My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

96 FRAME LOCK
iean Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, are the most prominent---emphasize
contemporary poetry written in a single-VOice confessional mode that
already seems to have been translated into the prevailing idiom of the
anthologies themselves. This stylistic discrimination entails the rejection
of works that challenge the idea that English is a transparent medium that
can represent cultural experience as if it were information (already had a
form). The result is that both formally innovative work and work in nonstandard
forms of English are marginalized.
I could go on.
Can Continental philosophy be understood in the absence of Continental
literature? Or does Continental philosophy without Continental
literature equal American literary theory?
Disciplinary boundaries serve more to cordon off areas of knowledge
than to encourage students to search through a wide range of historical
writers and thinkers and art practices. I would like to see the direction of
undergraduate English programs in American universities move expansively
toward the world rather than more parochially toward the literature
of England and its linguistic heirs. While I suppose one could argue that
people in the U.S. might have a special reason to know about the history
and literature of the U.S. (though possibly North America would be the
better frame), I can't see giving priority to the literature of England as
opposed to the literature of the other European countries-or indeed
other places in the world. English majors usually major in English not
because of special interest in England but because of a more general interest
in literature, writing, art, the humanities, or the history of ideas. English
is the host language of their study. It's not as if students are likely to
encounter Li Po or Soupault elsewhere in their studies-much less the
Popul Yuh or Sappho. And, if that's so, it's hard to see how the line can be
usefully drawn without including the "other" arts, and works from cultures
that do not identify their cultural productions by proper names. Jerome
Rothenberg's and Pierre Joris's Poems for the Millennium: The University of California
Book of Modern Poetry goes a long way toward redressing this problem.
But I digress. I came here to talk paragraphs.
I like the idea of a paragraph developing its own internal logiC, pushing a
stretch of thought, turning around a term, considering a particular angle
on a problem.
But it's the shift from paragraph to paragraph that creates the momentum,
with the jump varying from almost indiscernible to a leap. My
method of teaching, as much as writing, is to place one thing side by side