My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

ne ~esponse as ~UC~
Words in Visibility
Late at night, deep in conversation with my most intimate poetic collaborators,
a question is asked, at first so tentatively that no answer seems
called for, but then with a persistence beyond mere curiosity: What was
your first textual experience?
Hearing so many thoughtful forays into the intersection of the visual
and the verbal, I realize that this nocturnal question really must be a mask
for another question: What was your first typographical experience?
Babbling as we do in the phonocentric illusion some call early childhood,
where making and mimicking sounds brings the world into constantly
(constitutively) new being, verging on the worlds we thought we
saw the moment before but that vanish, like sibilants in dense fog, just asjust
because-we invoke them ... Into this paradise of entropic sounding
comes the regime of order, the objects before my gaze grow labels, like in
one of those intensely frightening Richard Scarey books where the bikes
all say ''bike'' and the roads say "r-o-a-d" (ceci n'est pas une lecture). These visualized
markers create boundaries on an indefinite expanse of plenitude,
organize and stipulate and restrict where once there was potential and multiplicity.
And where is "to" where "of", says the child, where is my little
amongbetweenwithin. For words are no more labels of things than the sky
is a styrofoam wrap of some Divine carryout shop. And letters are no more
tied to words or words to sentences than a mule is tied to its burden.
Letters in liberty, words freed from the tyranny of horizontality, or sequence:
these are some of the impulses of a visually active domain of poetry.
The visual dimension of writing is apparent from the first gesture of
any inscription-the moment of making a mark, a sign that does not yet
signify anything more than its process of demarking. In this first instance,
the gesture of writing and drawing are identical-call it inscribing, as if we
could scratch some meaning out of (or is it into?) the sullenly indifferent
blank of the page that always confronts us just beyond grasp.
There are, it seems to me, two domains of poetry that are insufficiently
recognized, too little attended to: the sound and the look. This is another