My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

THE RESPONSE AS SUCH 179
way of saying that poetry is too little attended to: sounds too quickly converted
to words or images, the material space of the page too quickly supplanted
by the ideational space of the text (as if MLA really meant "muted
language association"). Too often, reading habits enforce a kind of blindness
to the particular graphic choices of type, leading, page dimension,
and paper, under the regime of a lexical transcendentalism that accords
no semantic value to the visual representation of language. The poetic response
to this derealization of poetry is to insist, against all odds, that a
work can be composed whose semantic inhabitations are all visual; Cy
Twombly's work, as illuminated by Renee Riese Hubert, suggests one such
possibility, as do those works within visual poetry that do not employ alphabetic
writing.
The idea that a text may yield up to a visualization of what it purports
to represent is a primary example of what Ron Silliman, in his essay "The
Disappearance of the Word / The Appearance of the World", calls the
transparency effect. Still, an important distinction needs to be made
between, on the one hand, derealizations of textuality-that is readings
that discount sound sense or the visual materiality of the page, or bothand,
on the other hand, works that encourage proactive visualizations of
images, that is, visualizations that are constructed by the reader in the
process of puzzling through the linguistic material presented. In contrast,
the transparency effect describes the conjuring of visual images or nonvisual
ideational content, without generally focussing on the importance of
the distinction between these two forms of the effect.
Certainly, a primary effort of much formally innovative poetry over
the last 20 years has been to insist on melopoeia (sound play), syntaxapoeia
(play of syntax), and parapoeia (the play of parataxis, parody,
and invented structure)-over phanopoeia (image play, which might be
better called videopoeia or indeed visualization) and logorrhea (the endless
repetition of the already known, whether received forms or contents).
The transparency effect suggests a diagnosis of both phonophobia
(fear of sound) and misography (belief in the inferiority of the visual
component of language and the superiority of the ideational component
of language). In the case of Johanna Drucker's sumptuous and stunning
series of books, we confront the materiality of the visual representation
of language over videopoeia or logopoeia. Though, as a hyperbophiliac,
I overstate it to say look and sound over ideas or visualizations: rather
the insistence has been to ground the one in the other, not let the latter
mute or repress the former.
This project has, therefore, necessitated a critique of that ocular imagism
commonly associated with a decontextualized reading of Williams's
wheelbarrow poem, among other sources. A non-ocular-centered poetry