Stephen Berg
Halo
publisher: Sheep Meadow Press, 2000
isbn:1-87881879-1
price: $12.95
Porno Diva Numero Uno
publisher: Lingo Books, 2000
isbn: 1-889097-39-X
price: tk
Berg describes a sort of ars poetica in Halo, a series a short quasi-religious paragraphs:
Curtains she calls it "curtain of the world" mercy behind it on the other side cruelty here in the God-world no-God, whenever I read to her -- 'I have to know that as a thinking, finite being I am God crucified' -- it shreds me, no-time which is God God everywhere everything we are, often in great heat I write to a friend say everything that shames batters inspires won't send it burn it on stove papery ash God's words, woke in the dark again clawed the unwalled dark again.
[19]
In these two smallish books of prose poems, Berg strains for the visceral transcendence of the saints, but something seems either entirely naive or slightly forced about the pieces, as their basic form -- the run-on sentence that drops elements of normal syntax as it seems spoken in a "white heat" -- is both not very beautiful to read, and not nearly as gregarious, image-laden or charming as his New American models, such as O'Hara in "Meditation In An Emergency" and Ginsberg in his major early works such as the confesional "Kaddish."
While it is somewhat refreshing to see someone write from what one presumes is the core of the "soul," few of the poems seem especially candid, nor do they seem to have anything contained within them that society is necessarily suppressing -- Berg is not being "suicided by society," to use Artaud's phrase about Van Gogh, and he has no counter-culture to expose.
Nor are the poems philosophically resonant, and so one wonders whether a craft-obsessed poet -- a Williams, say, or a Creeley, neither of whom would let a line of poetry run past three words if it failed to be interesting -- would have been able to find profundity, syntactic, spriritual or otherwise, in the rather colorless formulation of "Of", which runs in its entirety:
That death is what you cannot do that death is what you cannot be that death is not the opposite of nothing.
[24]
Porno Diva Numero Uno is more successful, as it takes as its central theme an imaginary relationship between the author and Marcel Duchamp around the time he was constructing his final work Etant donnés [1946-66] (housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from which city Berg edits and publishes the American Poetry Review).
But once again, Berg's form stumbles, as even interesting speech seem compromised by the poet making excuses for the language by applying -- even where a dialogic contrast seems necessary -- elements of his "signature style," the run-on can't-be-contained-by-syntax mode:
[...] until I could name anything just by touching it but it was only after a period of disgust with visual art with the quality of distance it depends on that I decided -- and this was the only reason for my decision -- to do some of my things so the idea was touch not art how would you like to eat an apple drink a glass of wine if you didn't have hands anyhow put a bicycle wheel and a stool together black white and you've got the wildness of an impossible combination combined you almost don't know what to do with it touch look spin sit eat what? so I'm like a blind artist I am a blind artist a man with no ideas only the memory of that early lesson" [...]
[13]
Porno Diva, as its flashy title suggests, seems framed as a deep, candid investigation of eroticism of the cheap suburban brand (think American Beauty), but while Battaille is clearly the godfather, here, Berg doesn't make many of his own investigations -- very few images, digressions, infatuations, etc. seem particularly inspired by Berg's sexual imagination.
Though an interesting image may point one somewhere in that direction ("...in our age two removes from the viewer first the door then the wall then her holding the puny lamp of orgasm up there dream of faceless leather..." [66]), for the most part it seems Berg is undecided whether to be Duchamp's Boswell (though much of Duchamp's material seems taken from common sources), the hectic but image-dry visionary of Halo, or a collagist of art-related non-sequiturs.
Berg seems to be more focused when he introduces odd low-brow matter that genuinely intrigues him, such as the long section on the mating habits of rhinoceri, in which the sentences become suddenly rather narrative, obedient to trying to hit the right tone for conveying the slightly perverse subject matter. Perhaps that is a lesson, for though Berg calls himself an "apostle of the ordinary, one wonders why he doesn't opt for material that will work against his tendency for run-on, hence leading to more complex, engaging aesthetic solutions.
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