A ‘leap of poetic faith’

The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies
Charles Bernstein
University of Chicago Press 2024, 424 pages, $30, ISBN: 9780226836096

A month or so ago, having my thirteenth collection of poems in the designer’s hands, I felt queasy about the possibility of writing new poems because of a fear of repeating myself and doubts about whether I could do anything different. Then I read Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies. Wariness about self-repetition is a valid concern: Bernstein asserts that “it is important … not to continually rely on the same ways of making phrases and making them go together.”^[1] However, thanks to his cogent articulation of the most powerful reasons (beyond approval, for example) for writing poetry and poetic criticism as well as his comic and serious call for practitioners not to be influenced by perspectives that inhibit the flowering of inventiveness, of a vibrant exploratory poetics, I resolved to take further “leap[s] of poetic faith”^[2] — to pursue anew what Paul A. Bové, speaking in Love’s Shadow (Harvard UP, 2021) of Wallace Stevens’ notion of “the work of poiesis,” characterizes as the “essential problem” of “how imagination sustains us, nourishes our lives, and nurtures our cultivation of the world as a dwelling for an imagining species.”^[3] Did Bernstein perform these two valuable functions in Pitch of Poetry, Attack of the Difficult Poems, My Way, and other prior essay collections? Sure. And so what? Social and aesthetic contexts change, terminology changes, and similar reasons occur for further elaboration of poiesis and critique in various formats.

Among numerous examples in Bernstein’s book of “the kinds of poetry [he] want[s]” are figures about whom he has written before, and he finds fresh, generative points to make about each of them. He speaks of Gertrude Stein’s attempt “to articulate a poetics that was an antidote to antagonism” through “an ethics of dialogue” and “an aesthetics of presentness,”^[4] Louis Zukofsky’s treatment of “poetry … as a bearing in and toward language, in and as language,”^[5] John Ashbery’s “great project of Unrepresentative Verse, a search for an alternative to reductive forms of representation, whether it be representation of a person, a place, a group, a nation, a species, or simply of an object,”^[6] Robert Creeley’s “excavation of self” through “estimation of unknown facts from a limited range of the known,”^[7] and Lyn Hejinian’s ability in My Life to actualize a “sentence-to-sentence disjunction” that “illuminates the patterns of life lived” while evincing “a wistfulness verging on sentimentality (but never dwelling in it).”^[8] Those whom, to my knowledge, he has not considered in prior critical collections, include comic Sid Caesar, whose “doubletalk”^[9] is linked intriguingly with homophonic translation; Tonya Foster, who utilizes an “accumulation of voices” to mark a “continued return not to the same but to the site as reciting”;^[10] Caroline Bergvall, who marshals “blockages, stuttering, error, code-switching, and skips” as “stitches that make up a fabric,”^[11] and Nissim Ezekiel, who “averts mastery, turning the tables on both authentic storytelling and Orientalist condescension” and develops a distinctly “Indian English.”^[12]

This book could be retitled The Kinds of Poetry and Criticism I Want and Don’t Want. Bernstein doesn’t want poetry written solely in the service of other activities or goals or read solely in the context of its immediate sociopolitical utility: “every attempt to instrumentalize poetry diminishes its power.”^[13] I might quibble that if attention to a poem’s salient linguistic features accompanies an instrumentalizing gesture, the latter would be acceptable. To “social/virtue gospel true believers”^[14] who insist upon poems that directly espouse particular political stances in conventional ways, Bernstein responds that “valuing poems thematically, exclusively as expressions of the subaltern, risks reinscribing racist ideas of authenticity.”^[15] For several decades, notions of authenticity in poetry communities and academia have been usefully complicated by acknowledgment of multiple subject positions, but even the articulation of those individual strands of “identity” risks oversimplification. Bernstein argues that “a prefabricated template for what counts as intelligible and legitimate” can do a disservice to “the otherwise voiceless”^[16] in undermining their efforts to achieve autonomy through self-representation. Further, “Bernstein cautions against the reification of emotion” and advocates poetic exploration of “messy or deformed or difficult to categorize or ambivalent” emotion.^[17]  

Bernstein declares: “… [If] you love the poem for what it is about, you don’t love the poem but what it’s about.”^[18] I think that you can love the poem’s subject matter and the poem itself as long as you also love how the text presents that content. Sadly, one may hate a poem due to an erroneous assumption about its content or implications of its form. Several essays in Bernstein’s book concern the damaging effects of misprision, often linked with a coercive employment of metonymy, as opposed to uses of that trope that “spark intensive unconscious, intuitive, felt connections,”^[19] as in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. When a writer in the Boston Review denounces Bernstein’s poem, “War Stories,” which I have discussed elsewhere as a catalogue of numerous attitudes toward war that enables readers to develop a critical inventory of their own possible views, as tantamount to “right-wing disinformation,”^[20] it seems to be a literate person’s deliberate (stubborn) refusal to read closely by ignoring the heterogeneity of assertions within collage.

The book’s subtitle, Essays & Comedies, is significant. For a poet-critic who eschews “the straight path of self-righteousness” and prefers “the crooked roads that have no certainties,” comedy performs the useful work of deflating mechanical thought and behavior, as in Henri Bergson’s theory.^[21] Take a look at the parody-recommendation of a professor from “Final Acres Residential College” for a student prized for “his deep animosity to literature” and his “intuitive understanding of how literary works are not just complicit in the darkest deceptions of capitalism but also an active agent of global environmental catastrophe.”^[22] Move over Plato! In “The Taint of the Human,” Bernstein vigorously parodies how colleges ingratiate themselves with student-“consumers”: “In an effort to make humanities classes more accessible to a wide range of students, and boost enrollment, Hodgepodge University has eliminated the requirement for reading poems in all classes…. Original poems will be provided, if at all, as optional reading.”^[23] The degree of ingratiation gets increasingly more absurd in each of the succeeding three prose blocks.

Bernstein dares to place “the aesthetic world of our freedom from obligations” — imaginative possibility — alongside “the ethical realm of our obligation to others.”^[24] His strategy for fulfilling his “responsibility” as a poet “to foment response”^[25] is to travel during the composition process “from one element to another and [see] the different kinds of balances and harmonies that are created,” so that “the world sort of comes into an attunement, and that begins to be the poem.”^[26] Further, a “desire for certain sound resolutions” — not discernible at the outset — “creates the music.” When completed, the poem may be “well-wrought,” but is a “submersible,”^[27] rather than Keats’ and New Critic Cleanth Brooks’ “well-wrought urn.” Though I, too, embrace this way of proceeding, it sometimes takes the eloquence of a Bernstein to remind me — when I feel self-doubt or impatience or problematic extrinsic motivation for writing — that there is no magic alternative or shortcut to this process and that following it with an open spirit makes poiesis well worth the investment of time and energy.

The comedian with the letters CB — that’s one kind of poetry critic I want.

Notes