My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REZNIKOFF'S NEARNESS 213
everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity ... / The bum's as holy as the
seraphim!,,;36 indeed, I would suggest that Ginsberg's poetics derive
equally from Blake, Whitman, and Reznikoff-an interesting trio (even if
this extravagance conflates Williams with Reznikoff).
16. Gershom Scholem points out that a positive attitude toward language
distinguishes Kabbalism from other mystical traditions:
Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding
language as something more precious than an inadequate instrument
for contact between human beings. To them, Hebrew, the holy
tongue, is not simply a means of expressing certain thoughts, born
out of a certain convention and having a purely conventional character
... Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew ... reflects the
fundamental spiritual nature of the world ... Man's common language
... reflects the creative language of God. (17)
17. It comes to this question: what is the status of the detail, the particular
in this work? Why is it so important? For Reznikoff, as for Williams, the
detail is not a "luminous particular" in Pound's sense-not extraordinary
but exactly ordinary, even if indeed luminous. So, then, why this particular
detail, and then that one?
Metonymy: the fragment as substitute for, hinting at, something else,
something that only it can stand for, is an instance of-a manifestation or
emanation. The part for the (w)holy.
Witness of the detail understood as metonymic.
Scholem, again, is a useful guide. Kabbalism rejects the allegorical for
the symbolic, where allegory-"the representation of an expressible something
by another expressible something"-is akin to the literary conceits
and Symbolism that Reznikoff rejected. In contrast, "the mystical symbol
is an expressible sensation of something which lies beyond the sphere of
expression ... Every living thing is endlessly correlated with the whole of
creation ... everything mirrors everything else" (27).
Reznikoff, a secular poet refreshed by "the clear waters of reason", committed
"to use words for their daylight meaning" is no mystic, if mysticism
is understood as elevating his work above "the common table", as he puts
it in a poem entitled "Te Deum". Reznikoff is not a poet of the ecstatic,
directed to the beyond, but a poet of the near, the close at hand: of a
returning to oneself as to the world.
18. Fragment as shard-of a broken or cracked totality that cannot be rep-
36. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 134.