Charles Bernstein's Placards, 2008 and Beyond

A Sampling... See them all HERE.

Poor People Make America Strong  Protect Income Inequality Citizens United for the One Percent

June 9, 2012

 

The Right of the Few to Govern the Many Citizens United Paid for by Bloomberg, Koch, Koch, & Rove, LLC

June 10, 2012

Stop Collective Bargaining Now! Living wages slash business profits. Rally Round the One Percent  Paid for by Scott Walker for President

JUNE 10, 2012

Money Rules! Keep the Supreme Court on the Right Track Citizens United for Plutocracy

June 10, 2012

preserve tax cuts for the one percent income inequality is a necessary safeguard against democracy

June 10, 2012

voter suppression  the last safeguard against Godless democracy

June 24, 2012

in these uncertain times ensure a darker tomorrow Vote Republican Our America Not Yours

July 19, 2012

Don’t emasculate America Support the NRA On Election Day  GUYS LIKE GIRLS WHO LIKE GUNS

July 27, 2012

Support the right of rapists to have their children. Vote Ryan-Romney Paid for by Sex Offenders Against Choice.

August 13, 2012
reprise of Fall 2008 placard

Rapists have always been in the frontlines battling a woman’s right to choose. We hail Todd Akin and Paul Ryan and support the Republican Party’s 2012 Platform criminalizing abortion. Sexual Offenders Against Choice Our America Not Yours

August 22, 2012

Citizens! Be Vigilant! our nation's core values are threatened Don't Let America Slide into Godless Democracy support voter suppression laws our America, up yours paid for by Racists for Voter Suppression Republican Party, USA/2012

August 23, 2012

Legitimate Rape The Bush-Romney-Ryan Economic Agenda

August 26, 2012

Tax Primer I redistribute  You redistribute  He/she/it redistributes We redistribute  You redistribute  They profit

October 5, 2012

Mitt Romney America’s Putin Not to say Rasputin

Ocotber 5, 2012

Vote Ryan-Romney

Attack of the Difficult Poems by Charles Bernstein

Attack of the Difficult Poems:  Essays and Inventions
by Charles Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2011

During April 2011, get 30% off ($18.20) if you order directly from the University of Chicago Press:
CLICK HERE to order.

Contents:

I. Professing Poetics

The Difficult Poem

A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices

Against National Poetry Month as Such

Invention Follies

Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment

Wreading, Writing, Wresponding

Anything Goes

Our Americas: New Worlds Still in Progress

The Practice of Poetics

II. The Art of Immemorability

Every Which Way but Loose

The Art of Immemorability

Making Audio Visible: Poetry’s Coming Digital Presence

The Bound Listener

Hearing Voices

Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics

III. The Fate of the Aesthetic

McGann Agonist

Poetry and/or the Sacred

The Art and Practice of the Ordinary

Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies

Poetry Plastique: A Verbal Explosion in the Art Factory (with Jay Sanders)

Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren’t You the Kind That Tells

Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime

Fraud’s Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud

Fulcrum Interview

Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice

Poetry Scene Investigation: A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff

Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?

Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers

IV. Recantorium

Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka)

I love this review! -----> “I regret to inform you that Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems is highly unsuitable (not suitable) for National Poetry Month. Not suitable for acceptance by the publications of the Modern Language Association or its affiliate, the Annual Convention. Not suitable for readers under the age of five. Not suitable for endorsement by the Paris Review. Not suitable for your average television sitcom. Not suitable for tenure. Not suitable for free distribution. Not suitable for variations in the ontological condition. Not suitable for readers of generic poetry. Not suitable for the MFA. For everyone else: priceless.” — Tan Lin

Often I Am Permitted

I love USAmerican poetics, and many of its practitioners. That was probably the real gift of my education at UC-Berkeley, the Bay Area being one of the greatest spots in the world for (free) readings and a heavy concentration of writers -- on the street, in the metro, at favorite cafés, that one with small round marble-topped tables -- bring a cardigan -- and the one with the inherited dark woods and tippy legs -- at the twilight, run next door, bring back fish and chips in newspaper. Malt vinegar.

The Castro, the West Oakland Senior Center, the Mission's murals and taquerias, creepy Japantown, Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights.

Wheeler, Dwinelle. 94720.

Josephine Miles reading in the late afternoon, something about a swimmer swept to sea, or a benevolent ocean and a drowning, Pinsky's parade of sycophants.

Commune, commune, commune -- at water's edges, the Pacific, the bay, the packing district, watching you practice Japanese on notecards, watching you woo the girlish women in Greek School.

A summer of language and found poems, particularly in diners, possibly because of back-to-back booths and open seating (you were gifted in acoustics, in picking our place to be), people so sleepy in the mid- to late- mornings. They'll say anything, and we listened. You published, shameless, arty line breaks your personal permission.

I walked in broken sandals from Berkeley to the Golden Gate, that "thirty-five million dollar steel harp" (said The Chronicle in 1937), to Sausalito, then, refusing to look at my feet but finally acknowledging them, and my blood trail, took the 6:30 ferry, then BART, stomped up the hill from Shattuck to the International House.

That was the kind of thing I did before you. Things were more light and air and feet and muscles, also nipples, then.

I am a fan of Charles Bernstein and what he does, and in ferreting out this and that, I was introduced, posthumously, to his daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein. Yesterday, I posted two YouTube videos from her user account and feel even weirder about that impulse today. It was a foreign act that I wanted to pass off as a comfortable thing, even a celebration of this lovely young woman.

But I don't think her work is great, and so I am not, in turn, a great fan, but something like politeness and real sadness over what was certainly going to be greatness, denied, motivated the gesture. The iteration.

[Denied? Not deferred, certainly, though in these ketamine times, I don't claim a firm understanding of our realities, but not denied, either. Just not, I suppose. Just not. Just plain old very sad very wrong not.]

Anyway, videos sort of from dead people, facebook accounts of the deceased, still friends, still peering out, still protecting a useless privacy.

She only share some profile information with everyone. If you know her, add her as a friend or send her a message.

Charles Bernstein's Web Log is like an infusion of goings-on that I can access when there is need, and there is need, on average, three times a month. It's ugly -- I hate the colors -- I hate the fonts -- I hate the layout.

It's perfect.

And every instance of need births great gratitude but what am I supposed to do, thank him? Harrumph.

In much the same way I know anything, I knew that Jonathan Williams was likely dead, too. Dead with all the other dead people that seem to be peopling the poetic crowd of my advancing years. This -- dead writers -- is partly how I've come to treasure opportunities like the Poetry Audio Archive over at the Academy of American Poets -- for how I long to hear them -- again, or for the first time, or the thirteenth. You really do have to hear poets. Look at them, not so much, but hear them, oh, yes.

Of course, I knew (of) Jonathan Williams from my own Asheville era, and wish that that portion of my life were preserved, for so much remains only in staccato bursts of errant electricity. He made me laugh. He made me want to hear language, touch words.  I like baseball;  He did, too. 

And I forgot him, and most all like him that I ever knew. That's the value of something like Bernstein's Web Log. Between him and Ron Silliman, I'm golden.  I remember.  I backtrack.  I listen to their trusted voices.

Joel Oppenheimer and Francine Du Plessix
at Black Mountain College, 1951.
Photograph by Jonathan Williams

Oh, please.  You remember what it was like.  My commitment to poetry included a commitment to publishable poetry.  Also, I aided and abetted a visit to my campus by Joel Oppenheimer -- there was an ice storm, a very old tree fell, and we all wrote poems about it.

But by the time I came to like Jonathan Williams, I had no campus.  To speak of.

I find that when I read and skim Bernstein's postings, often reduced to announcements, I remember names.  The tip-of-the-tongue drive-you-crazy names.  I practically crow with delight. 

Guy Davenport!  Robert Duncan.

Ah-h-h.

Is there a better way than to end with Robert Duncan?  (Do I feel odd for the absence of George Oppen?)
These various portals to grace -- Emma Bee Bernstein's videos from YouTube, her father's work, analysis of works, and selfless promotion of language, archives oral, archives visual, blogs and blogs and blogs, all these portals such gifts such gifts!

Places of permission.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan




as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,


that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein


that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.


Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.


She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.


It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down


whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.


Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,


that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

Charles Bernstein :: Leslie Scalapino

As noted earlier, there are some wonderful éloges floating around for Leslie Scalapino, who died May 28, 2010.

Charles Bernstein has pointed many of them out, as well as providing gentle suggestions about what really matters by virtue of his blog gleanings.

Here is his own memory of her, published in SIBILA, poesia e cultura. He addresses something that most gloss over, or address pedantically, in an of-course kind of way: the pesky business of Scalapino and poetic intention, inseparable from "the integrity of the work itself." A huge part of my appreciation for her work springs from the fact that it is work.

Leslie Scalapino’s Rhythmic Intensities

Scalapino Memorial
Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church
New York, June 21, 2010

The poet dies, the poet’s work is borne by her readers.

When I first encountered Leslie Scalapino’s work I was hard hit by its psychic intensity, formal ingeniousness, and rhythmic imagination. I felt I came to the work late; the first book I read was The Woman who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, which while published in 1976, I didn’t read till around 1981. The psychosexual dynamics of the work and its ability to make dislocation a visceral experience immediately became, once I had taken in the magnitude of Scalapino’s project, a capital point on the mapping of poetry associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, one that deepened and enriched that survey. When North Point published Considering How Exaggerated Music Is in 1982, Scalapino’s work became an indelible part of my poetic firmament, that imaginary company each of us chooses but that also chooses us. That is, I feel as much chosen by Scalapino’s work as that I was doing the choosing; her work entered into and changed my consciousness about what was possible for poetry, changed the terms for all of us working along similar lines.

Every once in a while I would say something to Leslie about Considering How Exaggerated the Music Is. She would shake her head, slightly laughing, “Oh Charles not the music: considering how exaggerated music is.” As in her music, the music of her poems. Not exaggerated in the sense of hyperbolic or overstated, but as in extravagant, wild and wandering.

Starting in my earliest conversations with Leslie, when I would try to describe qualities I found in her work, she was adamant in resisting interpretations she felt countermanded her intentions. When I would say, but you know, Leslie, readers will respond in many different ways to a poem, she would give no ground; for her, how a work is to be interpreted was part of the poem: not just her intention, but part of the integrity of the work itself. I felt her rebuke to my more porous view of interpretation to be magnificent and improbable, for as much as Leslie set the bar for interpretation a bit higher than actual reading practices will ordinarily sustain, she demonstrated her fierce commitment to poetic meaning and also the truth in the form and materials, sincerity in Zukofsky’s sense: that reading was a social bond that necessitated the reader’s recognition of the formal terms of the work. So there was a right way to read, not in the moral sense but in a very practical one, as in a right way to operate software so it works, does the job for which is was made.

And you could say that Scalapino created a new and thrilling poetic software, allowing for a phenomenological unique experience, something like a 3- or 4-D poem. Her overlays, repetitions, and torques enable proactive readers to enter the space of the poem as something akin to a holographic environment. The present time of the work is intensified by her echoes (overlapping waves of phrases) of what just happened and what is about to happen, so the present is expanded into a temporally multi-dimensional space. Her undulating phrasal rhythms are in turn psychedelic, analytic, notational, pointillistic, and narrational. Think of it as deep-space syncretic cubism. And Scalapino’s performances of her work, many collected at PennSound, are crucial guides to entering this hyperspace.

Scalapino’s poetry was central to my poem/essay Artifice of Absorption, which I wrote starting in 1985. In Artifice of Absorption, I noted that Scalapino’s rhetorical repetitions create a disabsorptive/affective charm: the slight, accented, shifts in similar statements operate as modular scans of the field of perception, building thick linguistic waves of overlay and undertow, the warp of a thematic motif countered with the woof of its torqued rearticulation.

When I visited Leslie and Tom in Oakland a few weeks before Leslie died, her luminous and effervescent stoicism, the nobility in which she acknowledged death lurking in her garden, was fused with her refusal to give up on life and her urgent, tragic recognition of the work she still had it in her to do that she would not be able to do. She spoke of how much she wanted to come to New York to read her new work, and so together with Stacy and Tracy we made plans for her to read here tonight. In Oakland in May, we laughed together at the moment’s literary gossip and we talked about her just finished book, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, written in the late style of Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Floats; she knew it would be her last.

I sent her my response to this work just days before she died, trying to do justice to the work and hoping that she would accept my description as apt, which Tom tells me she did:

The Dihedrons is an ekphrastic implosion inside our severed human-body/animal-mind. “Memory isn’t the origin of events,” Scalapino writes early in this magisterial work, which restores the synthesis of events to its place as meanings' origin. The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom -- as much a work of grotesque science fiction as a poem --cracks open the imaginary reality astride reality. In the stadium of its visionary composition, the everyday floats vivid strange: in time, as time, with time, beside time.

Scalapino’s poems, from her first book to this last, probe politics, memory, perception, and desire, creating hypnotically shifting coherences that take us beyond any dislocating devices into a realm of newly emerging consciousness. Like a sumo wrestler doing contact improvisations with a ballerina, Scalapino balances the unbalanceable poetic accounts of social justice and aesthetic insistence.

Every once in a while, I’d say something to Leslie about her book series, calling it O Press; she would shake her head, slightly laughing, “Oh Charles not oppress, O Books”! “Oppression is our social space.” Leslie, with the support of Tom White, created one of the great small presses of our time.

I keep thinking about her titles, which are among the most amazing, fantastic, and unexpected of anybody ever … And her essays, which are models of a non-expository, exploratory style remains foundational for any activist poetics.

Like a ballerina doing contact improvisations with a sumo wrestler.

The poet dies, the poet’s work is borne … by us, in us, through us, as us.

It’s the longest day.

Considering how exaggerated music is.

It's thanks to Bernstein's use of it as a citation that I came to love this bit from one of Giraut de Bornelh's songs:

And they say
If I would just sing lighter songs
Better for me would it be,
But not is this truthful;
For sense remote
Adduces worth and gives it
Even if ignorant reading impairs it;
But it's my creed
That these songs yield
No value at the commencing
Only later, when one earns it.

image is of a troubadour casket