POETRY The syntactician'ssong -...

POETRY 21

The syntactician's song

Por nearly forty years Charles Bernsteinhas been one ofAmerican poetry's mostspirited iconoclasts, a tireless and re­

sourceful foe of "Official Verse Culture" andall who deploy, without the requisite lashingsof irony, the much-derided "lyric I".Co-founder in 1978 with Bruce Andrewsof the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,Bernstein has been at the forefront ofa vast andvaried phalanx ofAmerican poetic experimen­talists, and a key exponent of the values andpractices of what has come to be known asLanguage writing. Members of this groupwere initially published by small presses suchas Roof Books or Burning Deck or Sun &Moon, but are now often found on the lists ofcommercial publishers such as Farrar, Strausand Giroux - who issued Bernstein's SelectedPoems in the United States in 2010 - oruniversity presses such as Chicago andCalifornia. Indeed, one can now see thatLanguage writing offers an almost text­book example of a successful avant-gardemovement, first defining itself in scornfulopposition to the dominant pedagogical andpublishing institutions, and then invading, or,as it might seem to some, being co-opted bythem. (Bernstein has taught at Columbia,Brown, Buffalo and Princeton, and is currentlyDonald T. Regan Professor at the Universityof Pennsylvania.)

All the Whiskey in Heaven opens with a fewpages from Asylums (1975), a long poementirely coIlaged from a book by ErvingGoffman, also called Asylums, on the socialsituation ofmental patients (1961). Bernstein'spoem was originally produced on a manualtypewriter, and circulated in a stapled edition ofa few dozen (a facsimile, it goes without say­ing, is now available online). While this grun­gy, samizdat format signalled Bernstein'saffiliations with the mimeograph culture of theLower East Side poetry scene of the late 1960sand early 70s, its subject matter, evokingMichel Foucault and the need to understandsocial systems of classification and control,pointed to a striking difference between Lan­guage writing and the hedonistic, dandyishaspects of the New York School, orthe utopianideals of the Beats: Language poets knew theirliterary theory, and Bernstein, who studiedphilosophy at Harvard under Stanley Cavell,saw poetry as a means oftransforming attitudesto language and society, rather than in campcompetition with Hollywood movies, in themanner ofFrank O'Hara - who once observed,with a sly nick of the wrist, that "in a capitalistcountry, fun is everything".

That's not to say that there is no fun to be hadfrom this Selected Poems, which offers a smor­gasbord of disruptive techniques, verbal dis­tortion and extravagant pastiche, as well asmuch literary knockabout, my favourite quipbeing Bernstein's version of a famous phrasefrom T. S. Eliot's essay on Philip Massinger:"Immature poets borrow. Mature poets in­vest". Culled from nineteen chapbooks andvolumes, it also makes one aware of the manytraditions Bernstein inherited, and set aboutschrnearing into his ongoing critique of thetreacherous linguistic, economic and psychiccircuitry of late capitalism. Dadaist fragmen­tation, the Modernist manifesto, Olsonian

MARK FORD

Charles Bernstein

ALL THE WHISKEY IN HEA VENSelected poems

320pp. Salt. Paperback, £14.99.978 I 907773 30 3

RECALCULA TINGI 84pp. University of Chicago Press.

£ 16 (US $25).978 0 226 92528 8

William Allegrezza, editor

THE SALT COMPANION TOCHARLES BERNSTEIN

388pp. Salt. Paperback, £ 19.99 (US $29.95).978 I 84471 485 8

open field poetics, Ashberian abstraction, theWhitrnanian catalogue, the Ginsbergian directaddress, Brechtian "anti-absorptive" aliena­tion techniques, Oulipian constraints, phon­etic Pound-speak, and experiments withdoggerel that would have made even WilliamMcGonagall's t1esh creep: all are deployed inBernstein's ferocious assault on the status quo.

It is not surprising, given the centrality ofcertain developments in theory to his poeticpractices, that one can map Bernstein's workso neatly onto the concerns of theory-orientat­ed criticism; Bernstein is, after all, the author ofShadowtime (2005), a "thought opera" basedon the life and work of Walter Benjamin.Accordingly, the essays gathered in The SaltCompanion to Charles Bernstein tend towardsa celebration of the guerrilla tactics with whichhe attempts to undermine linguistic conven­tions rather than antithetical readings, orevalu­ative assessments ofparticularpoems or books.

The essay I found most interesting was byPaul Stephens, who explores Bernstein's use ofthe sophist-figure, a use that builds onMichel de Certeau's definition of sophism as"the dialectics of tactics". Ancient Greeksophists taught rhetoric, but also becamebywords for deceitfulness and artificiality;Bernstein's express mission is not only tohighlight the deceitfulness and artificiality ofall the discourses we inhabit, especially thosethat claim to be grounded in sincerity or com­mon sense or truth, but also to unpick poetry'sclaims to some superior linguistic realm:"think of me as a snake-oil salesman", he onceremarked, "a confidence-man". His volumeThe Sophist (1987) includes a poem entitled"Amblyopia", the technical term for lazy eye,and Bernstein's work might be said to bemotivated by the desire to bring to ourattention the distorted vision that results fromall attempts to feel at home in language. InA Poetics, published a year before The Sophist,he defined the ideal "syntactitian" as alinguistic nomad living in a state ofvigilant andradical provisionality, as, in Stephens's phrase,"an itinerant teacher of tactics rather than ofunconditional truths".

The syntactitian's tactics must of coursechange in response to developments on theground - or in the air. "And then", as BarackObama wrote in his preface to Dreams fromMy Father, "on September 11, 2001, the worldfractured." Bernstein, having spent his poetic

Charles Bernstein at the InventingAbstraction exhibition, MOMA,

New York, April 3, 2013

career up to that point orchestrating variouskinds of linguistic fracture, adopted a set ofcompletely antithetical tactics, offering in"Report from Liberty Street", begun a weekafter the attacks, a reportage-style descriptionof the destruction of the Twin Towers and themourning and anger that followed, punctuatedby the italicized refrain, "They thought theywere going to heaven". Reading this piece, it'shard to locate the sophist-figure inviting asceptical take on the journalistic language ofcrisis-response:

One of the most affecting sites is at the TimesSquare subway station. Around the cold tile col­

umns in the central atrium of the station, peoplehave put up dozens of homemade signs, eachwith the picture of someone. They say missing­not in the sense of "looking for", but rather

feeling the loss. The grief surrounding thesecolumns is overwhelming and we look on as ifhit by a wave of turbulence.

A number of references to Shelley's"Ozymandias" suggest an analogy betweenthe hubris of the American empire and thatof the long-vanished king of kings. "Reportfrom Liberty Street", in other words, isemotive and descriptive and allusive in a prettytraditional manner, registering trauma in astyle that is indifferent to the fracturing verbalstrategies of the "syntactician", or the notionsof "meta-irony" so prized by Bernstein'scommentators.

The dramatization ofstates ofuncertainty in"Report from Liberty Street" is uncharacteris­tic of Bernstein's normally provocative andconfident, even didactic, modes of address.9111 and the War on Terror that followed un­doubtedly expanded the range ofgenres that hefelt might serve his purpose, and in pieces suchas "War Stories", a set of somewhat Emerso­nian aphorisms ("War is the world's betrayalof the earth's plenitude .... War is revenge onthe wrong person"), or the very Brechtian "TheBallad of the Girly Man", both published in2006, we find him jousting with the powersthat be in language comprehensible to anyone:

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store

The rich get licher, the poor die quicker& the only god that sanctions thatIs no god at all but rhetorical crap

The poem's title is an allusion to ArnoldSchwarzenegger, at the 2004 RepublicanNational Convention, denigrating his oppo­nents as "girly men"; re-angling the termsomewhat in the manner of gay theoristsappropriating the word "queer", Bernsteinapplies "girly men" to all those who opposethe war in Iraq:

So be a girly man& sing this gurly songSissies & proudThat we would never lie our way to war

In such a poem the all-conquering self­consciousness of the syntactitian finds its ownpeculiar ground zero.

Recalculating is Bernstein's first full collec­tion since Girly Man (2006), and reveals himresponding to a more personal tragedy, thesuicide of his daughter at the age of twenty­three. "I was the luckiest of fathers in the world/ until I turned unluckiest", begins one of thepieces written in the aftermath of the death ofEmma, who is commemorated in the book'sepigraph. Recalculating includes inventiveversions of poems by Baudelaire, Mandel­stam, Apollinaire, Celan and Catullus, but thefinest of Bernstein's translations is a ravish­ingly simple rendition of Victor Hugo's elegyfor his daughter Leopoldine, who drowned ina boating accident on the Seine in 1843. Hereis Bernstein's translation of the middle quat­rain of "Demain, des l'aube ... ":

I will be walking with my eyes fixed on mythoughts,

Without looking around, without hearing asound.

Alone and unknown, with back bent, with my

hands crossed.Sad, and the day for me will be like the night.

Almost as affecting is a looser version of thefirst half of Gerard de Nerval's "El Desdicha­do", that makes light but deft use of the Oulipi­an technique of homophonic translation, "LePrince d' Aquitaine ala tour abolie" becoming"Smashes in the blackened sun of torn alibi".

"Recalculating" is the term some satnavsystems use when you take a wrong turn, andthe journey has to be replotted. The title poemof the volume is a set of aphorisms and vi­gnettes that range from "The Jew is a textualconstruction" to "We aced the shit out of thatasshole" to "It was a fork in the road, but he hadalways favored spoons ... ". For allhis earnest­ness of purpose, there has often been aGroucho as well as a Karl Marx element toBernstein's poetics, a belief that humour is aslikely to open the doors of perception as po­lemic. Like the Ginsberg of, say, "America",Bernstein enjoys launching burlesque riffs onserious topics, as in a poem such as "Strike!":

Strike because the Supreme Court is jerry­rigged, its justice without honor.

Strike because Murdoch and Berlusconi makeBig Brother seem like chopped liver.

Strike because it's not fun to tango alone.Strike because you've been on hold for longer

than you can remember and want to hang upwithout losing your place in the queue.

Strike because it's nearly as effective as Prozac.

The poem delivers 112 reasons for striking,but fortunately there seems little likelihoodthat its author will be withdrawing his ownpoetic labour any time soon: "Strike", it con­cludes, "because you want to sing this song".

TLS NOVEMBER 22 2013