My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

252 A N AUT 0 B lOG RAP HIe A LIN T E R V lEW
the Electronic Poetry Center and the LINEbreak radio show, but also
with the Poetics Program reading series, presses, and magazines. The
university, like most large bureaucracies, tends toward stagnation, following
the least line of resistance. Nonetheless, based on my limited
experience, it is possible to create small but deep pools of activity, if
you are motivated and tenacious, and perhaps a little bit looney.
I don't think there ever comes a time to stop advocating, or where
partisanship or asserting an aesthetic judgment must become merely
self-serving. My argument has been, and remains, directed at systematic
discrepancies of attention to different approaches to poetry and
to language, something that goes beyond any individual poet's recognition,
or position. In any case, the idea is not to replace one authority
with another, much less one style with another, but to keep the
doors spinning to tunes generated on our homemade reality synthesizers.
Which is to say: Keep playing monkey to your own grinder. And remember:
It's not over even when it's over.