My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

C LOS EllS TEN I N G 285
mensurate. To speak of the poem in performance is, then, to overthrow
the idea of the poem as a fixed, stable, finite linguistic object; it is to deny
the poem its self-presence and its unity. Thus, while performance emphasizes
the material presence of the poem, and of the performer, it at the
same time denies the unitary presence of the poem, which is to say its
metaphysical unity.
Indulge me now as I translate some remarks by Benjamin on psychoanalysis
and translation into the topic at hand:
The question of presence, the plurality within being present, is of
fundamental significance for poetry. The presence of the text (the
written document) within the performance but equally the presence
of the performance inside the text means that there are, at anyone
moment in time, two irreducible modes of being present. As presence
becomes the site of irreducibility, this will mean that presence
can no longer be absolutely present to itself. The anoriginal marks
the possibility of the poem being either potentially or actually
plural, which will mean that the poem will always lack an essential
unity. (Within the context of poetry, what could be said to be lacking
is an already given semantic and interpretive finitude, if not singularity,
of the poem.) It is thus that there is no unity to be recovered,
no task of thinking of the origin as such, since the origin, now
the anorigin, is already that which resists the move to a synthetic
unity. Any unity will be an after-effect. Such after-effects are composed
of given publications, performances, interpretations, or readings.
The poem-that which is anoriginally plural-cannot be
known as such because it cannot exist as such. 5
The relation of a poem to variations created in a poetry reading has not,
so far as I know, received previous attention. Variations created in performing
"oral" poetry is, however, a subject of Gregory Nagy's Poetry and
Performance, where, speaking of both the Homeric epics and troubadour
poetry, Nagy writes, "to perform the song ... is to recompose it, to change
it, to move it."6 Indeed, Nagy's "poetics of variation" is suggested by two
variant epithets for the nightingale in The Odyssey-where the nightingale
5. The passage is based on Andrew Benjamin, "Translating Origins: Psychoanalysis and Philosophy",
in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 24; all the references to poetry are my substitutions made to Benjamin's
"original"; I have also elided a few phrases. See also Benjamin's The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger.
6. Nagy, Poetry as Performance, p. 16. Nagy specifically cites McGann's work on "the textual
condition".