A Poetics of Social Acts

I am filled with regret and overcome with the errors of my ways, for I have preferred the crooked path over the straight, the bent over the upright, the hunched over the erect. I recant and cant my recantation. I altogether abandon the fetishizing of the sounds and forms and appearances and rhetoric of a poem. The innermost meaning of poems reveals itself when sound, form, appearance, rhetoric, and oratory fall away.

—Charles Bernstein

Time... / Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives.

—W. H. Auden

By his own account, Charles Bernstein has fought the good fight for language-centered poetry and criticism against "Official Verse Culture," although it is questionable at this point in time, when Rae Armantrout has won a Pulitzer, whether Language Poetry remains outside acceptable poetry culture. In this collection of his published essays, talks, and book reviews, a thirty-year-long apologia is sent forth to present arguments to writers, readers, academics, and critics on his views on aesthetics and aestheticism. The book is launched by a short introductory parody of the self-help genre and concluded with a parody, rich in wit and feeling, styled in the manner of famous recants as Chaucer's and Galileo's. The individual pieces are of-a-piece with the parodic title subject, Attack of the Difficult Poems. Recalling parody of the war-driven, 1940s and 1950s B-film genre, the views are lucidly presented, closely argued, lucid, and for the most part sensible—oddly, the opposite of what Bernstein values in poems.

Not a fan of his poetry, I was thoroughly engaged by his discussions and found myself in agreement with a good deal of what he had to say. Bernstein's aesthetic values center on an aestheticism of direct contact, sound, and "linguistic sensation" established in social contexts—shifting, fluid, changeable with the times and different readers. Poems are not to be left to themselves. Poems are to be experienced in the body. The concept of an ideal individual self presented and assumed as a voice in a poem is anathema to the value of poems' uses. Contrast and conflict do not have to resolve in interpretable meanings. The search for definitive meaning is counter to the nature of poems. Readers, as in any responsible relationship, are in charge of reading poems, poems are not in charge of readers: "Don't let the difficult poem intimidate you! Often the difficult poem will provoke you, but this may be its way of getting your attention. Sometimes, if you give your full attention to the poem, the provocative behavior will stop." And: "Learning to cope with a difficult reading of a poem will often be more fulfilling than sweeping difficulties under the carpet, only to have the accumulated dust plume up in your face when you finally get around to cleaning the floor." Thus, a sampling of wit that is one of the great pleasures of criticism, almost lost in the reign of academia over poetry, that Bernstein, himself an academic for the past two decades, returns to us.

Leading off the first of three major sections is a lengthy essay on teaching: "A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices" argues for poetry as practice and performance in place of the traditional ("Professional") critique. Instead of explicating poems, as artifacts, poems return to their status as art: students read, listen, respond, and write about how the poem proceeds from beginning to end as a performance of language. Content and meaning are not essential outside of language used with craft. This was my favorite chapter, as I already agreed with this position, and teach students to attend to the sound and feel of flowing language. For some poets, such as Emily Dickinson, this is the only approach that unleashes the power and greatness of her art. If something can be said, there is no reason to write poetry. The aesthetic aspects are what make it art, and that purpose must be...