My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

30 AN INTERVIEW WITH MANUEL BRITO
which meaning is discovered rather than refined; where poetry is on
trial, but where the trial is sufficient to itself, producing innovation
and investigation not verdicts or conclusions.
Anyway, what is the difference between a sonnet or sestina and a
poetry "experiment" (for example, producing a poem by erasing half
the words in a source text or writing a poem each word of which
begins with a different letter of the alphabet, or writing a poem in
the form of an index)? Such experiments might just as well be called
nontraditional, or new, poetic forms; they have the advantage of a
less than fully authorized literary history.
I would say the most common, and empty, charges against nonconventional
literary works is that they are only about their nonconventionality
or antitraditionality or, so the refrain goes, only about
"language"; as if one breaks forms or finds new ones for the sake of
that activity rather than to be able to make articulations not otherwise
possible (which itself may be pleasurable for writer and reader).
Such comments (and they are just as frequent in the alternative
poetry worlds as in the mainstreams) mask the fact that conventional
and traditional literary writing reinscribe the meanings implicit in
their forms but that poetry is not limited to this activity of reinscription
(lovely or comforting or pleasurable as it sometimes may be).
There may be no pure outside (chorus: "no pure outside" "no pure
outside") but there isn't no pure inside either (chorus: "no inside
ether, no inside ether").
MB: The quotidian, or elements related to our daily life, are present in
many of your poems. What is your interest in this approach?
CB: Another preoccupation: the ordinary, a tradition more often associated
with a plainer style than mine, but then what could be more
everyday than words? It's a strange pull, since I often use arcane,
rather than everyday, words. And my syntax, slhe isn't exactly ordinary
either. But it's the texture of everyday experience I'm after, how
language both constrains and engenders experience. And many of
the particulars that litter my poems are indeed everyday sayings
(sometimes inverted) and overheard comments. Moreover, the mix
of elements, including the discontinuity and interruption, is part of
the fabric of everyday life in the present. I suppose one thing I'm
after is the sheer-nonsymbological-viscosity of experience. I
want to intensify, not rarify or elevate or moralize about nor transcend
or explain (away) everyday experience.
MB: Veil is introduced by a quotation from Hawthorne's "The Minister's
Black Veil". How can we understand the metaphor of the veil as