Cuando Me Enamoro - At a reading I attended in the Smith College science lecture hall a few years ago, Charles Bernstein, famous as a poet and anti-poet, pointed to the giant poster on the wall behind him and said, “I want to thank the Poetry Center for putting up my poem ‘The Periodic Table of the Elements.’ ” He then proceeded to give a mock-dramatic rendition of the symbols, left to right, down the page. “H, He, Li, Be!” he panted, growled and spluttered. “Why!?” he complained when he got to yttrium (Y). “I!” he declared solemnly for iodine, as if toasting his own ego. He slowed down, sped up. “No!” he bellowed for nobelium, then finally whispered “Lr,” the last chemical symbol. He turned to face the audience. “I’ve always wondered if I should have ended with ‘No’ rather than putting that ‘Lr’ on the end. I think it was a mistake. I think it would have been more emphatic with the negation.” This was the funniest, most impromptu-brilliant, serious moment I’ve ever witnessed at a poetry reading — and very much about sound, language, expression and communication.
With “All the Whiskey in Heaven,” his first book not published by a university or independent press, Bernstein takes his place in the mainstream of American poetry, the very “Official Verse Culture” he’s attacked entertainingly for years — a fate awaiting all our best outsiders. Bernstein is identified with the Language poets, who emerged in the 1970s. Interested in the materiality of language, they are politically left, theoretically grounded and deeply suspicious of the lyric “I” that speaks from the heart in traditional poems without examining its own existence in a sociopolitical power structure. Their work is often most subversive when both joining and satirizing that weary old, dreary old genre, poetry about poetry. Early Bernstein can be opaque, annoying those who see difficulty as elitist and who want poetry to be cuddly and educational. But everyone should love the later Bernstein, a writer who is accessible, enormously witty, often joyful — and even more evilly subversive.
This selection of Bernstein’s work doesn’t neglect his early experiments. “Lift Off,” apparently transcribed from a typewriter correction tape, begins “HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineopcv i iibalfmgmMw.” A sympathetic reader appreciates the grunting “dugh,” the fortuitous trip to Paris implied by “seine,” the broken “s ob,” the loneliness of the lowercase “i.” This is a conceptual poem — you may be more excited to know it exists than to read through it.
A hilarious, addictive untitled series of sentences sounds cribbed from TV Guide: “Comradery turns to rivalry when 12 medical students learn that only seven of them will be admitted to the hospital. . . . Henrietta Hippo believes she can predict the future by reading the letters in her alphabet soup.” No mere joke, this prose poem gets at the strange dream-normalcy of television, the absurdity of narrative, the tragicomedy of human desire.
“Of Time and the Line” combines prosodic theory, stand-up comedy, and personal and political history by considering uses of the word “line”: George Burns and Henny Youngman punch lines, Bernstein’s father’s “line of ladies’ dresses,” his mother’s hemline, long lines in Russia, soup lines in the United States, Chairman Mao’s political line, “abandoned (most- / ly) for the East-West line of malarkey / so popular in these parts.” In all, there are 40 indefatigably punning, quasi-blank-verse lines — cold war references, hammy delivery, satire of sentimental family history. The sillier Bernstein gets, the more it’s a sign of the poem’s seriousness:
Nowadays, you can often spot a work
of poetry by whether it’s in lines
or no; if it’s in prose, there’s a good chance
it’s a poem.
“Thank You for Saying Thank You” lampoons critics of difficult poetry, beginning, “This is a totally / accessible poem,” satirizing the claims built into certain kinds of lyric poetry and describing itself into existence: “It fully expresses / the feelings of the / author: my feelings, / the person speaking / to you now.” Some claims are bald falsehoods:
It
celebrates the
triumph of the
human imagination
amidst pitfalls &
calamities.
The poem is gleefully about nothing but itself, an extremely funny, cruel, ultimately profound comment on poetic falsification, and what poems can and should and cannot do.
When Bernstein arrives at his own style of lyric beauty, his means are slant. “A Test of Poetry” is a gorgeous catechism of questions, but no answers, posed by a translator to the author of a poem we get only in fragments:
What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry
systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownership
of factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Are
we tossed in tune when we write poems? And
what or who emboss with gloss insignias of air?
This riveting poem, more than five pages long, does everything a lyric aims to do — it creates linguistic excitement, mystery and emotion — without resorting to tiresome epiphanies.
The prose poem “Report From Liberty Street” is one of the few poetic responses to 9/11 to avoid false consolation and the taint of catastrophe-exploitation. “I took a walk on Liberty Street today. Only it was not the same place as I had known before,” the poet reports from Lower Manhattan. He narrates what he sees, thinks and hears, repeating at intervals the chilling refrain, “They thought they were going to heaven.” Because Battery Park is closed, “it’s impossible to get to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” Meanwhile, “At Pier A on the Battery, there are two giant Apple ‘Think Different’ ads with blown-up pictures of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, who preside over the scene with unflinching incomprehension.”
“Unflinching incomprehension” seems the right phrase for the way Americans watched the events of 9/11, and also for our country’s simplistic, war-justifying stance toward complicated geopolitics. The hijackers are “Not cowards. Men of principle” but “No one deserves to die this way. I think that goes without saying and yet I feel compelled to say it.” How to respond to the events is on Bernstein’s mind. He invokes “Ozymandias,” Shelley’s sonnet about the remains of the statue of an ancient ruler, borrowing and corrupting a phrase from Shelley, “These vast and hollow trunks of steel,” to describe the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Toward the poem’s end, Bernstein says, “The question isn’t is art up to this but what else is art for?” I can think of a lot of things art might be for, including — taking a cue from “All the Whiskey in Heaven” — documentation, commemoration, celebration, satire, theory mongering, genuine sentiment. But Bernstein refuses the responsibility of having the last word on this century’s most vicious and problematic tragedy, instead quoting “Ozymandias” again with tremendous resonance to end his own poem: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’m not sure whether art is up to the task of dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath. I do know that this calculating, improvisatory, essential poet won’t tell you the truth wrapped up in a neat little package. He might show it to you when you’re least expecting it.
Daisy Fried’s most recent book of poems is “My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again.”
