My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

6 REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC
at the University at Buffalo, I have retreated to an Ivory Tower, removed
from the daily contact I used to have, as a poet-office worker in Manhattan,
with the broad masses of the American people ... the ones that I used
to meet at downtown poetry readings and art openings.
And surely it is a scandal, I tell my students, how Americans are afflicted
with attention-deficit disorder, just like they say in Time magazine, which
after all should know, being one of the major sites of infection for the disease
it laments, with its "you can never simplify too much" approach to
prose and its relentless promotion of exclusively predigested cultural product.
And since we all know students can't follow a linear and symbolic argument
of a conventional poem, how can you possibly expect them to
read the even-more-difficult poems you seem bent on promoting, interjects
a concerned younger member of the faculty, eager, in his own classes,
to present the ideological cracks in the surface of popular culture? You
want to take things that appear accessible and linear, I reply, and show how
they are complex and inaccessibly nonlinear; I want to take things that appear
complex and nonlinear and show how this complexity is what makes
them accessible in the sense of audible (auditable). And, I continue, waving
my arms and upping the tempo as my colleague's eyes begin to spin in
orbits, isn't the nonlinearity of much so-called disjunctive poetry indeed
a point of contact with the everyday cultural experiences of most North
Americans, where overlays of competing discourses is an inevitable product
of the radio dial, cable television, the telephone, advertising, or indeed,
at a different level of spatialization, cities? But isn't advertising and
the commercialization of culture a bad thing, interrupts the future public
intellectual, isn't that what poetry should be trying to resist; and isn't the
sort of poetry you promote just a capitulation to the alienated, fragmented
discourse of postmodern capitalism? If you say so, I reply in the manner
of Eeyore, as if I had found myself caught in a Gap ad (Robert Frost Wore
Khakis: "the gaps I mean"). But you can't quite have it both ways: the form
of much of the most innovative modernist and postwar poetry may not
be the obstacle you imagine it to be, so don't use that fact as a way of dismissing
the activity as esoteric. Neither hypotaxis nor parataxis has an intrinsic
relation to poetry, cultural resistance, or accessibility: the mistake
is to demonize radically paratactic approaches as both the unreflected
product of the worst of the culture and at the same time as esoteric, though
I would suggest this particular double bind is a very effective tool for the
stringent enforcement of cultural hegemony within a multicultural environment.
And do beware the role of public intellectual, my friend, for
when The New York Times starts talking about either the death or rebirth of
public intellectuals, it can only remind us that intellectuality as a form of
linguistically investigative activity has been banned for a long time from