Pitch of Poetry

Charles Bernstein

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226332116
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Praised in recent years as a "calculating, improvisatory, essential poet" by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or "pitches" for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake. Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

Bent Studies

The Pataquerical Imagination

Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies

A preliminary sketch of this essay was presented at “Tendencies: Poetics and Practice,” City University of New York Graduate Center, February 24, 2010, at the invitation of Trace Peterson, and “Rethinking Poetics,” Columbia University, June 11, 2010. Versions of the work were subsequently presented as the Lahey Lecture, Concordia University (Montreal), October 25, 2012; Yale English Department lectures, February 27, 2014; EPC’s twentieth-anniversary conference, September 12, 2014; and boundary 2’s “The Social Life of Poetic Language,” Dartmouth, May 22, 2015. The essay was completed in January 2015.

A Fantasy in 140 Fits

Dramatis Personae

Edgar Allan Poe

Emily Dickinson

William Carlos Williams

William Blake

Hart Crane

Walt Whitman

Stéphane Mallarmé

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Fanny Brice

Superintendent Fenza & the Graeae189

Countrymen, Cadets, Soldiers, Monkeys, a French Doctor, Porters, an Old Man, Apparitions, Witches, Professors, Poets, Lords, Gentlemen, Ladies, Officers, Murderers, Attendants, and Messengers

La palabra más bella del idioma es extranjera

Bárbara o Barbara

Todos los hombres son mortales también el shock lender es

El concepto más bello de la lengua

¿Sabotaje?

Prestábamos

Se lo digo a Usted, no a ellos

“Búsquense una nueva casi porque la vieja se está des”

The most beautiful word of the language is stranger

Barbaric or Barbara

All men are mortal the shock lender is also

The most beautiful concept of the mother tongue

Sabotage?

We used to lend

I tell you, not them

“Look for a new almost because the old one is dis?”

Jorge Santiago Perednik, trans. Molly Weigel, from The Shock of the Lenders

Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic, and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied by) foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness.

Lyn Hejinian, “Barbarism” (The Language of Inquiry)

STEHEN, im Schatten

des Wundenmals in der Luft.

TO STAND, in the shadow

of the stigma in the air.

Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—

Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.

John Masefield, “A Consecration”

I. [facsimile]

A specter is haunting official verse culture—the specter of pataquericalism. All the forces have entered into a nepohumanist alliance to exorcise this specter: Associated Writing Programs and Pulitzer, New Yorker and New York Review of Books, elliptical lyricists and hybrid centrists.190 Over the past two decades, the stranglehold of Cold War scenic-voice poems has loosened under the pressure of the literary in(ter)ventions of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its partisans to let a soupçon of flowers bloom in official verse culture greenhouses. The forms demonized a few decades ago are now embraced as a mark of new inclusiveness, a fair and balanced approach to poetry styles, marking not the end to poetic ideology but an indefinite cessation.

It is high time that pataquericalists should openly, in the face of the whole poetry world, display their views, parade their aims, parody their tendencies, and meet this old husband’s tale of the specter of Bent Studies with a whoosh & higgly hoot & a he-ho-hah.

The history of all hitherto existing poetry is the history of pataquerical struggles. Normal and perverse, highbred and vernacular, metered and unmetered, versed and averse, national and barbaric, couth and uncouth, proper and wrong, manly and unmanly, black and white, jew and goy, pigeon and sparrow, fancy and imagination, miscegenated and pure, assimilated and ideolectical, dominated and dominatrix—stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of poetry at large or in the triumph of the mediocracy. The modern necrohumane society that has sprouted from the ruins of the poetry wars has not done away with these antagonisms. It has established new hybrids, new conditions of normalcy, new forms of correctness in place of the old ones.

II.

I told my wife the water is too shallow. She said, wait till you get to know it better.

III. Com(op)positionality

In Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, Simon Jarvis counters a corrosive assumption about ideological critique.191 In The German Ideology, Jarvis reminds us, Marx takes to task the idealists known as Young Hegelians for their iconoclastic hubris: the assumption that by debunking false consciousness—idol smashing—they will free themselves from idols once and for all. The mistake of the Young Hegelians was to see debunking as an end in itself rather than as a part of a dialectical process of critique, to take an Emersonian rather than a Marxist swerve, a process that has no terminal point but, like a Klein bottle, doubles back on itself (or like sweaters at the old Klein’s department store, is always on sale at better price).

The legacy of romanticism haunts the contemporary imagination of poetry. Romantic ideology, in Jerome McGann’s sense, underwrites the hegemonic ideology of postwar US poetics—that poetry, through its commitment to lyric sincerity (high lyric) and refined craft (high-bred) can be a universal expression of human sentiment.192 Poetry, in its highest, and often dullest, forms, is able to transcend partisan bickering and divisive position taking. It is a bulwark against the inhuman tyrannies of hypernationalism, fascism, and Pol-Pot-Stalin-Mao-Tse-Tung thought: regimes of totalitarian violence that are an affront to humanity. Except that these monstrous irruptions are entirely human and define us as much as moral sentiment or ethical conduct.

In our time, the dominant strain of official verse culture is defined by its presumption of being above the fray of special interests, bickering movements, and groups. The recent rise of elliptical and hybrid poetics is a case in point, for this is not a movement but a strategy to contain disruptive and unruly ideological and historical—which is to say aesthetic—challenges.193 It is a poetics of assimilation and accommodation, and, as such, is very much in line with the traditional values of much American poetry and poetry criticism of the Cold War.

There is no escape from aesthetic ideology, despite the fervent insistence of the fair and balanced idealists in their rejection of excess, dissidence, and oppositionality—that is, aversion of the three q’s: queered, quixotic, querulous. The repression of aesthetic ideology under the banner of convention, accessibility, compromise, refinement, or humanist literary values has the effect of naturalizing the idealists’ unacknowledged positions and group affiliations. This subliming fosters a poetry of capitulation and compromise whose telltale signs are often stylistic restraint and lyric self-regulation, which as an aesthetic position could be promising but in a humanist vacuum are merely proto-professional. This is the difference between craft and method, positivism and the dialogic, Christian universalism and Minute Particulars, homogenization and the syncretic.

To imagine that there is a neutral space, a craft of poetry, that is free of ideological domination or contamination is positivism. In ...