus here is on new directions, an old-time cliche but I trust justified by the works presented. While many of the essays are traditional in form, I encouraged all the participants to move beyond the constraints of professional writing if and as possible or necessary. For this reason, I have asked that the original style of each essay be left as is and that the documentation formats not be standardized. But then I have always had a weakness for eccentricity. In this issue, Jennifer Scappettone writes on ambience and “junk

Recantorium (a Bachelor Machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

I Charles, son of the late Joseph Herman, later known as Herman Joseph, and Shirley K., later known as Sherry, New Yorker, aged fifty-eight years, arraigned personally before this Esteemed Body, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Readers, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity throughout the entire Poetry Commonwealth, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Books of the Accessible Poets, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by your help will in the future believe, all that is held, preached, taught, and expressed by the Books of Accessible Poets. I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that National Poetry Month is not good for poetry and for poets. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy. And I now freely and openly attest to the virtues of National Poetry Month in throwing a national spotlight on poetry, so crucial to keeping verse alive in the twenty-first century. I was wrong, I apologize and recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that only elitist and obscure poetry should be praised. I abjure, curse, detest, and renounce the aforesaid error and aversion. And I now freely and openly attest that the best way to get general readers to start to read poetry is to present them with broadly appealing work, with strong emotional content and a clear narrative line. I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that, to raise the profile of poetry, events involving celebrities reading poems, such as the one each year that is the centerpiece of National Poetry

Its 8:23 in New York

After the long and strange odyssey back from LaGuardia airport this morning, I went to a jammed local Upper West Side coffee shop. A family was eating, deciding, loudly, whether to get the chicken or tuna salad; the mother expressed great disappointment that there was no skim milk. The coffee shop was packed and the mother said, ‘‘Well, it’s OK, at least we’re not in a rush right now and after all the restaurant probably has more people now than they are used to handling.’’

A Conversation with Geoffrey O'Brien

CB: The first two volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century are extraordinary collections of work by poets born between 1838 (Henry Adams) and 1913 (May Swenson). I say extraordinary not just because I like the selection in this anthology—I do—but as a reaction to the remarkable range of poets presented. You have included poets who are in most other anthologies but also a striking number who are almost never seen in contemporary anthologies of American poetry. You include the popular and the radically innovative, the light and the heavy, poets well regarded in their time but less so in ours, and poets virtually unknown in their own time whose reputation seems to be on the upswing in our own. And there is an exemplary sampling of popular song lyrics, from Cole Porter to Robert

Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation

magine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade presses and all the university presses in the United States stopped publishing or reviewing poetry. New poetry in the United States would hardly feel the blow. But not because contemporary poetry is marginal to the culture. Quite the contrary, it is these publishing institutions that have made themselves marginal to our cultural life in poetry. As it is, the poetry publishing and reviewing practices of these major media institutions do a disservice to new poetry by their sins of commission as much as omission—that is, pretending to cover what they actually cover up, as if you could bury poetry alive. In consistently acknowledging only the blandest of contemporary verse practices, these institutions provide the perfect alibi for their evasion of poetry; for if what is published and reviewed by these institutions is the best poetry has to offer, then, indeed, there would be little reason to attend to poetry, except for those looking fot a last remnant of a genteel society verse, where, for example, the editor of The New York Times Book Review can swoon over watered-down Dante on her way to late-night