My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

ROB I NON HIS 0 W N 171
to mean in language, as Blaser insists in his quarrel with another poet "over
experience", when his companion "spoke too soon of a sacred cut-out" for
the self:
... it was the process
of the actual we were both about
what exactly do we experience in poesis
over the neat 'I' that thinks itself a unity of things or
disunity desperately
untrue to whatever we are tied to-like one's
grief or the smothering
domestic realism, or the I-feel, so deep and steeply,
no one wants to
listen without a drumhead positivisms of the self
that die into an urn (317)
Against "positivisms of the self" as such!: so that the poem emerges not
from some imposition of "I-feeling" but from a transposition of listening,
"the sounding air of the mind" (254); a site in which, it goes without saying,
one's selves are never absent: "the robin of such listening" (282):5
It is within language that the world speaks to us in a voice that is not
our own ... In the reversal of language and experience, these fold
into one another and unfold, composing as voices in our language.
(PO 179)
But Blaser's restless thought does not stop here: along with this deflation
of the self is also a rejection of the positivisms of spirituality, specifically
of the appropriation of the sacred or mystical or religious to legitimate a
particular poetic or political practice.6 In contrast, Blaser speaks for the
"incorporation of the text of the sacred into the domain of art"; that is, not
for the sacred as poetry but poetry as the sacred (RPW 25).
Over and again, Blaser reiterates his commitment to "Languages" not
"Language" (RPW 13); that is, to both the poetic and philosophical traditions
of plurality and multiplicity and against scientism and religious in-
5. Discussing the poetics of "dictation", Blaser contrasts "an imposition" to a "disclosure", noting
that in "the practice of outside" "language pushes us into a polarity and experienced dialectic
with something other than ourselves. It involves a reversal of language into experience.
which composes a 'real' ... A reopened language lets the unknown, the Other, the outside in again
as a voice in the language. Thus, the reversal is not a reduction, but an openness. The safety of
a closed language is gone and its tendency to reduce thought to a reasonableness and definiteness
is disturbed" (PO 275-76).
6. See, especially, "Even on Sunday" (346). Speaking of words such as "god, soul, spirit, angel,
ghost," Blaser writes, "We need not return to them, and cannot in any sense that we now understand,
but they haunt us" (PO 294).