My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

284 C LOS ELI S TEN I N G
scat jazz improvisation. He makes playful yet dissonant music from the
apparently refractory words of Marxist analysis, bringing out the uncontained
phonic plenitude inside and between the words. This is no mere
embellishment of the poem but a restaging of its meaning ("Class
Struggle in Music", as Baraka titles a later poem). Baraka's recitations
invoke a range of performance rhetorics from hortatory to accusatory:
typically, he will segue from his own intoning of a song tune to a more
neutrally inflected phrase, then plunge into a percussively grating sound.
What's the relation of Baraka's performance-or of any poem performed
by its author-to the original text, I want to overthrow the common
presumption that the text of a poem-that is, the written document-is
primary and that the recitation or performance of a poem by the
poet is secondary and fundamentally inconsequential to the "poem itself".
In the conventional view, recitation has something of the status of interpretation-it
provides a possible gloss of the immutable original. One
problem with this perspective, most persuasively argued by Jerome Mc­
Gann in Black Riders, The Textual Condition, and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism,
is that there is often no one original written version of a poem. Even
leaving aside the status of the manuscript, there often exist various and discrepant
printings-I should like to say textual performances-in magazines
and books, with changes in wording but also spacing, font, paper,
and, moreover, contexts of readershipi making for a plurality of versions
none of which can claim sole authority. I would call these multi foliate versions
performances of the poemi and I would add the poet's own performance
of the work in a poetry reading, or readings, to the list of variants that together,
plurally, constitute and reconstitute the work. ThiS, then, is clearly
not to say that all performances of a poem have equal authority. An actor's
rendition, like a type designer's "original" setting of a classic, will not have
the same kind of authority as a poet's own reading or the first printing of
the work. But the performance of the poet, just as the visualization of the
poem in its initial printings, forever marks the poem's entry into the worldi
and not only its meaning, its existence.
A poem understood as a performative event and not merely as a textual
entity refuses the originality of the written document in favor of "the
plural event" of the work, to use a phrase of Andrew Benjamin's. That is,
the work is not identical to anyone graphical or performative realization
of it, nor can it be equated with a totalized unity of these versions or manifestations.
The poem, viewed in terms of its multiple performances, or
mutual intertranslatability, has a fundamentally plural existence. This is
most dramatically enunciated when instances of the work are contradictory
or incommensurable, but it is also the case when versions are com-