My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

50 W HAT'S ART GOT T 0 DOW I T HIT?
popular, and general interest prose; but in an age of cultural studies such
segmentation will not hold. The space of prose is an operating environment
that embeds genres within genres. Nor does one have to choose
between fiction and story: for there are the stories of our searches and
researches. The art of the essay; but also, the essay as art.
For prose can sing. It can swim against the remorseless tide of axiom a­
tizing and tone-lock. But that requires that as writers we listen to the
sounds that we make with our words; that we own the shapes our paragraphs
declare as they crash into one another or erode each other's edges;
that we hear both the studied and the studying as always art, music, the
movement of ideas through measures and measuring, shifted and shifting
tempos and modulations. This is the promise of a writing-conscious cultural
studies as much as of a proactive poetics.
The test of the new poststructuralists will be whether we will change
the prevailing institutionalized infatuation with triumphalist specialization,
neoscientific prose, and all shape and manner of standardization,
from tests to course designs. Will we apply our theories of ambiguity, provisionality,
and the nomadic not just to reinterpreting the power dynamics
of centuries no doubt prematurely consigned to history, but also to our
own workplace and its administrative and professional apparatuses?
Of course poetry and fiction are institutionalized in university creative
writing programs. But for the most part such programs do little to further
social expressionism in poetry or cultural activism in criticism. Too often
creative writing programs lock themselves into counterproductive antagonism
with English departments, especially with the new literary theory,
fearing philosophy will compromise the intuitive and emotional capacity
on which a poet must rely in fabricating her or his voice.
It doesn't have to be this way. Creative writing programs could be transformed
into university centers for the art of writing, specializing in
research and development into the social and aesthetic dimensions of writing.
At the same time, literature classes could be transformed from a
knowledge-acquisition approach to creative reading workshops, replacing
tests with poetic response in the form of free-form journals, poems, and
literary imitations.
I don't teach Literature I teach poetry-as-a-second-language, or PSL­
People in Solidarity with Language. That means I try to immerse the workshop,
formerly class, in poetic forms, poetic sounds, and poetic logics.
Tapes of poets reading their own work are indispensable, since there is no
way to fully explain sound values; it would be as if you tried to teach music
only from scores. Poetry readings, along with regular visits by literary
artists to graduate and undergraduate classes, can be catalytic, offering an