Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

 

If story’s other is narrative, what is lyric’s other? Lyric is so generic that it’s difficult to find a term to contrast with it, unless one moves to another genre, typically epic. Even so, the hegemony of a single-voice, “scenic” lyric, the Vampiric heart of Romantic Ideology, has been contested since Blake, Byron, Swinburne, Poe, Dickinson, and the slave songs, in the nineteenth century, and Stein, Loy, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Tolson, and Riding in the early twentieth. The conventional lyric’s American other in the 1930s was the “objectivist” poem, in the 1950s “Projective Verse” and the “serial poem.” In the 1960s, Antin and Jerome Rothenberg suggested “deep image” and Amiri Baraka and company, “Black Arts.” There was a time in the early 1980s that poets advocated against the scenic lyric with terms such as “analytic lyric” or “transcended lyric.” Ron Silliman’s “new sentence” and David Antin’s “talk poems,” as with “language-centered,” specifically presented themselves against the vanilla lyric.
            Not voice, voices; not craft, process; not absorption, artifice; not virtue, irreverence; not figuration, abstraction; not the standard, dialect; not regional, cosmopolitan; not normal, the strange; not emotion, sensation; not expressive, conceptual; not story, narrative; not idealism, materialism.
            For binary opposition to intensify their aesthetic engagement, and not become self-parody, it helps if they fall apart, so that you question the difference, confuse one with the other, or understand the distinction as situational, as six is up from five but down from infinity, diction so low its high, solipsism so radical it dissolves into pure realism. (“The Unreliable Lyric”)

The latest from American poet and critic Charles Bernstein is the hefty collection The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024), an assemblage of talks, essays, lectures, interviews, musings, reviews and speeches presented in a triptych of sections—“Pixellation,” “Kinds” and “Doubletalk”—offered with no introduction, but a preface by his friend, the late New York writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), “Twenty-Five Sentences Containing the Words ‘Charles Bernstein’,” originally offered by Auster as an introduction to a reading Bernstein was doing at Princeton University on March 14, 1990. As Auster spoke, nearly thirty-five years ago this month:

Charles Bernstein is a poet. Charles Bernstein is a critic. Charles Bernstein is a man who talks. And whether he is writing or talking, Charles Bernstein is a trouble-maker. Being fond of trouble-makers myself, I am particular fond of the trouble-maker designated by the words Charles Bernstein.
            Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. in the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country. Whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to what he is saying.

The introduction Auster make then still holds, certainly, although I would have been interested in some kind of framing as to why these particular pieces arranged in this particular way for this particular collection. Trouble-maker, trickster, indeed, that wiley Bernstein, providing just enough for a reader to supply the rest, I suppose. The back cover, at least, offers this paragraph, the first of two, as copy: “For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more.” The pieces collected here are playful, thoughtful and dense, running a length and breadth of American poetry and poetics, including a handful of clusters of shorter critical responses on poets such as Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, David Bromige [see my review of the collected Bromige here], Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Madeline Gins, Rae Armantrout [see my review of her latest here], Rosmarie Waldrop [see my review of her latest here], Johanna Drucker, Tonya Foster [see my review of Foster's debut here] and Pierre Joris, among others, running through the contemporary and historical of American poetics. “It’s funny to have to be brief about Robert Duncan,” the opening section of one of these essays begins, “since there is nothing brief about his work or my responses to it.”

Charles Bernstein’s poetic allows him to respond critically through prose and poetry both, accumulating points across a series of seamless grids. If Vancouver’s George Bowering has been our plainspeaking Canadian troublemaker and critical thinker through lyric and experimental poetry across the decades, responding to the works of those around him since the 1960s, Bernstein is the other side of that same play, but with a far denser approach through academic language. As Bernstein writes on New York poet Tonya Foster: “My comments on Foster are abstract and technical. But Foster’s work doesn’t feel abstruse or conceptual (two qualities I often like in poems). Foster’s work is constructed as a system or environment that explores the emergence and disappearance of identity and place. It’s not a poetry of, or about, fixed points of reference that are described. The sites emerge and submerge in the flickering probes of Foster’s accumulation of voices, her collection of verbal markers and shifting signs.” As well, I particularly enjoyed the opening to his first response in “Groucho and Me,” an interview conducted by Robert Wood, in which Bernstein offers:

I only know what I think when I am in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialog. I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations. It takes two to tangle, three to rumble, four to do the Brooklyn trot. I want my writing to dance to the changing beats of the house band.

There is an incredible amount of writing, thought, critical detail and response in this collection, assembling notes, longer essays, talks and conversations across some four hundred pages, the density of which cannot be overstated. If you want some of that serious play that the late Toronto poet bpNichol mentioned, this might be what he meant.