An introduction to Charles Bernstein's reading from 'Recalculating'

'Strike because you are abandoned.'

Al Filreis

[The following is the text of an introduction I gave before a reading by Charles Bernstein from his book Recalculating on April 16, 2013, at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia.]

In Recalculating (Chicago, 2013), Charles Bernstein follows every imperative invoked from the late Emma Bee Bernstein in its epigraph, among them “Pump up the radio,” “Retrace your route in reflection,” and — profoundly — “Race your future to the finish line.” For Bernstein, via Fernando Pessoa, poets are fakers whose faking is so real they even fake the pain they truly feel. Reversing effectiveness with an eye on redemption, he seeks to kill two stones with one bird. Recalculating Wallace Stevens’s “Loneliness in Jersey City,” he offers us “Loneliness in Linden,” where — as is not the case in Stevens — “Jews do Jewish things” with failed language: cobbling together the six million tunes of the never-heard-of-in-modernism dead.

In “Fold,” the poet makes a prose-poem list of sentences in which transitive verbs are identical to direct objects, facing faces, voiding voids, gulping gulps, fearing fear and hating hate. Re-addressing friends and poetic colleagues, he offers a poem in honor of Bob Perelman in which Bob is presented only by way of possessives: what he has, what he writes, not what he is. His numinous nominalism. His casual attire surrealism. His direct address to entropic homeopathic Jewishness. In “I Will Not Write Imitative Poetry,” Bernstein — teacherly — sends himself scolded to the blackboard, forcing himself to write sixteen times that he will not write imitative poetry, he really won’t, he won’t, he won’t, he promises he won’t. It’s a wash-your-mouth-out-with-soapistry, an ars poetica as bold as the poetic-pedagogical absolutism it opposes, a few don’ts for the post-imagist. Thus he recalculates – re-understands – innovative writing in the progressive socio-literary lineage, the “pen [being] tinier than the sword,” free verse being “not a type of poetry but an imperative to liberate verse from constraints no longer applicable for a new time and new circumstance.” He recalculates a pragmatic progressive politics of language, thinking aloud through Lakoffian reformist optimism: “All the signs say no passage; still, there must be a way.”

And so he loves originality so much he keeps copying it. When Charles Bernstein at 60-plus recalculates, he submits unironic internet-age radical idealism to 1930s-style vaudeville: “Poetry wants to be free.... Or, if not, available for long-term loan.” And misanthropy in the style of Shecky Green or Morey Amsterdam: “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t bear.” And this laugh line: “I am a Jewish man trapped in the body of a Jewish man.” He’s unready, unwilling and unable – the title of the poem in which these lines occur – but he’s still constantly hearing Emma’s drive-fast/race-to-the-finish imperatives, and so his poems are ready, willing and astonishingly able.

Yes, this personal recalculation gives us poems of incomprehensible and uncomprehended mourning – “I was the luckiest father in the world / until I turned unluckiest” – but it also makes possible poems like “Strike!” – right out of the Popular Front, a list poem telling you to strike, but you don’t know if you’re aggressively thrashing or nobly resisting. “Strike because your only hedge fund is your bare hands.” “Strike because you are sick of all that’s called new and despair that nothing changes.” “Strike because you are abandoned.”

“Recalculating” – the book but also the title poem – means that “The Jew is a textual construction,” which suggests the realization, finally, after all these years, that “You’re not even there when you’re there.” “The Jew” is a poem not about this poet but another – revered bearded wandering father and surrealist Jewish vaudevillian – turned 80 years old for the occasion of the poem: Jerome Rothenberg. The poem consists of 24 Talmudic joke-stories inflected by Cagean contemplation: “A reader complains about the obscurity of a line of verse and seeks a Jew’s counsel. ‘Obscurity is like the yeast in a cake. It is long acting to ensure the dough rises on time.’”

Recalculating means: rising on time.

Just in time for election day 2008. Just in time for some serious autopsychographia. Just in time, in the era of digital unoriginality, for realizing that computers will never replace poets because computers won’t take that much abuse. Just in time for retracing your route in reflection and for putting your hands on the wheel. Just in time for poet-fakers who’ve learned for years in poems to fake the pain they really feel. “Strike because you are abandoned” is a line exactly as political as it is personal.

April 17, 2013

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.