My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

70 A N I N T E R V lEW WIT H HAN N A HMO eKE L - R I EKE
to pretty much learn on your own, though perhaps being inspired
by someone else's model. I guess I'd say sometimes my intuitions are
inspired and sometimes not. Meanwhile Denise Levertov, whose
early poetry I admire, uses "inspiration" as a cudgel to knock down
instances of radically imaginative poetry that refuse to conform to
the bland and conventional verse styles with which she has affiliated
herself. I suppose that only proves that inspiration is being used as
cover for a refusal to think.
HMR: Marjorie Perloff claims, that in language poetry-like in futurist
poetry-the search for the "mot juste" is most important. My
impression, however, is, that it is not the single word, but the "in
between", what happens between the words, the friction that arises
from new contexts, and very often the gaps, erasures what is interesting
for many contemporary poets in the U.S. What is your view
on that?
CB: Depending on what poet, and indeed what poem, I think all these
things are going on. For myself, I am enthralled by the possibility of
word substitution-using an unexpected word where a particular
word is expected. For this to work with the torquing I want, it is
necessary, ironically perhaps, to find the exact right word; that word
is, from another angle, of course, exactly the wrong word, "Ie mot
mauvais" (and as long as we are talking about Moe, let's not neglect
Larry and Curly). Then again if words could actually bring about
justice, we might need no poetry at all.
HMR: Is television, and other new visual media, important for your
own poetry? TV aesthetics and language seem to playa major role
in your writing, and in one essay you write about a competition
between poetry and the mass media. What do you mean by that?
CB: The mass media is part of the environment in which I live and so
my poems, to some degree, reflect on that environment, which is
not to say simply reflect it. In a culture like the U.S., where value is
usually equated with audience size or commercial potential, poetry
has a virtue of providing an active "counter" culture which is intensely
productive but quite small in scale. This smallness of scale is a
value in itself. I am a part of the first generation to grow up on, or
anyway With, TV. My work is as influenced by Dragnet as by Proust.
Indeed, quite apart from the sorts of contexts and influences I was
belaboring earlier, I would insist on the primary influence of the
contemporary moment: on the forms and materials given to us in
the specific time we are living. This makes for a poetry that engages
the social world directly, by taking on its jargon and its technologies,
its blather and its displacements, not only as subjects but as