With Strings
Charles Bernstein
publisher: University of Chicago, 2002
isbn: 0-226-04460-2
price: $12
Readers are cautioned that certain statements in this poem are forward looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. Words such as 'bluster,' 'rotund,' 'interstitial,' 'guerilla,' 'torrent', 'prostrate', and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and projects about the aesthetic environment and assumptions made by the author and are not guarantees of future performativity.
[73]
writes Bernstein in "Today's Not Opposite Day," one of many cagey, slapstick satires in his large new book. But even when this poet -- in his best vaudeville bureaucrat's voice -- just tells you what to expect, buckle up for a plateful of much weirder fare (the mixed metaphor is apt).
Bernstein has never been an easy pleasure, from the early minimal work of his Language years to his recent incarnation as professa-widda-(Yiddish)-attitude, but the more recent work reflects a growing comfort with his role as public intellectual and avuncular proselyte for all things counter-hegemonic, hence a huge turn toward satire and even lyric in his work.
The Bernstein "lyric," of course, takes on every convention one could imagine lurks close to the humanist heart:
the toilet seat is down now
it's there I plan to sit
until I find that doggy bag
I lost while just a kid
[39]
By making the poems so nail-scratchingly obvious in their form -- as in "Besotted Desquamation" in which every line in the poem contains four words beginning with the same letter "marshalling muted might majestically" -- Bernstein anchors the aesthetic object (art always want to rise into the aether) in deep engagement with the most mundane modes of culture.
This rationale for writing very "bad" poetry makes one put all aesthetic -- and by extension social and moral -- judgments in scare quotes, pitting the reader against the very value system that may have brought him or her to the poem itself:
& the moral of that is: Better
a loose potato chip than a
hot tamale. & the moral of that
is: It is a rocky road that's
filled with bumps. & the moral
of that is: If you kill the spirit
in others, you kill it in yourself.
& the moral of that is: Watch the
slings and arrows & the automatic
weapons will get you every time.
[33]
While some of this "companion to My Way: Speeches and Poems" (as he states in the intro) seems filler -- those few poems that avoid kitsch and in which the poet seems merely to have failed achieve an effect -- or maybe too annoyingly bathetic, there is no real way to determine where "filler" ends and the "quality" writing starts, and where the poem ends and the jacket copy starts, which just goes to show that everything good comes with strings attached.
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