My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REZNIKOFF'S NEARNESS 219
34. It's a question of the poem's attitude toward its materials: condescension,
sentimentality, impersonality, identification, misidentification, detachment,
erasure, appropriation, approbation, condescension, deafness,
blindness, scorn, ecstasy, depression, anxiety, hypocrisy, reflection, management,
control, possession, flirtatious, annihilating.
35. Serial composition, one detail adjacent to the next, one perspective
permuted with another, refuses the binary. Oppen:
There are things
We live among 'and to see them
Is to know ourselves'.
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series52
36. My aim not to explain the poems but to make them more opaque.
37. The sensation of not understanding, comprehending (say in Zukofsky or
Stein): poems charged with the intractability, the ineffability, of the world.
I like this secret walking
in the fog;
unseen, unheard,
among the bushes
thick with drops;
the solid path invisible
a rod awayand
only the narrow present is alive. 53
Reznikoff's very extreme attitude toward elision and condensation has the
supplemental effect of prodUcing density in exact proportion to its desire
for clarity. This is not the clarity of conventional poetic or expository discourse
because its poetic space has been transformed into a gravitational
field in which every word matters in the sense of having matter, musical or
notional weight.
In "Early History of a Writer", Reznikoff recounts how a friend had
applied Kittredge's method of microanalysis to some of his early poems:
he read my verse as I had never read verse before,
scrutinizing it, phrase by phrase
and word by word, thought and image, thought and sound ...
52. George Oppen, "Of Being Numerous", # 1 (excerpt), in Collected Poems of George Oppen (New
York: New Directions, 1975), p. 147.
53. "Autobiography: Hollywood", #III (excerpt), 2:39. Compare Oppen's "And the pure joy I
Of the mineral fact II Tho it is impenetrable II As the world, if it is matter I Is impenetrable" ("Of
Being Numerous", #2, p. 148).