My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

66 AN INTERVIEW WITH HANNAH MOCKEl-RIEKE
tanto For one thing, many of us were active on the left as part of the
anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s. We saw our poetry
(and essays and publishing and "arts" organizing) as growing out of
that oppositional politics. This has meant a concentration on the
nature of ideology, both as it pertains to political discourse, of
course, but more importantly to "ordinary" language and to poetic
discourse. I would point to the Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin,
Louis Althusser, and the sociologists Erving Goffman in the
U.S. and Basil Bernstein in the U.K., as writers who suggest, at least
for me, some of the issues I think these poets have addressed,
though in ways that could not be anticipated from such "theory".
Another category of shared interests would be language philosophy;
for me, the late writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular,
along with the related work of the American philosopher Stanley
Cavell. Russian formalist linguistics, for example the work of Roman
Jakobson, should also be mentioned here, and Ferdinand de Saussure,
although he has been of more use to some of my friends than
he has been to me. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze
& Felix Guattari, and later Michel de Certeau and Jean-Jacques
Lecercle, have also been important, and of course others would
emphasize different writers and have less interest in these (but I can't
speak for them).
Equally important has been the rethinking of the scope and purpose
of the artistic domain. I would point to Jerome Rothenberg's
several anthologies as the most useful example of this opening,
including his first, Technicians of the Sacred, which presented quite radical
transactions and transductions and performances of what are
often mislabeled "tribal" or even "primitive" poetries from the Americas
as well as Oceania and Africa. The implications of theses materials
are profound, as suggested by James Clifford's recent The Predicament
of Culture. Finally, the early century work of many Russian
futurist (and formalist) poets, artists, bookmakers, and performers is
surely the most inspiring, and ultimately unsettling, model for the
sort of collective and collaborative activity of artists some few or
many of us envisioned.
HMR: Talking about "traditions". How is your writing related to
Objectivist poetry and Projective Verse?
CB: I recently wrote a long essay on Charles Reznikoff, one of the socalled
"Objectivist" poets, and several people asked why I had written
it, since Reznikoff's work seems so different than my own. In
looking at the literary past, I am not interested in emphasizing how
what I do is different than the poets whom I admire, but in the