My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

THE BOO K A S ARC HIT E C T U R E 57
the greatest interest in. Yet my own temptation is to allow for maximum
contrast from one poem to another, that by means of this conflict of modes
) can bring into greater audibility musical or aesthetic or emotional preoccupations
not otherwise articulable. Sometimes) think of a book as a
"group" show; but) want the formal divergences among the poems to produce
an "inner" space that seems impossible to evoke if there is too much
uniformity among the elements.
Organizing a book is something like constructing a durational tunnel
that a reader can ride through, like riding through a multichambered
House of Horrors at an amusement park. The creation of durational spaces
in a poem-great but empty halls, narrow corridors, closets, enclosed
pools, formal picture galleries, off and on ramps, pulleys and trap doors
between levels-produces an internal or negative (in the sense of inverted
or inner) architecture.-You are entering a building through a dark and
musty subbasement; proceeding a few steps, you trip onto an elevator platform
and are whisked to what is something like the 23rd floor, where you
are stepping out into an abandoned soundstage for a 1930 production of
a Fenimore Cooper story; sighting a ladder, you climb up a flight onto a
floor filled with hundreds of irregularly shaped cubicles populated by
women dressed as Matadors ...
Against the Romantic idea of poems as transport, ) prefer to imagine
poems as spatializations and interiorizations-blueprints of a world ) live
near to but have yet to occupy fully. Building impossible spaces in which
to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems
and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell
inside the pleats and folds of language.