My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

l~e ~oo~ as ~Tc~itectuTe
Architectural terms are more than just metaphors for reading, yet it's difficult
to track the parallels without getting impossibly abstract or painfully
elusive.
You can start with the idea of "grammatical space" and Louis Kahn's idea
that material-and I would include verbal material-"is spent light".
Something of the darkness of reading comes out in this phrase, a reminder
of the opaque spaces of the interior that poetry can aspire toward just as
easily as back away from: the sightless interrogative of writing, its blackening
of the page a resistance to the oppressive insistence of visibility.
Aldo Rossi's topology of fractures, contaminations, areas of waiting, and
intermediate/non-determinate units are as much terms for a new prosody
as a new architecture.
The constructing of grammatical space through various forms of
sequencing pervades all levels of writing, from the ordering of syllables,
words, phrases, lines, and stanzas within a poem to the overall arrangement
of poems in a book. Poetic composition consists of a series of displacements
constantly opening up upon new emplacements; or, to speak
literally of metaphors, composition consists of measuring or registering a
series of dislocations that produces the poem's motion or kinesis.
In organizing my books, including this one, I've tried to invent different
ways of ordering the individual pieces, avoiding, where possible, both
chronological and thematically developmental patterns. For example, borders
between poems are occasionally confused: sometimes a stanza of a
long poem may not be formally different from a discrete short poem in the
same book, or a short poem in one book becomes part of a longer poem
in another. Various sequencings of contrasting styles or rhetorics or shapes
attracts me as a model. I've sometimes imagined my collections of poems
to be something like those oversized books of samples that used to be in
tailor's shops, with small swatches of different fabrics-one page with a
dozen types of herringbone and another with different thicknesses. My
father, who was in the textile business, used to have dozens of such books
in his office, in fact it was probably the kind of book he knew best and took