My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

112 INTROJECTIVE VERSE
ters. There is no moment in which the introjective evasion of verse is finished,
the form fuels blame. If the beginning and end is the breathlessness
of words, sound in that material sense, then the domain of poetry blurs and
blurts.
It's hardly this: the uselessness of a baby, by itself and thus by others,
crying in its misconception of its relation to culture, that semiotic fluidless
ness to which it owes its gigantic existence. If it squall, it shall find
much to squall about, and shall squirm too, culture has such flummoxing
ways of terrorizing all that is outside. But if it stays inside itself, if it is contained
in its infancy as if it is a participant in the life immediately surrounding,
it will be able to babble and in its babbling hear what is shared.
It is in this sense that the introjective ache, which is the artist's artlessness
in the intimate streets of enfoldment, leads to scales more intimate than
the child's. It's all so easy. Culture works from irreverence, even in its constructions.
Irreverence is the human's special qualification as vegetable, as
mineral, as animalady. Language is our profanest act. And when a poet
squalls about what is outside herself (in "the material world", if you object,
but also the materiality in her, for that matter), then she, if she chooses to
reflect on this restlessness, pays in the street where culture has given her
scale, centripetal scale.
Such works, though it's no argument, could not issue from persons who
conceive verse without the full resonance of human voicelessness. The
introjective poet staggers from the failings of her own boasts to that syntaxophony
where language digs in, where sound echoes, where utterances
concatenate, where, inevitably, all acts stall.