My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

10 REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC
reader to reader. What I like in poems is encountering the unexpected
and I enjoy not knowing where I am or what comes next.
Flotsam in My Jetsam
There's flotsam in my jetsam
Barnacles in the stew
I got a letter from my lawyer
Says he's gonna sue
Wheels of gold on fire
Sirens slouching in the rain
If five'll get you ten at 9 o'clock
I'd still want to stay in bed
Sometimes I wonder how "mainstream" the idea of the transparency of language
really is. It may operate as the conventional wisdom, at least since
the Enlightenment, but there has been a consistently powerful counterhegemonic
stream, and not only among poets. Yet this history, the heterodoxy
of our poetic traditions, is constantly being erased or tamed. The
lyric tradition, with its emphasis on the enunciative, on sound, and on subjectivity
remains extremely valuable to my poetic concerns. But lyric poetry
needs to be viewed in its specific historical contexts and read for its specific
rhetorical forms; that is, away from the Romantic ideology that makes
the lyric a generalized, even universal, expression of human sentiment.
This would be to emphasize the concrete particulars of sound and form
over and against the dematerializing idea of voice or purity of expression,
and also to privilege poets who particularly insist on this double hearing,
say Ossian or Swinburne, Poe or Dunbar, Skelton or Hopkins. Surely I
use more of the tones and those high, swooning sounds from this tradition
than many of my contemporaries and I have even suggested a name for
this movement of verse, "The Nude Formalism" (the form stripped bare by
her bachelors, maybe), an ideolectical counter to a "New Formalism" that
claims a continuity with conventional lyric prosody but disdains its sonic
excesses. Over the past few years, I have actively solicited members for my
new movement, but few have wished to join me on this often rather giddy,
though potentially hilarious, course.
Um, hm. My thesis is coming around again, like that recurring train stop
for Charlie and the MTA. So much scholarly and philosophical proselike
so much lyric poetry-is locked into a single emotional tone. And this
"tone lock", this rigid holding to a particular temperament, restricts what
you can say. Part of what you find in Emerson-and certainly what I'm