My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

l~e ~alue of Sulfur
For the past several years I have been a correspondent for Sulfur magazine.
Correspondent from where? I like to think of myself as the correspondent
from the outer reaches of language, because I think language, along with
outer space, is the last wilderness, the last frontier-our collective inner
space, as strange as the unexplored depths of the oceans, as wild as the
word Emily Dickinson proclaimed was language's wildest, just the one syllable,
NO.
Language is a wilderness that, unlike others, can never be conquered,
or exhausted; but it can be made to accommodate: to submit, assimilate,
compromise, deny. In contrast, I correspond for a poetry that dwells, without
disavowing-that is, that dwells in ways that may make readers anxious-not
only on the resplendent and difficult to contain, but also on the
disturbed, confused, broken, awkward, difficult, dark. This is a poetry
committed less to opposition than composition-a com(op )posing that values
inquiry above representation, resistance over adjudication. For a stubborn
aversion to the conventions of expression, even for the sake of the
aversion, can be necessary relief in a society that confuses palatability for
communication, packaging for style, tiny bytes of message for meaning.
In a culture where national political discourse religiously avoids complexity
and journalism swings maniacally from the parroting of PR releases to
the endless repetitions of the same rehearsed banalities (whether it be
celebrity interviews or the close-up faces of disaster victims), there is a
need for a poetry that is not just more of same. & this is a need that grows
in direct proportion to poetry's much-heralded denial, as in the cover story
of last month's Commentary (August 1988)-"Who Killed Poetryi'-an article
so proudly shallow that its only point seemed to be that it wished the
art of writing could be killed, as if poetry was some kind of weirdly persistent
mosquito that hovered around the author in the throes of composition:
call it language's conscience, its consciousness of itself.
In the face of smugness like this, it becomes necessary to insist on the
value of poetry that goes beyond the moralizing subjectivity that characterizes
so much of the verse of our time. Whether a poem is innovative or