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Reading Charles Bernstein RECALCULATING

5/7/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
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


reconsiderations that follow, as in the concluding lines of the next poem, “The Truth in Pudding”:  “Language is an event of the world, just as, for language users, the world is an event of language. Even the world is a word.” How we frame things in language influences how we remember, how we act, and in cultural contexts influences the directions to which we collectively drive history. The poem itself is an amusingly telling, or tellingly amusing, meditation on contemporary poetry and poetic practice, including on the practices of one “Professor B” worrying about his “worrisome ... worries.”

Despite the numerous references to Bernstein’s daughter’s 2008 death, Recalculating  itself encompasses a considerably longer period than 2008-2013. One of the book’s earliest poems, “Talk to Me,” dates from 1999 and “the recent NATO bombing of Belgrade” during Serbia’s violent attempts to suppress the Kosovar independence struggle. In moving toward thoughts of that war and of his dialogue with Serbian poet Dubravka Djuric about her realization, during the earlier Serbo-Croatian war, that poetics – “what images mean /how language works
/ how representation works” --  truly is political, Bernstein writes lines that should engage anyone involved in open-mic projects:
 
    In many ways the in-process writing through poetry is contained in
    the performance of poetry, the different ways in which
    a relatively fixed alphabetic work

    is said differently, is performed
   
    differently.

What, then, is recalculated in Recalculating? Well, this is the most international of Bernstein’s books – something quite interesting in view of the insularity of reference in most US poetry. As Bernstein writes in the above poem in another
amusing moment of self-insight,

    That’s the problem with poetry:
    I want other voices
    but I want them always to be

    My own other voice

Eleven of the poems here are translations from other languages, and a further six are derived from poems by poets who write in other languages. Of course one can see here the limitation of translation -- that's one of the implications, that it is usually into one’s own language, if not ones “own other voice.” One’s own culture is both a comfort-zone and a handicap.

For lyric poets, the pages 156, 157-9, 162-4, on which Bernstein presents writings, some precisely dated, which he did or seems to have done on days following his daughter’s death, should be especially instructive. I say “seems to have done” about some because part of the richness of these poems is that they signify far beyond reference.

FD

1 Comment
Best GPS
8/17/2017 10:53:00 am

This looks like a fun and interesting book. Its really fun tweaking and setting up a GPS system. In case you need a new one, you can go ahead and check this link http://topproducts.com/reviews/best-gps-navigation-system.htm. We offer wide range of GPS Navigator systems. We enjoyed your blog post, and we work for www.topproducts.com ‎and we will be putting your website in excel to come back later and bookmark. We thank you for your approval consideration. We are a good company, and we give back to the community, as we are not spam. We take the time to come to a few web pages like your, please and thank you. Rhea.

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    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

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