Black History in 1880s Vancouver
London Open Mic Poetry Archive
  • Home
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Stan Burfield Blog
    • Fred Burfield's Homestead Memoirs
  • Our Events
  • News
  • PHOTOS & SUMMARIES
    • Season 5: 2016-2017 >
      • June 7th, 2017: Summary & Photos featuring Stan Burfield
      • May 3rd, 2017, Summary & Photos featuring Jason Dickson
      • April 5th, 2017 Summary & Photos, feeaturing James Deahl & Norma West Linder
      • Mar. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Andy Verboom
      • Feb. 1st, 2017: Photos & Summary featuring Ron Stewart
      • Dec. 7th, 2016: Photos & Summary featuring David Stones
      • Nov. 2th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring Don Gutteridge
      • Oct. 5th, 2016: Photos and Summary featuring David Huebert
    • Season 4: 2015-2016 >
      • June 1st, 2016: Photos and summaries: featuring Lynn Tait
      • May 4th, 2016 Photos and Summary: featuring indigenous poetry
      • April 6, 2016 Photos & Summary, featuring Steven McCabe
      • Mar. 2nd, 2016 photos, summary: featuring Andreas Gripp
      • Feb. 3rd, 2016 photos: 3 Western students.
      • Dec. 2, 2015 photos: featured reader Peggy Roffey
      • Nov. 7, 2015 photos: Our Words Fest open mic
      • Nov. 4, 2015 photos: featured reader Charles Mountford
      • Oct. 7th, 2015 photos: Madeline Bassnett featured
    • Season 3, 2014-15 >
      • Aug. 16, 2015 photos: The Ontario Poetry Society's "Sultry Summer Gathering"
      • June 3rd, 2015 photos: John B. Lee featured
      • May 6th, 2015 photos: Laurie D Graham featured
      • Apr. 1st, 2015 photos: John Nyman & Penn Kemp featured
      • Mar. 4th, 2015 photos: Patricia Black featured.
      • Feb. 4th, 2015 photos: feature Gary Barwin
      • Dec. 3rd, 2014 photos: Feature Debbie Okun Hill
      • Nov. 5th, 2014 photos: feature Julie Berry
      • Oct. 1st, 2014 photos: feature Roy MacDonald
    • Season 2, Sept. 2013 to June 2014. >
      • June 4th, 20114, featuring Monika Lee
      • May 7th 2014, featuring Susan McCaslin and Lee Johnson
      • Sept. 4th, 2013 featuring Frank Beltrano
      • April 16th, 2014, featuring Penn Kemp and Laurence Hutchman
      • March 5th, 2014, featuring Jacob Scheier
      • Feb. 5th, 2014: featuring four UWO students of poetry; music by Tim Woodcock
      • Jan. 2nd, 2014: featuring Carrie Lee Connel
      • Dec. 4th, 2013, featuring M. NourbeSe Philip
      • Nov. 6, 2013 , featuring Susan Downe
      • Oct. 2nd, 2013, featuring Jan Figurski
    • Season 1: Oct. 2012 to June 2013 >
      • June 4th, 2013 featuring David J. paul and the best-ever open mic
      • May 1st, 2013, featuring Sonia Halpern
      • Apr. 24, 2013 featuring Frank Davey & Tom Cull
      • Mar. 6th, 2013, featuring Christine Thorpe
      • Feb. 6th, 2013, featuring D'vorah Elias
      • Jan. 3rd. 2013: John Tyndall featured.
      • Dec. 5, 2012: RL Raymond featured
    • Dig These Hip Cats ... The Beats
  • Poet VIDEOS (open mic & featured readers)
    • 5th Season Videos (2016-2017)
    • 4th Season Videos (2015-16)
    • 3rd Season Videos (2014-2015)
    • 2nd Season (2013-2014) videos
  • BIOGRAPHIES - Featured poets & musicians
  • INTERVIEWS & POEMS (featured poets)
    • SEASON 6 - Interviews & Poems >
      • Kevin Shaw: Poem & Interview
      • David Janzen - Interview
    • SEASON 5 INTERVIEWS & POEMS
    • SEASON 4 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 3 INTERVIEWS AND POEMS
    • SEASON 2 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (only from Dec. 4th, 2013)
    • Season 1 INTERVIEWS & POEMS (& 1st half of Season 2) >
      • INTERVIEWS of Featured Poets
      • POEMS by Featured Poets (1st Season & to Nov. 2013)
  • Couplets: Poets in Dialogue
  • Future Events
  • Past Events
    • 5th Season: 2016-2017
    • Season 4: 2015-2016
    • Season 3: 2014-2015
    • Season Two: 2013-2014
    • Season One: 2012-2013
  • Who we Are
  • Testimonial
  • Our Mission
  • Links
  • Contact us
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • Frank Davey Blog
  • New Page

Bernstein's More Perfect Pitch of Poetry

4/4/2016

4 Comments

 
Picture
Pitch of Poetry, by Charles Bernstein. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 350 pp. $34.44.

Here Charles Bernstein is pitching poetry, pitching for poetry, and describing both the acoustic and visual pitch of poetry, and the field, the pitch, of poetry. He’s at once a shill, a carney, a huckster, a used-poem salesperson, a showman, a shaman, a promoter, a master of ceremonies, a promoter, a provocateur, a pitch-man – but only occasionally an apologist. The likes of Sophocles, Longinus, and Sydney all beat him to it, but it’s never too late to pitch again for poetry. A relief pitcher. Plato and his followers have kept hitting dingers. Bernstein is and wants to be the reason the poets were expelled from the Republic. He reads askance the ‘official verse’ poets who have tried not be expelled.

In one possible reading this book is 350 pages of Whitman saying “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” For Bernstein, Poetry contains multitudes. He spurns poetry that is orthodox, normal, conventional, predictable, standard. “I can’t bear standards,” he writes, “or, rather, I want to lay them bare” (28). He describes the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E that he co-founded with fellow poet Bruce Andrews in 1978 as having “pursued a poetry aversive to convention, standardization, and received forms, often prizing eccentricity, oddness, abrupt shifts of tone, peculiarity, error, and the abnormal – poetry


that begins in disability.... This is what I call the pataquerical imperative (a syncretic term suggesting weirdness, wildness, and precarious querulousness by combining inquiry with ’pataphysics...)” (76-77). Several times here interviewers attempt to ‘trap’ Bernstein in contradictions. Houdini-like, he ‘shimmies’ away: Allison Cummings asks: “Inevitably, certain things end up being promoted as the best experimental writing because they are best known. Does your own role as prominent critic and poet help normalize certain values of tastes.” Bernstein responds with a long answer dotted with flagrant oxymorons.

                I think it might be more accurate to say that I have helped pervert certain values of taste rather than
        normalize them; perhaps it amounts to much the same thing. But then, as you know, I have always been
        as hung up on the sin in sincere as the verse in perverse.”
                But don’t let me shimmy my way out of this one – only, please, don’t throw me back into that briar patch.”
        ...
               ... if I question evaluative language, how can I say, as I just did, “one of the most important...”? .... But do
        we really have time now to get into such a complicated question? I mean before lunch?”
                In any case, flippancy is the gamma gobulin of poetic minds. (Or then again, maybe not.) (190-91)


One of the major Bernstein essays reprinted here is his 2012 explanation of the magazine  L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (reprinted from the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature). In tone (or ‘pitch’) it’s an anomalous inclusion, solemn, seemingly factual, unironically discursive among its wild, witty and pataquerulous companions. As a result some of it seems anxious and defensive, especially remarks such as “all [the poets] were deeply affected by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s” (66) – i.e. why wouldn't they have been? – or that not all “the poets involved were free of the effects of misogyny among ourselves and in our culture” (67) – i.e. it would be surprising if any were "free of the effects of misogyny." It can be unsettling to be asked to canonize one’s own literary movement – but Bernstein is unlikely (and why not?) to refuse the opportunity. 

Another important inclusion is a long meditation on the difficulty of artistic representation “after Auschwitz”: “This Picture Intentionally Left Blank.” The 1949 Theodor Adorno observation that first articulated this crisis, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch,” which appears to say, literally, that “after Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric,” has been widely understood as saying “to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.” It’s a translation that, perhaps deliberately, made the observation easy to dismiss. I’ve seen two problematical words there: both Gedicht and barbarisch. What (in 1949) did Adorno understand as ‘poetry’? And isn’t ‘amoral’ a more plausible translation of the metaphorical barbarische than ‘impossible’? The barbarism of the Third Reich has continued to be all too possible.

Bernstein greets Adorno’s statement with an out-of-left-field pitch of his own, when he includes  barbaric among the Blakean ‘kingly titles’ (along with perverse, girly [as in his collection Girly Man], odd, weird, eccentric, erroneous,  twisted, foreign) that he lists at the back of the book as the “Primary Vernacular Terms (Pejoratives)” he has adopted in his poetics. (He tells interviewer Eric Denut that such “epithets are OK by me; I think it’s best to take on their negativity, to wear such stigmas as badges of honor” [204]). In the book overall, it appears that poetry nach Auschwitz for Bernstein is best “disruptive, contentious, inchoate” (51), “extravagant” (59), “aversive to convention” (76), “prizing [of] eccentricity, oddness, abrupt shifts of tone, peculiarity, error, and the abnormal ... weirdness, wildness” (77), “weird, queer, and extreme” (240), “unattractive, disagreeable, low” (277), “mired in inability and disorientation” (278), “bent” (293), “nutty” (299). In this post Second World War essay, he implies that poetry and art are both, post-Auschwitz, at best non-descriptive, “occulted, shredded” (41) embracing of cultural and linguistic “miscegenation” (44)  “ghostly” (45), “thick” (46), self-aware: “punch ... holes in their [own] representations” (34) – be unconstrained by the conventions and decorums which concealed and normalized the attitudes which enabled the Holocaust. Such art, he argues, is “more perfect” (34) than the adroitly conventional. It’s a clever gambit, not only because it’s consistent with Bernstein’s understanding of his own poetry and poetics, but also because it causes both Gedicht and barbarische to be retranslated: To write poetry as one did before Auschwitz would be meaningless, an empty gesture. “To write poetry after the Second War,” he translates, “is to accept that barbarism is before us, staring us in the face” (44).

A third essay that makes this book worth having is the previously unpublished  “The Pataquerical Imagination” which occupies most of the concluding 60 pages. This is the essay that outlines where Bernstein’s evolving “bent” poetics have brought him, and articulates most cogently his belief that poets and poetics must have “pitch” – must have ‘attitude’ on how language works and what values are worth writing for.

Overall this is an openly makeshift collection – a descriptor Bernstein might well take as a further kingly compliment. It bundles essays from different periods and in different discourses, with twelve  interviews (in a 106-page section punningly titled “Echopoetics”), and 17 short notes or book reviews focused mostly on other prominent oppositional writers – Stein, Zukofsky, Olson, Celan, Mac Low, Blaser, Creeley, Ashbery, de Campos, Rothenberg, Scalapino, Drucker. The title of this 107-page section is “Pitch” – these are endorsement essays – pitches for other pitches.

FD


4 Comments
Tony Green link
4/8/2016 10:18:00 pm

nice inevention/typo 'gobulin' - globulin meets goblin

Reply
Hubnames link
4/13/2016 06:06:52 pm

Good reading post. Thank for share this

Reply
nsf bottoms link
12/13/2017 07:44:41 am

Yes i am totally agreed with this article and i just want say that this article is very nice and very informative article.I will make sure to be reading your blog more. You made a good point but I can't help but wonder, what about the other side? !!!!!!THANKS!!!!!!

Reply
Looking for Friends Washington link
11/8/2022 07:22:20 am

Hello mmate great blog

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    FRANK DAVEY: Poet, former Coach House Press editor, co-founder of TISH newsletter in 1961, co-founder of e-mag Swift Current in 1984, editor of poetics journal Open Letter, 'author' of Bardy Google in 2010 (Talonbooks), author of the tell-much biography of bpNichol, aka bpNichol in 2012 (ECW), and author of the recently published poetry collection Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (Mansfield). He has two other websites: a personal one at FrankDavey.net and one (co-managed with David Rosenberg) focused on poet bpNichol at  akabpNichol.net -- have a look!

    Postal Address: Books for review or other mail may be sent to FD at OPEN LETTER, 102 Oak Street, Strathroy, ON N7G 3K3, Canada

    -Bio/interview by 'Open Book'
    -Shorter bio/interview
    -Biography, online

    Categories

    All
    Adeena Karasick
    Agnes Threlkeld
    Aka Bpnichol
    Alan Edward McCartney
    Alan Reed
    Alice Munro
    Al Purdy
    Amodern
    Art Deco
    Artist's Homes
    Avant Garde
    Avant-garde
    Barack Obama
    Barbara Godard
    Barnicke Gallery
    Basil Bunting
    Battle
    Beauty
    Bill Bissett
    'Black Mountain'
    Bookthug
    BpNichol
    Buddhist Ecopoetics
    Canada At War
    Canadian Art
    Canadian Literature
    Canadian Pacific Railway
    Canadian War Lit
    CanLit Institution
    CanLit Teaching
    Ceramics
    Charles Bernstein
    Charles Olson
    Charles Olson
    Christian Bok
    Christine Miscione
    Christl Verduyn
    Climate Change
    Coach House Press
    Cold War
    Collaboration
    Conceptual Art In Britain
    Conceptual Poetry
    Concrete Poetry
    Creative Writing
    Daphne Marlatt
    Dennis Cooley
    Derek Beaulieu
    Devil's Artisan
    Donato Mancini
    Earle Birney
    Ecopoetry
    Emily Carr
    Epistolary Poems
    Eternal Network
    Eva Zeisel
    Ezra Pound
    Fetish Objects
    First World War
    Flarf
    Fluxus
    Frank Sanderson
    Franz Karl Stanzel
    Fred Wah
    Garry Thomas Morse
    General Idea
    George Bowering
    Gertrude Stein
    Greg Curnoe
    Gwendolyn MacEwen
    Gwynne Dyer
    Hart House
    Identity
    Indigenous Poetics
    Industrial Poetry
    Installation Art
    Irving Layton
    Jackson Mac Low
    Jacqueline Du Pasquier
    James Schuyler
    John Cage
    J.R. Colombo
    Judy Chicago
    Juliana Spahr
    Julian Assange
    Jussi Parikka
    Kathryn Mockler
    Kenneth Goldsmith
    Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
    Kit Dobson
    Language Poetry
    Laura Farina
    Laura Riding
    Lea Hindley-Smith
    Lemon Hound
    Leonard Cohen
    Lionel Kearns
    Lisa Anne Smith
    Lisa Robertson
    Literary Celebrity
    Literary Marketing
    Lola Tostevin
    Louis Dudek
    Louise Bourgeois
    Louis Zukofsky
    Love Letters
    Lyric Poetry
    Lytle Shaw
    Manifestos
    Mansfield Press
    Margaret Atwood
    Marjorie Perloff
    Max Laeuger
    Media Archaeology
    Michael Davidson
    Michael Morris
    Michael Ondaatje
    Mimesis
    Mina Loy
    Minimalism
    Misogyny In Poetry
    Modernism
    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
    National Anthologies
    Nelson Ball
    Norman Yates
    Open Letter
    Pataphysics
    Paul Martin
    Peter Jaeger
    Peter-quartermain
    Philippe Petain
    Phyllis Webb
    Pierre Coupey
    Poetic Community
    Poetics
    Poetry Readings
    Procedural Art
    Public Poetics
    Pussy Riot
    Pussy Riot
    Rachel Blau Duplessis
    Rae Armantrout
    Robert Creeley
    Robert Duncan
    Robert Fitterman
    Robert Kroetsch
    Robert Lallemant
    Robert Lecker
    Ron Silliman
    Second World War
    Sharon Thesen
    Sherrill Grace
    Slavoj Žižek
    Smaro Kamboureli
    Stan Bevington
    Stan Dragland
    Stephen Voyce
    Steve Mccaffery
    Susan Bee
    Swiftcurrent
    Telidon
    Thea Bowering
    The Martyrology
    Theodor Adorno
    Tim Inkster
    TISH
    Tomson Highway
    Toronto Research Group
    Trg
    T.S. Eliot
    U-331
    U-Boat Surrenders
    Us Fiction
    Vimy Ridge
    Vincent Massey
    Visual Poetry
    Walter Benjamin
    Warren Tallman
    W.C. Williams
    Weardale
    Wikileaks

    Archives

    January 2022
    September 2020
    August 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly