My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

n~ose ~e ~iddin~
'What is irony?/I said the jesting pilot
& then stayed around to field questions.
/II don't make jokes I test planes./I
Well, so do we all. Yet to have
an idea of multivalence, ambivolence in
Steve McCaffery's ever apter word, isn't
to put off, much less, pull off
anything. Antony Easthope in his
substantially probious Poetry as Discourse
says sarcasm is the most extreme,
maybe most emblematic,
form of irony in its lBO-degree difference
& manifest contempt, as opposed to milder forms
of irony that veer off zero-degree separation anxiety
less steeply. Tell it to my mother: /ISo
glad you called (pause) this year./I
She's not saying the opposite. Irony
is bourgeois, anyway, reconciliatory; sarcasm
(& the comic ploys related to it) is dialectical,
fomenting contra-diction. Of course not. Depends
on. If I
prefer to speak of the comic rather than the
ironic it's because the nature of literary
irony can be taken (Kierkegaard didn't)
as an especially, even uniquely, contextdependent
form of discourse, as if
there was some other discourse that was
context-independent-the words just meaning
what they say, no interpretation (interruption)
necessary. (Whose
on first?) That may be okay for a working
hypothesis for rocket makers, but it ain't cut no
m