My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

POUND AND THE POETRY OF TODAY 163
gates for what had been left out, or refined out, by precepts such as his own
"use absolutely no word that does not contribute". The undigested quality
of parts of The Cantos gives credence to the further explorations of the
unheard and unsounded in our poetry. On the one hand, this includes the
continuing care with which the sound and sense of the world of African­
Americans and native Americans have been charted by many contemporary
poets; it also includes, for example, Judy Grahn's attempts not only to articulate
contemporary lesbian experience but to chart a lesbian curriculum
from Sappho to Dickinson to Stein and HD. and Amy Lowell to the present.
These voices now speak of and for themselves, precluding appropriation
but entering into that larger collage-a text without center but constantly
site-specific-that is poetry in English. Indeed, it is something
resembling this hyper- and hypo-American collage that forms the structure
of the revisionist Poundian anthology America: A Prophecy, edited by Rothenberg
and George Quasha. On the other hand, the further exploration of the
unheard and unsounded in our poetry involves more radically incommensurable
parataxis and more comprehensive development of the visual, typographic,
and textually historicist dynamics suggested by The Cantos. In this
respect, one could point to Ron Silliman (who uses a numeric rather than
hierarchic procedure for ordering the disparate elements of the poem) or
to Erica Hunt (a poem including "local" history), as well as to several dozen
other innovative poets who are working in sharp contrast to the tradition
of High Antimodernism as it has evolved from Eliot to Lowell to the present-a
tradition that also sometimes traces its lineage to Pound.
The present flourishing of a formally innovative, open, investigative
poetry-a poetry that refuses to take subject matter, syntax, grammar, or
vocabulary for granted and that rejects simple and received notions of
unity of conceit, closure, and prosody-is unprecedented in its scale in
American literature. It is made possible, to a significant degree, by the existence
of alternative and oppositional publishing Uames Laughlin's New
Directions, for example) and by the understanding that the work of the
poet does not stop with the composition of a poem but continues into the
network of other poets and cultural workers and readers-that it is a social
project involving social organizing.
But rather than detailing the work of a number of other contemporary
poets, let me cite a remarkable new work by Jackson Mac Low, Words nd
Ends from Ez.8 These lines are taken from Section IX, "From Drafts & Fragments
of Cantos CX-CXVII":
8. Mac Low's 1983 Words nd Ends from Ez was published in 1989 by the Bolinas-based press
Avenue B.