My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

POETICS OF THE AMERICAS 133
also that the ordinary grounds itself in provisional constructions not natural
facts. The ordinary eludes fixed forms of representation; it can be
evoked, not captured. For the ordinary captured becomes merely captions
on a vanished object, an evacuated site for the residual rubbernecking of
exhausted passers-by. The poetic practice of the ordinary is synthetic and
synthesizing, not essentializing. Verse dialect, like any representation of
speech in writing, is always a form of invention.
One of the extraordinary things about the poetics of the ordinary is
that it can make poems that look so strange. Any approach to the ordinary
is partial because the ordinary, like materiality itself, is inexhaustible. The
poetics of the ordinary can set its sights on a series of aspects-on meter,
on diction, on theme, on lexicon. Poetic attention to anyone of these
aspects may make a poem that will seem alien to those accustomed to different
literary conventions. Transcribed speech, for example, may seem
more unnatural than the idealized conventions for representing speech.
Dialect, because it uses a nonstandard lexicon, can look as odd as the taum
or neologistic poems of Velimer Khlebnikov or David Melnick or Gillespie
or P. Inman, even to the native speaker of the represented idiom. The
ordinary erodes and resists the standard, just as standard English and normative
verse forms exoticize and defamiliarize the ordinary. There can be
no completely ordinary poetry because there can be no poetry without
style or form. "We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form."23
Very little has been written about the ideolectical writing of Abraham lincoln
Gillespie. Gillespie's pervasively neologistic work bears some resemblance
to Finnigans Wake; certainly, Gillespie knew Joyce. Unlike Joyce,
Gillespie was not interested in maximizing the etymological resonances
of words but rather in creating a kind of scat writing, with jazz as a significant
influence. American identity, along with "self" expression, is certainly
under erasure, more likely actively being erased, in "Expatracination"
(out from fatherland and race/roots), Gillespie's response to a 1928
transition questionnaire on Americans living in Europe:
the Spiritual Future of America is not to evolve till a present diabetes
is admit> removed, t'wit: America's total lack of parent-sagacity to
exprimply an especially-while-correcting them goodwill toward,
and to cull an early admiration from the children ... THEN-the
American Spirit will commence-sing as naive-direct-elimgoalpursue-clearly
as its present FolkMelod-"PopularSong," frequently as
blare-Outn!Fruct-freely as its dynaSaxophoneyc ... (i.e. Fair,
23. Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven", in Collected Poems (New York:
AlfredA. Knopf, 1978), p. 470.