My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

42 W HAT' 5 ART GOT TO DOW I T HIT?
who profess both literary and cultural studies too often ascribe to poetry
as such.
The products of official verse culture are no more interesting or valuable
than the products of Madison Avenue. (What would be the state of
film studies if it were confined to Oscar nominees?) However, poetry can
also be a form of cultural studies that incorporates reading the products
of Madison Avenue; call it, Social Expressionism. Yet the university as a
professional environment remains hostile to this type of approach both
in its creative writing programs and in its normalizing writing practices.
There is no art, only signifying practices. Or rather, who's to say what's
just a signifying practice and what a work of art? Once the fixed points of
difference are undermined, there can be no rule to make such distinctions.
But it doesn't follow from this that distinctions cannot be made in particular
contexts.
Of course if poetry is above the fray of competing social discourses
then its special status is secure. But there is no Poetry, only poetries. The
patchwork quilt of works I have in mind insists on its reflectiveness as a
means of refracting the pull of commodification or, to put it more historically,
zeitgeistization. The works of social expreSSionism-whether by
Bruce Andrews or Hannah Weiner, Ron Silliman or William Burroughsare
neither the unreflected products of their period nor the lyric expression
of individual selves. Rather the social field itself is expressed, in the
sense of brought into view, represented by means of interpretation and
interpenetration.
The university environment is not just nonpoetic, which would be unexceptional,
but antipoetic. And this situation has remained constant as we
have moved from literary studies to the more sociologically and psychoanalytically
deterministic approaches to cultural studies. At the same time,
the university is perhaps the only one among many anti-poetic and antiphilosophic
American institutions that will entertain its antipathy to the
poetic and the philosophic as a Significant problem, and it is this approach
that I think becomes more possible in the age of cultural studies.
Within the academic environment, thought tends to be rationalizedsubject
to examination, paraphrase, repetition, mechanization, reduction.
It is treated: contained and stabilized. And what is lost in this treatment is
the irregular, the nonquantifiable, the nonstandard or nonstandardizable,
the erratic, the inchoate. (Is it just a mood or sensibility I'm talking about,
and if that's it, can mood be professionalized?)
Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that's what I want from it, what I
want to say about it just here, just now (and maybe not in some other con-