My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

~lose listening
Poetry and the Performed Word
[ sing and [ play the flute for myself.
For no man except me understands my language.
As little as they understand the nightingale
do the people understand what my song says.
Peire Cardenal
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
Jack Spicer
While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention
to modern and contemporary poetry performance has been negligible,
despite the crucial importance of performance to the practice of the
poetry of this century. The subject is wide-ranging and requires a range
of approaches. At one end of the spectrum would be philosophical and
critical approaches to the contribution of sound to meaning: the way
poets, and especially twentieth century innovative poets, work with sound
as material, where sound is neither arbitrary nor secondary but constitutive.
At the other end of the spectrum would be critical interpretations of
the performance style of individual poets. Such approaches may well
encourage "close listenings" not only to the printed text of poems, but also
to tapes and performances.
Close listenings may contradict "readings" of poems that are based exclusively
on the printed text and that ignore the poet's own performances,
the "total" sound of the work, and the relation of sound to semantics. Cer-
Cardenal, "Song 56" (early 13th century), tr. Gregory Nagy, based on W Pfeffer's The Change
of Phi/omeL The Nightingale in Medieval Literature, quoted in Nagy, Poetry as Peiformance .. Homer and Beyond
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 211. Spicer, "Thing Language", in Language
in The Collected Books of lack Spicer (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975), p. 217.