My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

A N I N T E R V lEW WIT H HAN N A HMO C K E L - R I EKE 67
forms of continuity with the earlier work. Saying this, it is impossible
to summarize my relations to so many different poets. But in
Olson and Zukofsky and Niedecker and Oppen I continue to learn
from the insistence on new forms and structures and also the social
grounding of the poem. There are of course many ways that the
contemporary moment mandates different approaches to form than
practiced by these poets. Form is particular, historically contextual:
one lesson I take from these poets is to make my own way.
Still, some features of "Objectivist" work, as well as Stein's, do
stand out for me, especially as they worked to "materialize" the language
by emphasizing compositional processes. In Zukofsky and
Stein, one begins to hear a music of poetry that is acoustic rather
than metrical: a poetry that foregrounds the sound shape of the
poem. In all of these poets you also see the use of serial, or linked,
forms, as ways of eliding closure. You find a resistance to the "high"
diction or ornate rhetoric of symbolist poetry and a turn to a subject
matter of the everyday, to what at the time seemed anti-poetic subject
matter. You find extensive use of found or collaged material and
the use of invented rather than received form. And, finally, perhaps
philosophically most significant to my own work, a breaking down
of the barrier between the observer and the observed, description
and event, poetry and poetics.
HMR: In your essay on "The State of the Art" from your book A Poetics
you write: " ... we can't rely on the tools and forms of the past, even
the recent past, but must invent new tools and forms that begin to
meet the challenges of the ever-changing present." What does history
mean to you, and why do you consider it as a useless burden?
CB: I certainly don't consider history as a useless burden! But I wonder
which history-both in the sense of whose history and what
account of history, histories. Poetry is a place to explore these
methodological issues, so that history, in my own work anyway, is
felt more in the forms of the poems than in the subject matter. What
I want is a poetry that interrogates how language constitutes, rather
than simply reflects, history; and not only history, but social meaning
and values.
Devices and technique-the tools and forms of the past-shift in
their meaning and value over time, requiring continual reassessment.
I try to suggest this in my essay on postwar American poetry, ''The
Second War and Postmodern Memory", also in A Poetics, where I
account for the shift in attitude toward authority, declarative ness,
and cultural optimism-and indeed the aversion of representation,
the realization that there are some things that cannot be represented