My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

64 A N I N T E R V lEW WIT H HAN N A HMO C K E L - R I EKE
a particular technique might not be valuable or that attention should
not be called to it, but that specific techniques should not be idealized.
What was interesting about the work associated with
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is precisely that it did not represent a school
or a style or a single linear tradition with a starting point and a series
of red letter dates; if anything, grouping together these approaches
to writing exploded the idea of a single origin, a single school. We
are talking about synthesizing or grafting approaches with very different
agendas, styles, origins, and concerns but which, nonetheless,
were being related in terms of specific frames provided.
I'm not suggesting that these scenes of writing were free from
doctrinaire aesthetics-that is a utopian idea that bears little relation
to the social exchanges of actually existing poets. But I do think
that the many doctrines we sometimes debated and sometimes
practiced did undercut the tendency among many clusters of poets
toward social exclusivity. The issue and aesthetic orientation of
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tended to bring in a larger and more unpredictable
assortment of interested parties than a more social (or scene)
focus could possibly have allowed. You might say we met each other
through the work and not the other way around. And the number of
people involved has always been well beyond any easy count.
I would say that the interconnection among the poetic styles
attended to in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E has to do with the rejection of
certain traditionally accepted techniques for poem-making and an
openness to alternative techniques, together with a distrust of the
experimental as an end to itself-i.e., theatricalizing the processes of
poem generation rather than making the poems (though this last
point treads a narrow and arguable line). Surely, there was a deep
distrust of the typical "workshop" poem of too easy personal
epiphany-"Your glances, like lances I incise the blister I of my feelings
II or am I just a mat I for you to rub off I the muck of your lifelike
life"-poems that assume a "voice" without making any effort to
hear the voices and sounds in the language, in the materials-the
poem's "actual word stuff", to use a phrase of Zukofsky's. But also,
built in, was the distrust that any new style or technique or device
was the gold pot at the end of the rainbow; that is, a commitment to
the need for a multiplicity of stylistic approaches among a multiplicity
of poets, and even for one poet. So a shared "opposition", a
shared dissidence.
Or put it this way: a poem by TIna Darragh or David Melnick has
less in common with a poem by Lyn Hejinian or Bruce Andrews,
though all are in the Tree anthology, than any two poems by their