My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC 11
interested in in my own writing-is strong, abrupt changes in emotion_ So
something that's somber turns into something that's like a Borscht Belt
comedy routine which turns into something that's perhaps elegiacbecause
all those emotions can be relevant to a given topic or series of topics.
You can be very gloomy, you can be very sanguine, distant, rigorous
(as a mood); I want to shift between those different emotional, or let's say
philosophical, tones.
Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle
the chains. That's one way to approach my prosody, or perhaps not
prosody but prosody-making arguments.
I don't teach writing workshops but reading workshops. The reading
workshop is less concerned with analysis or explanation of individual
poems than with finding ways to intensify the experience of poetry, of the
poetic, through a consideration of how the different styles and structures
and forms of contemporary poetry can affect the way we see and understand
the world. No previous experience with poetry is necessary. More
important is a willingness to consider the implausible, to try out alternative
ways of thinking, to listen to the way language sounds before trying
to figure out what it means, to lose yourself in a flurry of syllables and
regain your bearings in dimensions otherwise imagined as out-of-reach, to
hear how poems work to delight, inform, redress, lament, extol, oppose,
renew, rhapsodize, imagine, foment ...
Poetry is tranquillity recollected in emotion, commotion projected in tranquillity,
recollection unsettled by turbulence.
If I am making an argument for the aesthetic, I hope it will be apparent that
I use "aesthetic" not to suggest an ideal of beauty but rather to invoke a contested
arena of judgment, perception, and value where artworks and essays
operate not as adjudicators of fixed principles but as probes for meaning,
prods for thought. To investigate the conditions that make value possible
is not to abandon value to historical contingency but rather to insist that
values be argued for, demonstrated, and enacted. I am in every way a partisan
but I do not hold that the values of that to which I am partial are selfevident
or obligatory. Yet I do hold out for a realm of value that is determined
by judgments made without recourse to rationalizable justification
and claim that this realm of aesthetic judgment is the basis for reason.
Not unstructured essays but differently structured: not structurally challenged,
structurally challenging.