My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

68 A N I NT E R V lEW WIT H HAN N A HMO C K E L - R I EKE
in the wake of the Systematic Extermination Process. The sort of
evasion of pride of group that is reflected in my answer to your first
question. What I emphasize in that essay is not poems "about" the
systematic extermination process, although that is discussed, but a
shift in sensibility, form, and diction that is quite profound but
almost never remarked on as being connected to this fundamental
historical frame. In this context, a poetry's diffidence toward direct
political statement as well as its asociality (its withdrawal from not
only mass culture but also popular-folk, street, "counter", Beatculture
as well) has a social and historical meaning. Poetry becomes
a necessary response to the Second War (and also, as in the return of
the repressed, the Vietnam War), but in its unconsoled mutters and
elegiac stutters, its hesitations and influidities, its intractabilities and
distempers.
HMR: That reminds me of what Bertolt Brecht said about the impossibility
to write about the beauty of trees. You mentioned that Brecht's
writing is of particular interest to you. Which part of his work are
you referring to, and why?
CB: Brecht figures prominently in my verse essay "Artifice of Absorption"
because I am interested in the dynamic of both being absorbed
in the textual "action" and at the same time remaining aware of the
structures producing the effect. Like the Russian futurist's idea of
ostranenie (making strange), Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt is a crucial model
for breaking the empathic connection between reader and poem,
where one reads through the words to get to the idea of content "on
the other side." In contrast, I want to materialize the word, create a
work in which the words remain audible, rather than unsounded and
invisible.
HMR: I read your major poetological statement, "Artifice of Absorption"-among
other things-as an attempt to blur the boundaries
between poetry and theoretical discourse. As far as I know, the dissolution
of this dividing line is also one of the issues you emphasize
in the writing of Stein and other modernists and it is strongly supported
in the Poetics Program at Buffalo, that is in the work of
younger poets. What does this issue mean to you and/or these
younger poets?
CB: Poetry is necessarily theoretical and it can evade this no more
than it can evade its historicality. Blur poetry and poetics as I might,
I do see them as distinct genres with specific traditions and I rely on
the generic distinctions to perform my hermeneutic oscillations
between the two. I'm not promoting an undifferentiated writing but,
on the contrary, I am interested in increasing differentiation of writ-