My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

4 REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC
quarter for a roll of tens, a dollar
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If I speak of a "politics of poetry", it is to address the politics of poetic
form not the efficacy of poetic content. Poetry can interrogate how language
constitutes, rather than simply reflects, social meaning and values.
You can't fully critique the dominant culture if you are confined to the
forms through which it reproduces itself, not because hegemonic forms
are compromised "in themselves" but because their criticality has been
commandeered. There is no wholly intrinsic meaning to any form, nor
are there a priori superior forms. Devices and techniques-the tools and
styles of the past-shift in their meaning and value over time, requiring
continuing reassessment. Yet forms do have extrinsic, social meanings
that are forged through a contestation of values from which it is impossible
to withhold judgment.
Forms, like words, can never be separated from their meanings, which
come into being in a social and historical process that is never finished.
A politics of poetic form recognizes that poetry's social and collaborative-material-dimensions
frame our ability to read poems as solitary
personal expression. It acknowledges the semantic contribution of the
visual dimension of language, of the means of production and distribution,
and of the context of publication. Such a politics insists that poems are
partial and particular not universalizable expressions of humanity.
To speak of politics in this context is to contrast the politics in and of
the rhetorical with the poetics of truth, authority, and sincerity in order
to insist that politics is always at play-never to put that play to rest, nor
banish or repress it.
When a poem enters into the world it enters into a political, in the
sense of ideological and historical, space. By refusing the criteria of efficacy
for determining the political value of the poem, we confer political
value on the odd, eccentric, different, opaque, maladjusted-the nonconforming.
We also insist that politics demands complex thinking and
that poetry is an arena for such thinking: a place to explore the constitution
of meaning, of self, of groups, of nations,-of value. The politics of
poetry for which J speak is open-ended; the results of its interrogations are
not assumed but discovered in the process and available to reformulation.
Its complexity and adversity to conformity puts such a poetic practice well
outside the stadium of dominant culture. It is this refusal of efficacy, call it
a refusal of submission, that marks its political character.
For the destination is always staring just out-of-view and all the signs are
flashing "access denied." I make meaning of the failure to arrive, for so