My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

INTROJECTIVE VERSE 111
one the poem refuses. (It is much more, for example, this backward somersaulting,
than simply such a one as Wilde put, so giddily, to get us
startled: life imitates art, not the other way round. Come on, girls & boys,
think complex, act to redistribute the wealth!)
(2) is the abandonment of principle, the ludicrousness that presides so conspicuously
over such dysraphisms, and, when averred, is the reason why
an introjective poem refuses belief. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE
THAN AN EXTENSION OF MALCONTENT. There it went, flapping,
more USELESSNESS.
Now (2) the clumsiness of the thing, how the awkwardness of the thing
can be made to dishevel the energies that the form thought it accomplished.
It can never be boiled down to a statement: ONE PERCEPTION
MUST NEVER LEAD DIRECTLY TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION. It
means something very different than what it says, is never a matter of, at
no points, (even-I shouldn't say-of our injuring reality as our weekly
bliss) get off it, invoke arrestation, keep out of it, slow down, the perceptions,
ours, the evasions, the long-term evasions, none of it, stop it as much
as you can, citizen. And if you also slouch as a poet, REFUSE REFUSE
REFUSE the process at some points, in some poems, once in a blue while:
one perception STOPPED, SLOWED, BY ANOTHER!
So there we were, looping, where there's no dogma. And its inexcusableness,
its uselessness, in theory. Which doesn't get us, ought not to get
us, outside the cyberfactory, then, or 1995, where centripetal verse is
made.
If I sing tunelessly-if I forget, and keep crying wolf, out of breath-of the
sound as distinguished from the voice, it is for no cause except to loosen
the part that breath plays in verse, which has been observed and practiced
too well, so that verse may retreat to its proper immobility and placelessness
in the mouths that are already lost. I take it that INTROJECTIVE
VERSE teaches nothing, that that verse will never do what the poet
intends either by the tones of her voice or theater of her breath ...
Because the centripetal questions the speech-force of language (speech
is the "red herring" of verse, the secret of the poem's delusions), because,
then, a poem has, by language, evanescence, nothing that can be mistreated
as solid, objectified, thinged.
II
Which makes no promises, no realities outside the poem: no stances only
dances. It is the matter of content, this discontent. The content of Clease,
of Bruce, of Ball, as distinct from what I might call more "literary" minis-