-
Archibald MacLeish declared, "a poem should not mean
but be," but of course he didn't mean it. MacLeish's poems
meant perhaps too much, and sang too little, to submit to
his definition. Marianne Moore wrote of a poet's ability to
create imaginary gardens with real toads in them, and so to
create being out of meaning. More than any of the other
moderns, Hart Crane self-consciously created poetry as
MEDIUM and wanted language to spring us to somewhere beyond
language. This unmediated medium remained, however
problematically, "natural"; the poem was an organism that
grew on its own; it was the poet's truly born child.
-
Crane incorporated advertising language into his myth
in "The River" section of The Bridge as if pre-packaged
language could also be used as a springboard to a
non-linguistic realm. But what happens when the order of
transmission is reversed, when advertising copy coopts
poetry, when the medium becomes the media, when the only
poetry that most people encounter comes in the guise of
slogans like "I wanna be like Mike" (which refers us to a
basketball player and culture hero whose very style is
"poetic")? In this contemporary example, of course,
advertising language is so strong that it has the ability to
change the names by which we know our heroes--no one though
of Michael Jordan as "Mike" until Gatorade (not,
unfortunately, the company with the sight-rhyme, "Nike")
needed to transform the hero to make him rhyme, make him
even more friendly (is it possible?) to consumer culture.
-
Marjorie Perloff's provocative claim in Radical
Artifice is that advertising language is that of Modernist
poetry; advertising's tenets were not laid down so much by
Madison Avenue as by Ezra Pound. "Exact treatment of the
thing, accuracy of presentation, precise definition--these
Poundian principles have now been transferred to the realm
of copywriting" (94), she argues (and I wonder it we might
not find more irony still in the word itself, "copy write";
"copy right"; "copyright"). Perloff, ever an exact and able
close-reader, takes the following billboard message in hand
to show that, "as the 'look' of the standard poem begins to
be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an
interesting exchange begins to occur" (100):
O. R. LUMPKIN. BODY-
BUILDERS. FENDERS
STRAIGHTENED.
WRECKS OUR SPECIAL-
TY. WE TAKE THE DENT
OUT OF ACCIDENT.
"Surely," she enjoins, pointing to the lineation of this
"free verse" bit of advertising, with its clever wordplay
and enjambment, "the next time we have an accident, this
memorable punning will stick in our minds and draw us to O.
R. Lumpkin rather than some other body shop" (100). This
"standard poem" might well be printed in The New Yorker or
Poetry or American Poetry Review (the latter with a
photo of Mr. Lumpkin himself, no doubt). The punning
begins, of course, with Mr. Lumpkin, who takes our lumps and
makes them right again.
-
Advertising's power, of course, lies in its simulation
of authenticity; the potential consumer may know that the
American Express card ads that show the familial love
between father and daughter are "artificial," and still wipe
tears from her eyes. Hence Dan Quayle's insistence that
television should show us a more authentic version of
ourselves. And so authenticity becomes a form of nostalgia.
Crucial to this sense of authenticity, Perloff would claim,
is its presentation--as in the Lumpkin ad--through the
medium of free verse, which we think of as "natural" and
unmediated through the artifice of traditional forms. "Free
verse = freedom; open form = open mind, open heart: for
almost half a century," writes Perloff, "these equations
have been accepted as axiomatic, the corollary of what has
come to be called, with respect to poetic language, the
'natural look.'" I suspect that she means us to hear the
conflation of poetic language with hairstyle, and the
attendant confusion between image and "self," whatever that
is; Perloff's persistent attacks on the univocal lyric over
the past ten years or so are based on a profound distrust of
the "self" created through it. She writes: "Most
contemporary writing that currently passes by the name of
'poetry' belongs in this category which [Jed] Rasula wittily
calls PSI, for 'Poetry Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary to
data management systems.' The business of this particular
corporation is to produce the specialty item known as 'the
self,' and it is readily available in popular magazines and
at chain bookstores" (19). Need one add that there is a
magazine of that name: Self?
-
While Modernists worked from a dualist model that set
in tension "the image and the real," and believed that one
was related to the other, Postmodernists, according to
Perloff, see that relationship replaced by one "between the
word and the image" or between "the simulacrum and its
other" (92). In this new poetry, the image itself is
deconstructed, because after all, who can trust advertising
to tell us the truth about ourselves, whoever those selves
are? If advertising has become our mirror, then the poet's
goal is to distort that mirror in such a way that we see the
inherent distortion in images--reflection must give way to
refraction, deflection.
-
So we abandon the Imagist image and return to language,
but language understood in a new way, not as mediator but as
medium (in the material, not the psychic, sense). Where
the modern imagist free verse poet would write the Lumpkin
ad as it appears above (and as the ads flash by in Crane's
"the River"), the postmodernist poet would begin not from
the image of a wreck, and the message that the wreck would
be fixed, but from the words used to convey that
message--whose real import is mercantile. For the language
of advertising, above all, sells. The postmodernist poet
might play on the name O. R. Lumpkin, its relation to lumps
and kin and lumpenproletariat, and in so doing, unmessage
the message by making the medium the subject. It bears
quoting the three ways in which Perloff sees Postmodern
poets deconstructing the image:
(1) the image, in
all its concretion and
specificity, continues to be foregrounded, but it
is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that
which must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted
to scrutiny. . . .
(2) the Image as referring to something in
external reality is replaced by the word as Image,
but concern with morphology and the visualization
of the word's constituent parts: this is the mode
of Concrete Poetry[.]
(3) Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in
Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to
logopoiea. "Making strange" now occurs at the level of
phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level
of the image cluster so that poetic language cannot be
absorbed into the discourse of the
media. . . .
(78)
-
The real strength of Perloff's book is in the narrative
it elaborates as a way to understand the NEED for Language
poetry in a now unfolding literary history. Thus, "[i]f
American poets today are unlikely to write passionate love
poems or odes to skylarks or to the Pacific Ocean, it is not
because people don't fall in love or go birdwatching or
because the view of the Pacific from, say, Big Sur doesn't
continue to be breathtaking, but because the electronic
network that governs communication provides us with the
sense that others--too many others--are feeling the same
way" (202-3). In other words, poems about great vistas can
already be found--either in the Norton Anthology (see
Keats) or, in their fallen form, in a Hallmark shop. This
passage, which expresses Perloff's yearning for a unique and
unsullied perspective on (past) nature, sounds to my ear
transcendentalist in its idealistic paranoia, its yearning
for, yes, authenticity. Perloff's defense, like Whitman's,
would be to celebrate self-contradiction, knowing that
nothing else is possible. Like her allies the Language
poets, Perloff would claim with Gertrude Stein that
repetition is actually insistence, and that to sound the
transcendentalist note in the 1990s is to say something
new. Yet it's hard for her to do this without somehow
worshipping the unsullied and autochthonous "self" that she
so easily dismisses in rear-guard free verse poetry.
-
Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and other of the
Language group of poet-critics agree with Perloff on this--
as on most--points; our particular way of seeing such a
vista has been pre-determined, so the argument goes,
precisely by the Norton (at best) and by Hallmark (at
worst) or by the more likely (con)fusion of the two. This
way of seeing insures that we do conform with others, also
programmed to buy Hallmark cards and do other good deeds for
capitalism; the only way to be a good Emersonian these days
is to de-form the language, which is also to reform it. As
Bernstein says it (he, too, sounding a lot like someone who
has found the original Waldo amid a crowd of faces):
"Poetry is aversion of conformity in
the pursuit of new
forms, or can be" (1); and "I care most about poetry that
disrupts business as usual, including literary business: I
care most for poetry as dissent, including formal dissent;
poetry that makes sounds possible to be heard that are not
otherwise articulated" (2). These claims are not, in and of
themselves, radical. The Language poets' means of acting on
these claims ARE more radical, but their attempt to create
once against a language that has not been coopted by the
media, an un-transparency that is transparent, puts them
squarely in the line of American idealists that includes
Emerson and Gertrude Stein. Their quest for originality, a
writing free of all quotation, is at once as admirable and
quixotic as was Emerson's.
-
Bernstein is perhaps the most intelligent and most
consistently interesting of contemporary thinkers on poetry
and poetics; he is also the most self-contradictory. His
work bears the kind of confused (nay, panicked) attention
that Emerson's does; like Perloff, his argument against the
Romantic and Modernist image owes perhaps too much to the
first American Romantic. He is at once aesthete (he adores
Swinburne and Wilde) and proto-Marxist; purveyor of
claritas and
obscuritas; deconstructionist and
fetishist of the word; preacher and skeptic; fiction-writer
and disseminator of truths--the train could go on, derailing
itself as it goes. This is, of course, part of Bernstein's
world view; his is a vision that tries to leave the binary
behind (by containing multitudes), and engage in the
polymorphous multiplicity of things. Yet I wonder if many
of these contradictions are not, in fact, incompatible;
Bernstein's Swinburnian poems seem somehow at odds with the
needs of a leftist politics, for example. Yet Bernstein's
prose is, for the most part, clear; he would pass a
university course in argumentative writing. It is far
clearer than his poetry, and serves (ironically) to
advertise the poetry by explaining its purpose, if not its
content. In fact, the content of the poems seems to me to
be the elaboration of the prose, as if poetry were a "proof
text," rather than the proper subject of our so-called
science.
-
Bernstein's claims for poetry are in many ways even
stronger than Perloff's, although he begins from the same
starting blocks with (an all-too-easy?) attack on
advertising culture, arguing that poets should display
a willingness to engage in
guerrilla warfare with the
official images of the world that are being shoved down
our throats like so many tablespoons of Pepto Bismol,
short respite from the gas and the diarrhea that are
the surest signs that harsh and uncontainable reality
hasn't vanished but has only been removed from public
discussion.
(3)
Bernstein replaces Perloff's creators of false "selves" with
the purveyors of what he calls "official verse culture."
That these are the purveyors of a political, as well as a
poetic, message Bernstein makes clear in his argument that
the notion that "we can 'all' speak to one another in the
universal voice of history" is a "disease." His heroes,
then, are poets who work "in opposition to the dominant
strains of American culture" (6).
-
These dominant strains, for Bernstein as for Perloff,
are evidenced in the strains of the American lyre. But
where Perloff's poetic heroes are those who replace "form"
with "artifice"--who replace sonnets with numerically
generated bits of language that have the virtues of
formalism without any of the taint (and what a taint there
is!), Bernstein erases the differences between all forms of
writing:
if there's a temptation to
read the long
essay-in-verse ("Artifice of Absorption"), which
follows these opening notes, as prose, I hope
there will be an equally strong temptation to read
the succeeding prose as if it were
poetry.
(3)
Whether prose or poetry, his writing is meant to be taken as
fiction; in a Steinian way he writes, "when Content's
Dream was published I wanted that to be classified as
'essays/fiction.' People sometimes ask me if I'm interested
in writing a novel. I say, well, I did, that's it" (151).
-
While Bernstein persuades me that the categories by
which we write and read literature no longer do us much
good, it seem to me that he himself holds to these
categories, and needs to hold to them to make his argument
fly. I find "Artifice of Absorption" the most compelling
piece in A Poetics--Bernstein's verse "Essay on Poetry,"
as it were. For here is an essay-poem that contains the
virtues of the essay form (it is readable, cogent) and of
the poem (it relies on enjambment for its rhythm and drama--
the same kinds of enjambments, I might add, that make poets
such as Amy Clampitt such easy targets for critics such as
Perloff). Bernstein begins from the question that springs
"naturally" from his work as a poet-critic (or poet-poet or
critic-critic); in so doing, he refines Perloff's discussion
of "artifice":
A poetic
reading can be given to any piece of
writing; a "poem" may be understood as writing
specifically designed to absorb, or inflate with,
proactive--rather than reactive--styles of
reading. "Artifice" is a measure of a poem's
intractability to being read as the sum of its
devices & subject matters.
(9)
For Bernstein, artifice is not so much a new kind of form,
as it is for Perloff, as a way of writing that foregrounds
technical devices over and above "content" and "meaning."
To paraphrase Bernstein's discussion of "voice" in the
Language Book, "content" is but one possibility for
poetry. But "content" and "meaning" are not the ends of
poetry, just more means; they are not the same thing,
either, for "content never equals meaning" (10). Artifice
is, according to Bernstein's jargon, non-absorptive; one
cannot "get lost" in a Language poem the way one can get
lost in a Harlequin romance--but the reader is also not in
danger of losing her soul to the particular demands made on
it by the Harlequin (which are fundamentally conservative,
despite--or because of--the soft porn). And, as Bernstein
sees it,
much contemporary
American
poetry is based on simplistic
notions of absorption through unity, such
as those sometimes put forward by Ginsberg
(who as his work shows
knows better, but who has made an ideological
commitment to such
simplicity)."
(38)
-
Bernstein places himself characteristically at both
ends of his artificial dualism:
In my poems, I
frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable
elements, digressions &
interruptions, as part of a technological
arsenal to create a more powerful
("souped-up")
absorption than possible with traditional,
& blander, absorptive
techniques.
(52-3)
He acknowledges that "[t]his is a / precarious road" that
makes the reader more conscious of technique than of
experience, but I wonder if Bernstein believes in the
currency of terms like "experience." After reading
Bernstein's work over an extended period, the world of
language becomes THE world, always threatening/promising to
dissolve into a chaos of no-definition. Finally, though,
Bernstein proposes a kind of reading that is rather
pragmatically critical, even as it is creative. As Perloff
points out toward the beginning of Radical Artifice (and
this is one of its least interesting moments), "Not only
does the boundary between 'verse' and 'prose' break down but
also the boundary between 'creator' and 'critic'" (17).
-
Like Stein's language, Bernstein's is always
"foreign"--alien, confusing, and above all, never sacred.
Bernstein's most recent book of poems, Rough Trades, must
be read in this way, as a celebration and cerebration of
language in and for itself, and as an exercise in
non-absorptiveness that is meant to refashion prevailing
world political views. In the contradiction between these
two purposes lies an abyss; Bernstein seems at times too
much like a New Critic who attempts to change the world by
ignoring it. But Bernstein, however much he seems to be the
Pope (Alexander, that is) of the postmodern, means to
undress us of our layers of expression in order that our
means of expression can clothe us in new (and utopian)
possibilities. He and Perloff, in their complementary
assaults on the common-places of the American language at
this fin-de-siecle, provoke us to look past the image by way
of the (small-w) word, and to re-invest our words with
whatever ideals we have left. The poetry that they
advertise is not written in a "common" language, but in one
that we cannot yet think in, non-absorptive to the point of
being non-sensical. It may get us to
another world. But
then again, that's a soap opera.
Copyright © 1992 Susan M. Schultz