My Way
Charles Bernstein
publisher: Harvard University Press, 1999
isbn: 0-226-04410-6
price: $18
"What is a poet-critic, or critic-poet, or professor-poet-critic?; which comes first and how can you tell?" asks Bernstein early in My Way. Turning his always playful, but never less than informed and precise, poetical eye on the new elements of the shifting literary landscape, his collection is eclectic both in its range of interests and its forms of expression:scholarly essays, interviews, encomiums to poets like Charles Reznikoff, Larry Eigner, Hannah Weiner and Susan Howe, quirky poems, and forms that are hybrids of all of these.
One of the key theorists of the now-adequately historicized Language poets, Bernstein's purview has expanded greatly past the formal concerns of that group to take in issues of multiculturalism, "standard" vs. "non-standard" forms of language usage, the ossified conservative agenda of literary institutions in the United States, poetry in performance (both on the page and on stage), and graduate-level pedagogical practices, as in "Frame Lock," which is:
a kind of logorrheic lock jaw, or sandy mouth, or bullet-with-the-baby-not-just-quite-then-almost-out-of-reach, as a mood swinging under a noose of monomaniacal monotones, the converted preaching to the incontrovertible, the guard rail replacing the banisters, stairs, stories, elevation, detonation, reverberation, indecision, concomitant intensification system.
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The many slips and holes permitted by the many forms in this book grant one peeks beneath the surface of Bernstein's discourse. A long autobiographical interview with Loss Glazier, for instance, covers the poet's attitudes toward Harvard where he was educated, his sense of being (in Isaac Deutscher's phrase) a "non-Jewish Jew", and his maturity during the sixties.
Poems such as "A Test of Poetry" -- deceptively "accessible" in its surface -- uncover some of the traumas foreign-language poets have had translating Bernstein's, or anyone's, poetry, pulling the sheets from under that in-between language that Benjamin wrote is the space of translation, but which had never-before been so giddily problematized.
"Water Images of The New Yorker" is a fine little investigative piece, discovering that 86% of the poems over a 16-week period contained images of water, while "Dear Mr. Fanelli," a poem in skinny Schuyleresque lines, takes the language of a subway administrator's "request for comments" literally, highlighting how even bureaucratic language is vexed with double-meanings.
"Pound and the Poetry of Today" is an important follow-up to his essay "Pounding Fascism" in his last book of essays, A Poetics, investigating the contradiction of Pound's overdetermined politics in the light of his collage poetics, while "Poetics of the Americas" creates an important bridge between the ethnically marginalized practices of poets like Claude McKay and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and more self-consciously "avant-garde" writers like Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and the Language poets themselves.
This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, an engagement that is both in good faith yet just cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored.
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