My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

"PASSED BY EXAMINATION" 103
Here is blank reason' 7
The "savage" that we have conquered in the name of civilization is ourselves.
We all wear moccasins. IS The captivity narrative is the story of our
own language held hostage, divided against itself; except when we sometimes
return to it: in dreams, in the inarticulate sounds-the hiss-of "history",
in poems such as these that bloom in the dark, sick from the blinding
light of the sun ("heliopathy" a kind of sunsickness).
disputation in dominion beyond sovereign.· 9
"The secret history of the dividing line" is that our "enclosure acts", which
we have long concealed (longed to conceal) from ourselves, need to be
overthrown, thrown out, "defenestrated". You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell /
Where you leave off and I begin.20 Our language is always a "Western Border"
if we push through, mark suns rising & setting 2 I ... [espy] bounds to leop over.22
Poetry as a displacement of the "sovereignty" of the crown or law allowing
for some other order, call it dominion.
Freedom's dominion of possible. 23
salvages / or / savages:24 either we salvage the past, make it a present, or we
are disappeared, marked off, banished to the dark.
Complicity battling redemption: 25 either we own up to-take responsibility
for-examine-our grammars as much as our histories-or we remain
guilty for them.
The Great Crossing
we marched with drums beating and colors jlying26
Howe weaves at the tears in the all-too-violent fabric that imparts national
identity to America. She sings of origins & hears the blanks firing in the
night of her exploding syllables.
17. "Heliopathy", p. 50.
IS. Ibid., p. 46.
19. Articulation, p. 2S.
20. "Thorow", p. 5S.
21. "Heliopathy", p. 50.
22. Articulation, p. 9.
23. Ibid., p. 27.
24. Secret History, p. 91.
25. "Thorow", p. 55.
26. Secret History, p. 117.