My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

WAR N I N G - POE TRY ARE A 305
not to deny that selves and groups exist, or have voices, but to take their
description and expression as a poetic, as much as an epistemological,
project.
Like many developments in education, the trend toward a representative
poetry is as much market or consumer-driven, not to say demographic,
in origin as it is ideological. The gorgeous mosaic of students
in the classroom, to use former New York City mayor David Dinkins's
term, puts an enormous, and appropriate, pressure on teachers to create
syllabuses that reflect the various origins of our students as much as their
multiple destinations. Yet, like in electoral politics, not every group is
recognized as equally significant in the often schematic, not to say gerrymandered,
patchwork of multicultural curricula. Similarly, some subject
areas such as contemporary poetry are being used to front for the
far more static approach to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual
orientation in other areas of the humanities and in the social and natural
sciences.
There are good reasons for this unequal development, since contemporary
poetry remains an indispensable site for the exploration of the multiplicities,
and multiplicitousness, of identities. TV and Hollywood movies
continue to provide inadequate, or nonexistent, representations of many
groups in our culture. This may help to explain why poetry and the small
press are a central place for such representations, given the independent
press's ability to serve what can as easily be called small or niche markets
as "marginal" communities. For some groups in our culture, poetry may be
a primary site of basic cultural exchange in a way that is hard to comprehend
for those who identify with the cultural representations of the mass
media. This is why it is crucial to differentiate share-driven mass media
from popular and local and folk-cultural activities whose lifeblood is their
low market share-their small scale, let's emphasize, rather than their
"unpopularity".
But it is not only sociologically identified "groups" that are unserved or
underserved by the majoritarian, market-share-driven, mass media, but
also "outsiders" of every sort and kind, of every stripe and lack of stripe, as
Maria Damon eloquently argues in The Dark Side of the Street. In an increasingly
intolerant American cultural landscape, nonmajoritarian cultural
activities are stigmatized as elitist and as "special interests" even though
these activities are the last refuge of local and particularistic resistance to
the big government and big media claimed, by the right, to be the source
of our problems. The current attacks on public television and public support
for the arts and humanities are a sharp warning that intellectual complexity,
aesthetic difficulty, and non-mega-market-driven cultural production
have become "minor" art activities that cohabit the same shadow