My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

FRO MAN 0 N G 0 I N G I NT E R V lEW WIT H TOM B E C K E T T 189
delusion that the Jews can never be "native"
or even competent speakers of their own language;
for the anti-Semite rejects the possibility
that Jews can assimilate into the language, and
culture, that they can make it as their own. That
echoes with Pound's idea of Jewish rootlessness
but also gives social dimension to my preoccupation
with the radical morphogenerativeness of language
and its related instability and ambiguity, its
unsettling and polydictory logics, which constitute,
rather than impede, our mutual grounding in language
as a grounding in each other that forms the basis not
of nations or ethnicities or races but of polis.
I take this as an aesthetic practice that repudiates the moral
discourse of a right to speak as a racial or national
patrimony, and also a right way to speak. This is a lesson I
learned not from Pound and Eliot, exactly, but from Stein,
from Reznikoff and Zukofsky, and also from Groucho Marx
and Lenny Bruce.
"Hands, hearts, not values made us."
Language extracts a toll from all who use it
but having paid this toll, access is unlimited.
No one who speaks can fail to pay this toll
and the profit extracted is returned to the fold.
So dunnah ask
Fer whom duh toll takers toils­
Dey toil for youse.
TB: Work, I hiccup, like Maynard G. Krebs.
You are a poet, theorist, Professor of English, a founder of the
Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo. You are also a vociferous critic of
what you have termed "official verse culture," as well as a champion
of the small press movement. From your unique vantage point, (a)
what do you consider to be the role of the poet in society, and (b)
what social impediments to the enactment of that role do you see.
CB:
The role of the poet in society is to
roll, i.e., not
get stuck
don't worry about the bumps, &