My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

Every day. Day by day. The hours hang and the headlines punctuate a
passage through time that we move through, head bowed at the collision
of flesh and indoctrination. Yet there might be (might there be?) some
doctrine to get us out of this viscous circle of self-enclosing artifacts that
we call news, as if the world was already lost before we could speak a
word to it.
In Hannah Weiner's Weeks, the daily bite of world-event narrative
achieves the grandeur, perhaps the quiet desperation, of background music
(ambient ideology). Weeks is an unnerving foray in a world of prefabricated
events: a world we seem to have fallen into, as if from the cradle.
Weeks was written in a small notebook, one page per day for fifty weeks.
Each page of the book is the eqUivalent of a single week, with each day
taking its toll in about five lines. The material, says Weiner, is all found­
"taken at the beginning from written matter and TV news and later almost
entirely from TV news."
Here parataxis (the serial juxtapositions of sentences) takes on an ominous
tone in its refusal to draw connections. Weeks, in its extremity, represents
the institutionalization of collage into a form of evenly hovering
emptiness that actively resists analysis or puncturing. In Weeks, the virus
of news is shown up as a pattern of reiteration and displacement, tale without
teller. Yet, while Weiner follows a strict poetic method of refusing the
"lyrical interference of ego", the result is that these deanimated
metonymies take on a teller, as if to call it "Hannah". This is the vortical
twisting, or transformation, at the heart of Weeks's prosodic inquisition.
Weeks is poetic homeopathy: a weak dose of the virus to immunize our systems-let's
say consciousnesses-against it.
What do we make of our everyday lives: make of them, make out of
them? What do we make of, that is, these materials that we can no where
(not anymore) avoid, avert our ears as we do, or, as in poetic practice, hide
behind the suburban lawns of laundered lyricism?
Weiner's Weeks is a shocking cui de sac to a tradition of the found in Amer-
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