Skip to main content

Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic

His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others.

Bernstein on absorption:
“By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing
completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...:
belief, conviction, silence.
Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom,
exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction,
digression, interruptive, transgressive,
undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured,
fragmented...: skepticism
doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29.

Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible

Through the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Centre he is advocate of electronic poetics

Through his theoretical work he has advocated voice-based, performative work

In the variety of his collections he explores all areas of page-based work

Through his involvement with PennSounds he is also an archivist of performed verse for the future

"Thank you for saying thank you" (Girly Man)

Postmodernism has been typified by an incredulity towards metanarratives which, in Language poetry means the cultural norms of language, art and poetry

In “Thank You...” Bernstein lists these presuppositions about what a poet should do

At the same time the poem is a commentary on the poem which is (permanently) absent from the collection

Through his ironic celebration of free-verse, expressive poetics he of course gives us a primer in all that is limiting about such mainstream poetics and, by negation, what a postmodern experimentalism should be concerned with:

Accessibility through linguistic transparency vs obscurity, difficulty, alienation techniques

Anti-intellectualism in favour of emotional expression

Stability of the subject who speaks (lyrical ego) with the intention to communicate authentically undermined by radical questioning of subjectivity to be found across post-structural and psychoanalytical thought

Shared values of humanism, subsequently questioned and negated say in the debates between Lyotard and Derrida on the one hand, Habermas and Rorty on the other

The importance of craft (as if poetry were indeed a badly drawn bed cf Plato's Republic Bk X)

Direct communication with an implied readership that will forgive racism in great art (no comment needed)

It says what it is, it is real. The desire for reality at the expense of the real being, in some measure, the definition of the age of the modern reformation as Badiou calls it which we live through today. Denial of the real, in forms that pathetically mime it. Maybe Plato was right, certainly most poets ought to be expelled from the city.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hey


Just saying hello while I read through the posts


hopefully this is just what im looking for, looks like i have a lot to read.

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977) First Published (New York: Viking, 1975) Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Introduction: · Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive. “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2 · Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet reli