Republics of Reality: 1975-1995
Charles Bernstein
publisher: Sun & Moon, 2000
isbn: 1-55713-304-2
price: $14.95
At once the most controversial and popular, most "accessible" and yet most twarting-of-expectations, of the "Language" poets, Bernstein is also the writer of that group who strove early on to experiment with both extremes of these newly discovered methods, from the use of the word in its isolated, destabilized but utopian expressivity to the restaging of the plain phrase at it operates in daily, even bureaucratic, life to convey our most heroically banal thoughts.
This collection of long out-of-print chapbooks -- none of these poems have appeared in any of Bernstein's many breatkthrough volumes, such as Islets/Irritations (1983) or Dark City (1994) -- provides a compelling, substantial overview of his career, meanwhile adding to the range of his impressive canon of major and minor (sometimes upsettingly so) works.
If one associates Language poetry with the non-referential, the unemotive, and fetishization of textual form and the language of theory over that of speech -- in other words, opaque writing that "resists" lyrics forms in the service of a political/aesthetic argument that is far from obvious -- one will be immediately surprised with the opening poem from the 1976 volume "Parsing", titled "Sentences," practically a litany of anxieties, attitudes and stuttering intensities, produced by the need to be social:
I feel too dependent.
I feel no sense of myself.
I continually need reassurance.
I feel she won't really express her feelings.
I feel shut out.
I can project everything and be reassured of nothing.
I am constantly feeling left.
I see in her silence and distance the same fear and pain I have.
[20]
If this poetry is defiantly "un-poetic" -- the lyric subject, not to mention the concluding lyric whooosh (e.g. O'Hara's "and everybody and I stopped breathing"), is nowhere to be seen, and odd instances later in the poem ("He said, 'Bring me the holy bible with all y'alls names in it.'") seem lifted from other works entirely -- Bernstein's restraint and confidence with this method puts him at a distance from his more technically stalwart peers who might sacrifice any humanistic nuances for fear of appearing compromised in the throes of cultural warfare.
His interest, then, is in language and how it is used among people, and not after it has been santized through excessive theorization. This basic understanding renders such dense works as "Poem" (from "Shade," 1978) both welcoming and discomforting. There is a cinematic element to this poem -- its focus plunges into suggested social and interpersonal vignettes while remaining with none of them -- all of which seems in service to an undisclosed satiric narrative:
a sound of some importance
diffuses
"as dark red circles"
digress, reverberate
connect, unhook.
Your clothes, for example
face, style
radiate mediocrity
coyly, slipping
& in how many minutes
body & consciousness
deflect, "flame on flare"
missed purpose.
[72-73]
One figures Mallarme's proto-Lettrist Throw of the Dice -- a verbo-visual manifesto for the poetics of chance that has probably been reprinted more in the last five years than in the whole century before -- as a founding text for Bernstein's poetics. Each poem seems a snapshot of language's movement as caught on the page, and yet Bernstein is democratic mirror to the aristocratic French Symbolist, replacing the holy sanctity of the aesthete's mind with the polyvalent chatter of Grand Central Station.
In his later poems -- the short poems collected in "The Absent Father in 'Dumbo'" and "Residual Rubbernecking" -- Bernstein takes the project far from the austere, dystopic fragments of the early works into near-totally banal, or oppressively purple and unbeautiful, lyricism:
Such mortal slurp to strain this sprawl went droopy
Gadzooks it seems would bend these slopes in girth
None trailing failed to hear the ship looks loopey
Who's seen it nailed uptight right at its berth"
[353]
Only Bernstein takes the promise of materialist poetics, and the desire to make language visible, would attempt such a distance from the norms of good taste, and though one is not sure if these later poems are the best encore to the fabulous and ambitious early chapbooks (those poems that resemble the early works but don't attain their power seem mere improvisations, inattentively included), the volume as a whole presents as many promises as it does problems, beauties as it does strange new things, all of which there are many.
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