My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC 9
investigate the construction of these provisional entities in and through
and by language_
If individual identity is a false front, group identity is false fort.
But saying that, I also want to acknowledge that the suspicion of many
kinds of collective action or identification in poetry, that is the stigmatization
of groups, does torque the equation, so that active exchange, shared
interests, and concerted activities that run counter to the BIG GROUP
consciousness of rugged individuality will get targeted as a sinister and
anti-poetic "party" (in the bad sense) organization. I'm for a poetry that
neither sheds its identities nor uses them as shields against the poem-inthe-making
nor, for that matter, selves-in-the-making nor society-in-themaking.
But also that does not hide behind bland assurances of human or
national generality in refusing the necessity of partiality or highly particularized
commitments that acknowledge the manner and matter of allegiances,
affiliations, identifications, markings, separations, shivers, splinters,
remnants, fragmentations. The parts are greater than the sum of the
whole.
The social grounding of poetry cannot be evaded by recourse to a purely
intellectual idea of the materiality of language since the materiality of language
is in the first instance a social materiality and, at the same time, a
materiality not of selves and identities but of bodies, including gendered
bodies. Materiality, that is, is not just an idea but also a responsibility. Here
I very much agree with the Italian poet Nanni Cagnone's insistence that
poetics not be pre-scriptive but, if to make the distinction at all, post-scriptive:
"Poetry is action above and beyond what a person is able to think."
So that my own poetic ethics, again to echo Cagnone, is to enact language's
refusal to abandon the world but also to articulate the way the
world cleaves to language.
A poem should make its own experience, Uncle Hodgepodge used to say.
I tend to dislike readings where the poet defines every detail and reference
of the work so that by the time you get to the poem it's been reduced to
an illustration of the anecdotes and explanations that preceded it. I figure
if a reader or listener can't make out a particular reference or train of
thought, that's okay-it's very much the way I experience things in everyday
life. If the poem is at times puzzling or open-ended or merely suggestive,
rather than explicit, maybe it gives readers or listeners more space
for their own interpretations and imaginations. Different readers pick up
different things and for any reader certain allusions are bound to be striking
while others will seem opaque, but which is which changes from