My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

WHAT'S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT? 41
similable, the erotic, the repulsive, the formally unsettling. From the populist
perspective, such work may be discounted as elitist or regressive or
both; from the defenders of transcendental literary values, such work is
attacked as corrosive. Moreover, the contest for the middle is less something
that pits high culture against low culture than it is a struggle within
"high" and "popular" culture: Kathy Acker vs James Merrill, Vanilla Ice vs
Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Cosby Show vs The Simpsons.
Just because something is neglected is sufficient reason to consider it.
Is there a special status of high art that should be accorded our most
respected poets and novelists and denied Paul Rubens or Peter Straub or
Jackie Mason? Are these writers any more deserving of a place in the classroom
than Pee-Wee 5 Playhouse or Mystery or The World according to Jackie
Mason? On the contrary, these three works are more interesting and worthier
of close reading than many of the recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize
or National Book Award. If the prize winners are the contemporary case
for high culture, then there can be no question that those who prefer to
study cultural and social texts are probably right. There's more innovation
and more cultural acumen in any episode of Rem and Stimpy than in any of
the books of our last trio of national poet laureates.
Our worst examples, foisted on us by the cultural orthodontics of officialliterary
culture, serve us badly. We keep thinking that what is canonized
as high art is what art is all about-but this whitewash of our literary
and aesthetic histories represses what indeed is the lasting legacy
of even white, Eurocentric male artists, much less artists of different origins
and, perhaps more useful to say, different destinations. In the great
shell game of art in the university, the "art" has too often disappeared,
replaced by administered culture. And administered art may be no better
than no art, since it's the administration that is doing most of the signifying.
What, then, accounts for the complacently narrow range of styles and
tone in the official verse culture of the postwar period? Perhaps this too
can be understood as a manifestation of intellectual self-hatred. Professional
anti-intellectualism plays itself out in a particularly uninhibited form
in the promoting of works of poetry that espouse a distaste for the intellectual
and rhetorical nature of writing-poems that insist on affiliation
with innocuous abstractions like the "universal human spirit" while denying
their implication in the material forms in which particular human spirits
actually might appear. Ironically it is such nostalgic values, fundamentally
aversive to a contemporary engagement with the poetic, that those