My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

REVENGE OF THE POET-CRITIC 13
The question of who is the audience for poetry is different than the question
who is the audience for a poem: the first is sociological, the second
ontological. At the same time, critical advocacy through essays and talks
does make a call for new readers and listeners, even as it provides something
other than poetry for them to attend. Yet I count on the measurable
audience for what I write to be small, for my work constantly invokes the
necessity of the small-scale act, the complex gesture, the incontrovertible
insinuation, the refractory insouciance of the intractable. Which is to say
poetry is (or can be) about measure but it counts differently.
The poetry audience has become atomized; Balkanized is the more
ominous phrase. Insofar as this represents the downfall of Poets as Universal
Voice of Humanity, broadcasting on the Official Verse Cultural
Network, this is a necessary development. Not that no one is claiming the
mantle for such Generalized Address, just that the emptiness of the
address is more readily apparent. Poetry is no match for advertising and
the mass culture industry if reaching the broadest public is what you have
in mind (irrespective of the message). This is not to say that the address
of poetry is not crucial for the public but that as a culture we are bloated
with Public Voices (most of them pathogenic); poetry has other voices to
offer (even if most poetry revels in its phobia of its own possibilities). Yet,
insofar as Balkanization has meant that poetry is framed by identity politics,
where identity is something that is assumed prior to the poem and not
discovered in the process of writing the poem, poetry risks losing one of
its most resonant formal features: its radical genericness. (Such a risk may
sometimes be worth taking.) There is nothing new in dividing poetry into
types: nature poetry or narrative poetry or love poetry or war poetry; but
these are merely pretexts for poetry; identity is no more. Language is poetry's
vocation, which is not to say poetry is about language but that it
locates itself as language, in language.
Which leads me to say that there is no audience for the poem, only
readers. Or better, no readers for the poem, only readings. Or then again,
no readings, only audiences.
Nobody out there but us. And I can never figure out who that was or
will be, much less is.
Or put it this way: The poem is like a heat-seeking missile that finds its
target but refuses to detonate. Often the target is not aware it has been hit.
This is the secret life of poetry.
Who knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of readers? The poet
knows but prefers to tell it on her own terms. S/he is an intellectual without
portfolio.
-"Ceil, what is he saying now? What does it mean?"