My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

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I don't know much about sex but I know what I like. Whenever I hear the
word sexuality I reach for my wallet. Your sexual politics is the way you live.
Some time ago, a letter was passed on to me in which my essay on Charles
Olson, in Contents Dream, was taken to task as "unjust" in its critique of Maximus's
sexual politics. Randy Prus writes:
Phallocentrism is different from misogyny. What I mean to say is,
some men write from the "balls", that soft tender spot which the gender
is constantly trying to express and yet protect. Hemingway and
Mailer write from the phallus, that hard expression of masculinity.
Olson, as well as Whitman, as well as myself write from the ''balls''.
H.D. in Notes on Thought and Vision locates the "womb" as one center
of writing. The "balls" are the male counterpart of that, as well as to
that experience. Gender expression does not mean gender dominance.
Here we see "maleness" desiring the same privilege in contemporary "progressive"
ideological space as is accorded to "womanhood" or "blackness".
But maleness, like whiteness, like Americanness cannot claim the "status"
of "marginality" because it remains culturally, politically, SOcially, and economically
dominant. The "imaginal" values of maleness have not been suppressed/discredited/denied
but rather vaunted: the struggle for men is to
unlearn masculinity, without substituting any positive value to this gender
differential, since positive values for maleness (as distinct from
"humanness"), remain suspect, at least for the present, as socially adaptive
strategies to maintain control and power.
One of the most striking features of the current poetry context is the
resourcefulness of many marginalized (though not marginal) groups in
asserting a powerfully positive identity either in individual writings or
through integrally related social formations (readings, publishing, critical
writing). White, heterosexual men cannot occupy this ground, for the relevant
group affiliation is one that cannot, in good conscience, be
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