My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

THE V A L U E 0 F S U L FUR 107
poetics than a series of sometimes contentiously related tendencies, or
proclivities, and, especially, shared negations (concerted rejections) of
American official verse culture. For truly these projects-in-Ianguage are not
restricted or exclusive; there is no limit to those who can, or have, or will
participate in this work, which is open-ended and without proscriptions:
not a matter of Proper Names but of Works, and perhaps not even a matter
of works but of how readers read them. And maybe those who say that
the mainstream is a projection, or desperate posturing, and that these
alternate, alternating, traditions are the active matrix of American poetry,
are right. For official verse culture, now as always, is under siege, undermining
itself, and able to occupy only a tiny table at the banquet of culture:
decked with medals and pride but notably less positioned for access
to the stage than many of its designated, and undesignated, others.
Just now in North America there is an intense density of poetic activity,
so that it becomes difficult to keep up with all the work that excites
interest and involvement. The work about which I wish to correspond
tends to be preoccupied with finding the possibilities for articulation of
meanings that are too often denied or repressed by a (multinational) culture
that we are always being subjected to, that we are indeed subjects of,
and which, moreover, can be understood as its nowhere explicated subject:
Poetry which is political not primarily in its subject matter, or representation
of political causes, however valuable that may be, but in the form
and structure and style of the poems, and in the attitude toward language.
Against the onslaught of a pervasive, and facile, insistence that there is
no escape from the simulations of commodity culture, it becomes political
to hold out for meaning: not the meaning that is the prepackaged message
of an authorized and syntactically normalized, grammatical, decorum;
but an always active, probing consideration of meaning as social,
corporeal, multidimensional; a meaning that is not fixed but acted out in
imperfect, asymmetric counterpoint to the labors that simultaneously
engender each day.