Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry, ed. Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 230 pp. $34.95.


Reading the Difficulties is another spring 2014 release in the Modern/Contemporary Poetics series co-edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. It is less a book about how to read ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry than one that presents examples of readers doing that. The subtitle, “dialogues with contemporary American innovative poetry,” suggests that “reading” can involve having “dialogues” with poems, and is a fair description of most of the contents. Two of the twelve essays are on Canadian poets, bpNichol and Lisa Robertson, who appear to have become honorary Americans for this occasion. Or perhaps “American” has been unconsciously redefined here as referencing North America – the rapid globalization of literary distribution and creation has complications for everyone. Also frequently cited here is a third Canadian, Steve McCaffery.

Difficult not to notice is the sometimes awkwardly close connection between the book and series co-editor Bernstein, who rather famously linked the word ‘difficulty’ to his own writing in his 2011 collection The Attack of the Difficult Poems. Much of the first third of this book reads like a tribute that important book. The lead-off contribution is his 2006 poem “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem.” The fourth essay is a comparison by Stephen Paul Miller of Bernstein and Walter Benjamin as radical secular Jewish poets. Thirty-three mentions of Bernstein are listed in the index (mostly in the first 50 pages), more than double those of any other writer except for fellow Language poet Ron Silliman who receives 23.   

The arguments of most of the contributors indeed have their roots in Bernstein’s assertions over the years in work such as The Artifice of Absorption (1987) and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-84 (2001) against the reduction by readers and teachers of literary works to their “content” – a scandalizing argument that has paralleled in the US poetry scene the one which I introduced to the Canadian Literature criticism scene in 1974 with my (“vastly influential” according to the Oxford Companion [one hopes!]) essay “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Paralleled with rather more panache, disruptive force and literary consequence, I would say. Here is some of Bernstein’s “artifice of absorption” argument against paraphrase, i.e. against throwing away a text’s materiality while “absorbing” its imagined/abstracted “meaning”:

Contemporaries and Snobs by Laura Riding. Ed. Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2014. 129 pp. $34.95


Contemporaries and Snobs was first published by Doubleday Doran in 1928, during the period  (1925-30) of Riding’s most influential presence in the international high modernist writing scene. It was a time in which she published poetry and commentary in major modernist journals, was in contact with Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot, lived with Robert Graves and co-wrote with Graves A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), which the editors of this volume describe as the “first formal study to consider the work of E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Conrad Aitken, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, T.S. Eliot, John Crow Ransom, Edith Sitwell, and Allen Tate as a single movement” (xi).

There is no surprise in its being republished: it’s an important document not only of the male dominance of that literary scene but also of the conflicts within it that are often understated in literary histories. There is perhaps some mystery in it being republished within Alabama’s   “Modern/Contemporary” Poetics series edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. Is there a connection being implied between the literary politics of the 1920s and those of recent US poetry? Are Riding’s acid criticisms of Eliot’s self-canonizing essays and her perceptive readings of Stein being reframed in order also to reframe the various works of Language poets?

However what could impress a reader first in Riding’s book is how distant her assumptions are from those in contemporary poetry. While challenging Eliot’s emphasis on ridding poetry of the personal and subjective, his stress on impersonality, she also readily accepts his implication that literature and literary periods can be only classical or romantic, and uses it to construct a history of English literature and Western culture as an oscillation of classical and

Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century was first published in a hardbound edition by the University of Chicago Press in 2010, but was made available last fall in an inexpensive full-size paperback. The book is printed on heavy photographic paper to accommodate its numerous images, some of them in colour. Perloff, for those who don’t follow “poetry by other means,” has been for the past two decades the most influential global scholar of alternative poetries – aka the avant-garde.

Thirty years ago I presented a paper at McGill in which I lamented that term for its apparent linearity, like an army on the march, and quoted Baudelaire’s mistrust of its overt militarism. Perloff here offers a strong case for retaining both it and its category, positing a historical avant-garde that began in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century and which developed until approximately 1916 when it began to be overwhelmed by the Great War, the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War and the conservative expressive poetics all four events encouraged. The recovery of that avant-garde, and the creation of new poetries built on its methods of appropriation, quotation, collage and montage, are what she finds to be simultaneously both avant-garde and arrière-garde today. A military avant-garde usually has an accompanying arrière-garde, she points out, writing “[w]hen an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty, it is the role of the arrière-garde to complete its mission, to ensure its success. The term arrière-garde, then, is synonymous neither with reaction nor with nostalgia for a lost and more desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the 'hidden face of modernity' (Marx 6)" (53). 

She declines the association of “progress” with both “avant-garde” or any intellectual movement, including the ethical progress often claimed for literature by post-colonial theorists (in Canada see Diana Brydon in “Canada and Postcolonialism” 64  and Pauline Butling in Writing in Our Time 122), implying that the most that literature can aim to accomplish socially is to be formally relevant to its cultural moment (53).

Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s twenty-first poetry collection, released this past month by the University of Chicago Press. The title, plus the cover image of a man looking down to his right as he drives and his female passenger looking somewhat anxiously ahead, not too subtly alerts the reader to a metaphoric invocation of the currently ubiquitous GPS navigator. The image, arrestingly anachronistic in the 1950s hat, scarf and tie that the man wears, suggests the traditional heterosexual couple, with the man driving, the woman subject to his driving; I was reminded that I have my in-car GPS set to speak to me in a woman’s voice. I was also, most likely along with many readers, prompted to begin looking for what might be being recalculated in Bernstein’s poetics. For over the years Bernstein’s poems have been mostly illuminations of poetry itself, and of language usage.

However the image of the couple on the cover also reminded me, as I’m fairly sure I was intended to be, of the couple that Bernstein is a part of, with his partner, the artist Susan Bee, and of their shockingly unexpected loss at age 23 of their artist and art-theorist daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, in 2008. Indeed, five pages in, the book begins with a epigraph page topped by a tribute passage by Bernstein’s friend and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry colleague, Bob Perelman, to Emma. Page 11 bears another epigraph from Emma’s own writings, one that seems uncannily to allude to the cover image: “ ... put your hands on the wheel ... look only as far as the blur of passing yellow lines to see the present .” The personal note that all this strikes is itself unexpected in a Bernstein book – a Bernstein who has repeatedly asserted that poetry is about itself, and about language. Was this also being recalculated? However, perhaps a reader should also remember that when the GPS voice tells you it is “recalculating” it’s not telling you that you are changing your destination – only that you are now about to take a new, and unexpected, route toward it.

The opening poem of the book, “Autopsychographia” – marked as having been based on one by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa – begins

  
     Poets are fakers
    Whose faking is so real
    They even fake the pain
    They truly feel  
    And for those of us so well read
    Those read pains feel O, so swell

The lines suggest a familiar Bernstein understanding of the lyric as a futile attempt at self-expression and sincerity – that language is always a representation that we might act on but whose authenticity is impossible to demonstrate. Although far from reconciling poetry and “pain,” the lines do point toward the numerous