My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

106 THE VALUE OF SULFUR
part of an effort to conquer it. For to admit that there is wilderness, or
poetry, is to lose the battle to overcome it.
Why do things except for money, or sport, or family? This is something
that seems no longer obvious. & if you say civic, it still doesn't explain that
the community for which you may wish to speak has few voters or consumers,
or perhaps is only a figment of your imagination, or a vision of a
community that may sometime come to be. It still doesn't explain that the
community for which you speak may be a people that have vanished, or
been expelled, or vanquished. Our history is one of ghosts, whose voices
we can sometimes hear sighing in lines more often than not denied the status
of communication because they make too much sense, but sense of
the wrong kind.
Each of us is entitled to our taste and perhaps deserve it. There is no
point in disputing preferences, if presented as such. But it is another matter
when such preferences are stated with the inevitability of endless repetitions
of the same, when taste insists on its right to be proscriptive but
not to be challenged, or when statements of taste turn to arguments that
fundamentally distort the sources, motivations, and accomplishments,
whether of the radical modernists of the lOs and 20s, the New American
poets of the 50s and 60s, or poets today: decrying the absence of meaning
or decorum; the abandonment of coherence, sentiment, or emotion;
the loss of the music of traditional verse forms; and other various and
sundry excesses. Seventy-five years ago, it was the stance of many avantgarde
movements to proclaim just these feats, partly just to "bug the
squares". But these claims have grown tiresome over time and, in any case,
never really fit the work in whose name they were spoken, since really
what was rejected was not meaning or music or even literary "tradition"
but outworn, or no longer viable, ways of conceiving of them.
A poetry or poetics that is skeptical of fixed values will provoke a rather
constant denunciation as valueless. Such rebukes can be encouraging in
that they show the continuing need to rattle against the pieties of those
certain (if insecure) in their beliefs and complacent (if anxious) in their
condescension. An pro-vocative poetry will provoke those who would
shirk from their own responsibility to make values rather than mimic
them. The test of such a poetry is that it discomfits those who rely on an
exclusive claim to truth and authenticity in order to legitimate their practice.
As I have learned from my many years on my own private Borscht Belt,
people without a sense of humor do not laugh at jokes. And if you want
to survive in show business, don't let the hecklers get you down, make
them part of the show.
The poetry for which I correspond represents less a unified alternative