When I left Chicago in 2003 I received, from someone who had only been in town a few months and didn't know me very well, the gift of Charles Bernstein's latest book. I'm not sure if he'd noticed my attitude as he handed over the gift, but he had a muted, defiant gleam in his eye as I first perused it, as if he expected me to take offense at something so patently inoffensive as a new book of avant-garde poetry. "You should really give this guy a shot," my benefactor said. "He's a very important poet." About Charles Bernstein. Whose poetry any fool in the business would have long ago read and formed an opinion about.
I have been attempting to dodge this level of pedantry my entire life. When it catches up with me, often a Charles Bernstein book is involved.
It's not uncommon for fans of Charles Bernstein to think of their hero as an obscure, misunderstood figure, though he is among the most widely published figures in contemporary poetry. His just-published collection, All The Whiskey In Heaven: Selected Poems, shares catalog space on FSG with John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney. Bernstein to this day poses problems other poets don't, and for that reason alone his ubiquity is justified. Yet even in the early nineties, Bernstein was not hard to dig up in the bookstores and libraries of Kalamazoo, MI, and he became something of a hero of mine at a time when the Ellen Bryan Voights and William Maxwells of this world were the only things properly considered poetry. Bernstein's publication L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E represented the still living legacy of mimeograph magazine movement that was so vibrant in the 60's and 70's, just before I was born, and while I understood the poetry Bernstein championed, the rhetoric left me cold (even if that rhetoric stuck it to the really dull poets, and was refreshingly conversant in my heroes Apollinaire, Jarry and Mayakovsy). To my adolescent, confrontational way of thinking, the enemy of my enemy was my friend, and so I jumped at my first chance to see Bernstein speak live with the great Marjorie Perloff (whose book The Futurist Moment introduced me to Blaise Cendrars, a fact for which I am grateful). This was in the mid-nineties, at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. The subject was Poetry and Contemporary Art, my two great interests at the time.
It was an entirely deflating experience. They did not touch on the issue of art and poetry at all. They stated the self-evident fact of Frank O'Hara's genius. They repeated that fact. Bernstein struggled to show an X-Ray of a human chest on an overhead projector and called it "a sonogram of the heart," which was cute. They both said "I entirely agree with you" to each other over a dozen times, which was not cute. (As in: "Of, course, poetry is really just a type of critical theory." "I entirely agree with you." And so on.) At one point I held up my hand and asked a question--I truly cannot remember what it was, something borne of a genuine if mixed-up curiosity about whether a thousand Jon Andersons writing at once could be thought of a "aleatory writing"-- which question, I was made to know by Bernstein, was irrelevant. "Totally irrelevant," seconded some fat, crumb-strewn creep in back of me. (Probably so, yes, but it seemed to me then, as now, that there was a very fine distinction between the stupidity of what I asked and what was being discussed on the stage).
Both Bernstein and Perloff looked grim throughout the event, as if they expected to be challenged. This in spite of the fact that the first six rows of the MCA auditorium were full of students slowly nodding their heads as if they were at a slow-jam rock concert. Afterward, I was overcome by a feeling that has not entirely left me for 15 years, a feeling that someone had entered my house and replaced everything I loved there with a simulacrum. Though I knew very much about them, though they had very nearly saved my life, though I loved them, poets like Mayakovsky, Jarry and Apollinaire were no longer mine: they were simply part of the airless rhetoric of Berstein, Perloff, and anyone else they let through the gate. I doubted I'd even be allowed to nod my head in the front row. To date, I have not been allowed that privilege.
I'll lay it out like this. It is my belief that inasmuch as political ideology touches ordinary life--sport, poetry, movies, family--it is an evil. After all that's been written about the subject of ideology, that sounds very simple, I admit. It risks sounding like everything I dislike about the acorny and poetic. But my sense is of the opposite: I don't deny that capitalist ideology does pervade every aspect of our lives, especially the acorns. Furthermore, it's my understanding that so-called avant-garde art is simply a return to the novelty of the art-making experience itself, and the sick concept of a "normalizing" art is the attempt by ideologues to turn what makes life worthwhile into a profession. In a sense, art and sport are the living utopia ideologues won't let us have under any circumstances, preferring instead that ordinary people like me work so they won't have to. This is not an intellectual matter. I exempt from the category of murder anything that happens to a person who attempts to keep me from my inalienable right to art and sport.
Bernstein is among the first poets of the current generation--the first of a great many--to say that ideology can only be fought with more ideology. It was said before by folks like Max Eastman, of course, but Bernstein is no social realist like that. His poetry fairly squirms with ideology, but only in the sense that all language does, to his mind. He adds fire to fire, subsuming the assumptions of language within--I hesitate to say it--a dialectic. I'm naturally led to believe that Bernstein thinks of his ideology as deriving from the writing of Marx, though I do not believe in any Marxism sheltered by that most delicious and insidious expression of consumer ideology, the contemporary American university. Bernstein belongs to a professionalized interpretation of modernist tradition proud to have expelled the ideologically suspect notion of imagination from poetry--in this, he owes so much more to T.S. Eliot than he acknowledges in his privileging of the "Pound/Williams tradition."* Instead, he favors something he calls play. Here is an excerpt from "Gertrude and Ludwig's Bogus Adventure," taken from the book that best explains what it Bernstein likes most to do, My Way:
As Billy goes higher all of the balloons
Get marooned on the other side of the
Lunar landscape. The module's broke--
It seems like for an eternity, but who's
Counting--and Sally's joined the Moonies
So we don't see much of her anyhow.
This is an example of the "play" Bernstein's talking about. But there are many places in this world where play moves with more suppleness than this. For instance, the word "Lunar" and the adjectival derivation of the Reverend Sun Young Moon's name have no real connection (unless you count the vaguely racist connection one Junior High student would think of to bully another on the basis of his name), and seems to derive in any case from what we'll call the mouthfeel of the word "marooned," as if this essentially prose object were in search of the merest alliteration to make it a poem. What the imagination does for us--place us on the moon, make us name and touch the things there--does not happen here. What happens here derives perhaps from something Derridian, and sets words in motion to relate to one another. In spite of rumors to the contrary, the poem in no way collaborates with its reader. It is not like a comedy routine or a chess match. It maintains the burden of all poetry: it is fixed either to the page or to memory. No matter how much it plays, it requires the lie of imagination to make the play in the diagesis live. What the Marx Brothers did was gambol. What Margaret Dumont did was stand there and purse her lips. Even in inanimate celluloid that collaboration is clear. I take the idea of play seriously enough to question Bernstein for not making the distinction between Groucho Marx, Margaret DuMont, and a corpse, which is what words are, considered as technological objects.
To drive it home further: only imagination redeems our words. Until ideology can back off from its triumphal, centuries-old war against the imagination, I will do everything in my power to ensure that the words it uses arrive DOA, regardless of what side it thinks it's playing on.
But I already know some associates who will disown me for all of this, and, in fact, some of them will be honoring Bernstein at the Zinc bar tomorrow, and I had here intended to break bread with Bernstein (if a person of my stature can be said to properly break bread with a poet of Bernstein's stature). Perhaps my early humiliation has flavored my ability to take Bernstein on his terms. I have been rereading his poetry in this new collection, and while I don't find myself exactly connecting to it, now all the ineffectual rage has dissipated. Bernstein is no longer in my house, replacing my stuff--I can enjoy Apollinaire on my terms again. Furthermore, I understand that he is selfless in the defense of very good poetry, and evidence of that can be found in myriad places. Even my girlfriend says that "all the generosity and warm feeling seems to surround him when he's in the room." Jeepers. More importantly, it's necessary to remember how bad poetry was, back in the eighties and early nineties, when there were nothing but Prairie Schooners and Gettysburg Reviews dotting the vast plain of American Poetry, and slow-moving ruminatives named Ellen Bryan Voight and William Maxwell munched contentedly on the brownish, high-fiber vegetation there.
Charles Bernstein, to me, is still essential reading. In order to understand what has happened to poetry in the last ten years, why the prosey dullards have receded and been replaced by a lot of scarcely more poetic "strategies"--the bulk of humorless and equally ideological word-mush that gently asserts itself these days as experimental poetry--one must read Charles Bernstein, for his sharpness, and because he opened the field for exception.
*I won't here elaborate the technocratic animosity some modernists feel for romantics. Here's the boilerplate.
