Poetics itself, in Bernstein's view, is the site of a confluence of possibilities. It is exploratory and declines reductive conclusions; it is "an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or problematicize any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive.
Furthering his efforts to give experimental poetry a platform, Bernstein edited two works in He chose and edited recordings for the compact disk Live At the Ear, which made available selections from the reading series conducted from to at Ear Inn, a restaurant-bar in lower Manhattan.
Bernstein's thirteen-poem collection Dark City shows his continuing mastery of multiple approaches to experimental poetry. According to Hank Lazer, "The Lives of the Toll Takers," the first poem in Dark City, "establishes a consideration of the state of poetry today as one A diverse collection, Dark City , as Lazer explains, is "built on a principle of difference--i.
Bernstein's work has commanded the attention of leading national scholars and been widely read. Bernstein has been called a "difficult" poet, but such a label surely in part indicates his integrity as an artist. The body of Bernstein's writing is evidence of his tireless investigation not only of but also inside language.
It is a record that cannot be collected in a single volume because the disparate nature of each investigation must, of necessity, modify the form it undertakes. As Bernstein remarks in his essay "Optimism and Critical Excess Process ," "We don't know what Art is or does but we are forever finding out.
Much of the difficulty of Bernstein's work is part and parcel of his aim as a writer. In Radical Artifice Perloff suggests that a text is called difficult because it does not meet the expectations of readers: "It is not because meaning won't reveal itself to a receptive reader, but because the culture has preconceptions of how images should be articulated and connected. The stumbling block, that is to say, is not so much obscurity as convention. Discussing the kinds of texts that have been called difficult in his essay "In the Middle" from A Poetics, Bernstein suggests that one must first differentiate between types of textual fragmentation: "To do this, one has to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, a fragmentation that attempts to valorize the concept of a free-floating signifier unbounded to social significance Ultimately, such a text enters a new realm of truth because "its autonomy is not of the self or logic but of nature, the world.
Its truth is not assumed but made. Bernstein's work--beyond the issue of its so-called difficulty--positions the text,its reader, and its meanings into a constellation of activities that open new possibilities made real in writing.
You are currently not logged in. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. You are here: Home » Charles Bernstein Profile. Their encompassing or total character intercourse with the outside and to departure such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, moors conflicts, discreditings, failures of assimilation. If cultural change the outside. Thus, if the inmates stay victory. They create and sustain a particular kind of tension dangers to it, with the welfare jails, penitentiaries, P.
First, the field of the poem, the way the lines look on the page, is constantly shifting, constantly modified. Not only does this repeatedly modified field suggest chaos and a clash of multiple voices and tones, it marks a direct refusal to accept the concept of poetic "order. Second, there is no fixed narrative element to this poem.
The first line of the poem seems to be the middle of a sentence, and the poem is built from a series of objects and their sounds, which are placed "in line. Last, the poem is about institutions. The title is a reference to one type of institution; poetry itself is another type. The reader can feel the artificial pressure and stark reality of the institution throughout this poem.
And yet this is not a movement in the traditional art sense, since the value of giving an aesthetic line such profile seems counterproductive to the inherent value of the work. Ig si heh hahpae uvd r fahbeh at si gidrid. ImpOg qwbk tuUg. In this work, it is clear that Bernstein is exploring the permeability of language.
What does one see when one can not be lulled into reverie by what the words say? What is the emotional result when capitals and other typographic markers are radically recast? What does the reader get from such typography--is it sound, a visual work, an assault on conservative poetic value? A final and very important point is the question that such texts raise about where a poetic work comes from.
Maybe the above characters are intentional. Maybe they occur as a result of errors by the typist. How could one decide? If one of the issues that experimental writing explores is to remove the authorial "I," then this poem is an excursion to a terrain that is purely experimental. If one of the issues is where a poem comes from, this poem not only begs the question but laughs at one for asking since it is a transcription of the correction tape from a self-correcting typewriter.
As such it is a primarily poetic work constructed from the literal typographic detritus of other works, both literary and nonliterary. The emphasis on typographical elements in these poems creates texts where, as Shoptaw writes, "the characters themselves sometimes make the music.
The regularity of the white space or silence is occasionally blurred or broken as certain lines malfunction: unched th Shoptaw notes that disfrutes in Spanish means "enjoyment. Even as "projected," it breaks down until "haecceity" is invoked. The title word stigma carries the senses of both a mark and a stain.
A backstage view is interwoven with a tragic story. A detective is captured by a mobster who plans to hook him on heroin and then deny him a fix until he reveals the whereabouts of the jealous hood's former girlfriend.
A retarded young man witnesses a murder but is not articulate enough to tell his story to the police. The Ideal swoops, and reascends. Content's Dream, for example, is subheaded 'Essays ' but the collection itself calls into question the distinction between poetry and prose.
It is not easy to say. Similarly, his books of 'poetry' all print texts which do not, for various different reasons, 'look like' poetry at all. Add to this the ideologically motivated selection of the vast majority of poets teaching in university writing and literature programs Bernstein's objection is to "biased, narrowly focussed and frequently shrill and contentious accounts of American poetry, [which claim,] like all disinformation propaganda, to be giving historical or nonpartisan views.
I felt the abridgement of imperatives, the wave of detours, the sabre- rattling of inversion. All lit up and no place to go. Blinded by avenue and filled with adjacency. Arch or arched at. So there becomes bottles, hushed conductors, illustrated proclivities for puffed- up benchmarks. Morose or comotose. The impermeability of texts such as "Shade" and the accidentalism of "Lift Off" collide here. The qualities of typographic compression and density are present despite the readability of the text.
Further, the accidental qualities of the voices and phrases seem completely natural and effortless though the poem unwaveringly drives home its powerful presence, establishing an argument and an enactment of Bernstein's poetics. You cannot but enjoy the way the neon signs and streetlights are mirrored in the myriad puddles created by the cracked sidewalks; but as you leap over them you land down hard on the concrete, sometimes with water on your pant legs.
Or let me try another metaphor: I once asked my friend photographer Peter Vilms about the differences between Finnish and Estonian dialects; his parents were Estonian and he was familiar with both languages. The tune is the same, but the sounds are always somehow different. Sometimes this difference is simply ironic. In short, we quickly perceive, that he is describing a poem that this is not.
The lines of this work seem to be lying. In his book, however, these lines are not expressed as I have represented them above, in sentences, but are broken in unexpected places that force the reader to carry over parts of words, while moving the eye down and across the page. Bernstein thus transforms an absolutely accessible language into a visual puzzle that risks turning off readers who prefer not to move their eyes all over the page to make meaning. These poems encourage us to rethink words, as we are forced to parse them out line by line by line.
All that horizontality. Catachresis has two meanings: the use of the wrong word for the context, and the use of a forced or especially paradoxical figure of speech. Both appear in the poem, as he spins normal statements into reversals and paradoxes:. The ordinary is never more than an extension of the extraordinary.
The possible. Eliot, W. Auden, and Robert Duncan. As if we were hearing a contrapuntal canon: Bernstein ties into the parts sung by predecessors and contemporaries. Introspection, or the inspection of consciousness, is carried out with sober rationalism. It is the rational conclusion drawn by the mind of cool reason that will come to understand the preservation of the past complete with memories. I think of Emma climbing the icy rocks of our imagined world and taking a fatal misstep, one that in the past she could have easily managed, then tumbling, tumbling; in my mind she is yet still in free fall, but I know all too well she hit the ground hard.
The hardest thing is not to look back, the endless if onlys, the uninvited what could have beens. I live not with foreknowledge but consequences; wishing I had foreknowledge, suffering the consequences of not. Not words received for comfort. All the while, locked into the dark Dickinsonian chambers of pain, he battles the infinite internal darkness.
Each day I know less than the day before. But knowing can only stem from not knowing, or the acceptance of not knowing. Much like his 19th century predecessor, Bernstein also insists that the only way to dispel metaphysical darkness is by coveting a familiarity with darkness: the griever must learn to feel comfortable in darkness, and ultimately accept the impossibility clear sight.
The groper will step on the noncognitive path that takes not knowing for granted, a not knowing that can only be captured in a particular language suited for prehension: language of linguistic darkness, dense with dysraphysms and imploded sentences, and broken English in general. Although he did not ask for the knowledge gained from such spiritual darknesses, he adapts to the dark, and uses his language—pregnant with dysraphisms, imploded sentences, revised aphorisms, and other linguistic forms of prehensive experience—to reach out into the unknown, the great unknown of the physical and metaphysical alike.
Bernstein, Charles. Artifice of Absorprion. Buffalo, N. All the Whiskey in Heaven. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Attack of the Difficult Poems. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, Creeley, Robert.
Olson, Charles. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, Perloff, Marjorie. Craig Dworkin. New York: Roof Books, Unoriginal Genius — Poetry by Other Means. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. David Ray Griffin and Donald W.
London: The Free Press, Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan Company, Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations.
M Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge, View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Save to My Colloquies.
That is, in prose you start with the world and find the words to match; in poetry you start with the words and find the world in them. Brushing up fate pixel by pixel, burnighing dusk: the sum of entropy and elevation. Poets deserve compensation for such sevices. All the Whiskey Moreover, all these radical departures from the norms of language contribute to what he calls imploded sentences, sentences that are fragmentary, broken, associative, acrobatic, cumulative, incomplete, and without closure, as well as rough, knotty, lumpy, and gnarled.
Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference: it brings you to your senses. All the Whiskey 84 And as language does not obey preconceived rules, so does the poem not obey preexisting form. Love is like love, a baby like a baby, meaning like memory, light like light. A cloud is a cloud and a story like a story, song is a song, fury like fury.
All the Whiskey Not following any abstract metrical scheme, the Bernstein poem is not regular metrically either. I want no paradise only to be drenched in the downpour of words, fecund with tropicality. The privacy of a great pain enthrones itself on my borders and commands me to stay at attention.
Be on guard lest the hopeless magic of unconscious dilemmas grab hold of you in the foggiest avenue of regret. Works Cited Bernstein, Charles. Dark City. Join the Colloquy.
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