Jean-Marie Gleize

What we’ve (so far) never seen

Translation of French afterword to Charles Bernstein, Pied Bot, trans. Martin Richet, Collection Américaine (Nantes, France: Joca Seria, 2012), which included translations of Shade and Occurrence of Tune.

cover image: Susan Bee

“let me be asked to say how I was able to produce texts so inexplicable, so obviously clear, so obvious.”
—Francis Ponge

In French: Asile.¹ This is the first book I read by Charles Bernstein, in the series directed by Juliette Valéry, Format Américaine, its twenty-fifth volume (so small), made in May 1998 with the help of the Royaumont Foundation. What I liked were the words: “Tirage illimité” (unlimited edition). A reading, therefore delayed (Asylum, had been published fifteen years earlier, in New York, in 1983), of a text about which I could see well why we could wish for an “unlimited” diffusion: first, it adopted a very mobile look, blocks of statements descending on the page, more or less long lines laid on whites of uneven length on the right, on the left, text floating irregularly, neither prose nor verse, recalling some known provisions (in our modern repertoire) but with this crucial difference: the ritualized poetic motif, the essentialized landscape, the still life more or less abstract, were not at the rendezvous, which on the contrary erupted into the violence of a brutal reality (prisons, camps, barracks, asylums), a locked universe (doors, high walls, barbed wire), for: disfigurement, humiliation, dispossession, submission, “life history, photographing, weighing, fingerprinting, assigning numbers, searching. . . .” Something black like a “disease,” that of a society, ours. Poetry could say (without preaching). Be cut, sharp. Politics as an autopsy.

When I first opened this book, this Pied bot, or rather the manuscript of its translation, randomly, the first line that jumped out to me was this (it is in quotation marks in the text): “But that wall could be said.” It just so happens that for me, the wall, a wall, is an emblem for the criticism of poetry (by itself). It is against the poetic verse-image of Paul Éluard’s “The earth is blue as an orange” that Claude Royet-Journoud gave, for example, a verse like “The back wall is a wall of lime,” literal, irreducible to interpretation: a poetic of the bias of surfaces, a wall, the white of the wall, poetry and the poet brought back to the foot of the wall. It seems to me that, around the 1980s, Charles Bernstein was determined to take up the question in an equally radical or primary way: What, from the real, could not be said? Are there things that poetry does not say, know, or should and could not say?

Charles Bernstein is one of those poets that one cannot isolate. He’s intervening. Intervention means the inclusion of a practice in a context where one works with and against others, between one and the other—some hostile, hence the necessarily polemical, offensive/defensive dimension of this kind of practice—, others on the contrary with whom one helps to shift the pieces of the game, to change the face of the territory. With whom we advance word for word. Active and fruitful intervention, in a singular and decisive way, part of a collective effort. Charles Bernstein, in this sense, “intervenes.” It was in 1978 that he founded L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Bruce Andrews. And this magazine (thirteen issues until 1981)² was born out of the desire to continue and share a theoretical dialogue begun with Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews. A “small” long-range magazine. A limited-edition magazine, intended to exert a great influence in the field of poetic experimentation in the late 1970s and early 1980s (a selection of critical and poetic contributions led to the publication of a book, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, in 1984). For us in France, given the dates and general orientation of these texts, it is the magazine Tel Quel (for critical poetry and criticism of poetry, as well as the renewed attempt to think about the articulation of poetics to the political) and the collective Change (for proposals relating to the poetry of grammar and the “change” of forms), which will have locally played a similar role.³ It is thanks to Emmanuel Hocquard (who is responsible for the ARC⁴ readings at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris from 1977), followed by his collaboration with Claude Royet-Journoud for the first anthology of American poetry in 1986, that we were able to read and hear Charles Bernstein for the first time.⁵ If it is above all “American,” the context in which Bernstein’s poetic practice arises and fits, in continuity-contiguous with the objectivist heritage, and on a construction site opened side by side for poetry “language,” extends for us to the Franco-American context: by those who, in 1973, in France, founded the small editorial structure Orange Export Ltd, we will have had access to these poets with whom Hocquard recognizes “many convergences of ideas and approaches to writing problems” with the French of the same generation.

Initiating, of course, this poet, grouping, eliciting. Aware that the landscape can be reshaped, that it is possible to turn weakness into strength, and that a wall could be said. The magazine is therefore one of those modest tools that can function as powerful transformer. What follows shows that Charles Bernstein, the critic and poet, will also evolve within the university institution (especially in Buffalo or Philadelphia for the most recent period). Before considering the treatment of language, the “political” or social dimension of the poetic operation lies in this inscription in a context, this ethic of formal responsibility in which the practice of teaching, public interventions, acts of publication, oral or written, personal or collective, are attested to as important in the eyes of Charles Bernstein.

The two texts assembled in this volume belong to the large sequence, “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” The first, Shade, was published in 1978, the same year the magazine was founded, and happens to be the first book published by Sun and Moon Press, which would later become one of the leading publishers of radical experimentation. The second, The Occurrence of Tune, was published in 1981, the year the magazine published its last issue. The text, in the original edition, is accompanied by photographs by Susan Bee, Bernstein’s wife. These photographs, like the discursive figuration regime, are “altered.” They offer reality, a very immediate and simply decipherable reality, a blurred image, defeated, decomposed, or in the process of decomposition. These two texts are preceded here by a brief (meta)poetic fragment, a kind of “proem” first published precisely in a prefatory position for Charles Bernstein’s first critical collection, entitled Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 and published in 1986. This book brought together several theoretical and poetic texts, or poetic-theoretical texts published in various journals, including the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, since the mid-1970s.

Pied-bot (club foot)—a word, a thing, an image, an idea? (The status or degree of figurative consistency of this “Pied-bot” are here uncertain.) This “Pied-bot” will support the ruminant, errant advance. Thus, as this preface also states, “other means are thus admitted to the circulation of the nowhere seen, everywhere disturbed.” These would be the malformations and deformations of the soul, or the body (textual as well), what obliges us and frees us. We will move forward with our eyes closed for the never-before-seen, the misunderstood, the almost perceived, the not yet said.

Here, then, begins or announces a book by nightfall. The darkness that comes or falls, which is our environment. And our fate, a habit. The question would be (one way to ask it, there are others): what is obscure? Or the poem,—the agglomerate of black dust, or my gaze—it is I, reader, who makes the night fall on each of his words. Victim that I am of my “habits.” The text is not waiting for me. Where I expect it, it is not, or is no longer. “Night falls” on nothing: on him I have dropped my habits, to see, to hear, to understand, my reading reflexes. Conflict.

One critique, relating to Asylum: “a disturbing poem.” Nothing more just. These books, Shade and The Occurrence of Tune, are disturbing, because they are part of a poetic, or of an apoetic, of transgression, which they perform at the same time as they elaborate it, at the same time as they state it (“show how / it’s happening / with each phrase”). Poetry and poetics, diction and theory, fiction and criticism are here inseparable (or even indistinct), as meaning and withdrawal of meaning, verse and prose, “magazine literature” or “ordinary talk” and “pure poetry,” conversational and propositional, high voltage and low voltage; the apparent “illegibility” of the poem is due to these overlays, to these confusions, as well as to the systematic implementation of a problematic treatment of the expression-representation system: pronominal instability prohibits any identification of a subject (of enunciation), as well as of description, of narrative proposing no more than only pieces of a motif or situation that cannot be recomposed. Or: “no lyricism, no emotion,” no emotional ease or aesthetic complacency, no arrangement of things, no obedience to what they call logic: the space of relationships constructed by the text is unpredictable, juxtaposition thwarts the hierarchical order (syntax), no submission to metric convention, prosody; a dethematized poetry, if one dares to say—where something like a song, a disillusioned singing, a more or less empty, abstract air, could return, arise, as improvisation (occurrence . . .), as improvised.

It’s no doubt in the poem entitled “St. McC.,”⁶ where there is at work in the most extreme way, one could say in the most provocative way, this poetic counterpoetic: a very large number of lines are composed only of one word, and even, for one of them, only digits, a certain number keep only a few elements of the literal skeleton of words, the scholarly lexicon and the standard lexicon flash in the night of sense (“graphemic / hinges”), some word-lines appear in capitals (TURN/DESIRE), but without being able to really detect any mallarméen “latent conductive thread,” others mix lowercase and capitals (“wiTh tHaT kiNd oF”), the rule of the lines’ autonomy (which accentuates the fact of incompleteness, inarticulation, the collision of vertically juxtaposed units) seems particularly striking (“so find / isn’t / TURN”). To put it in the poem’s own, self-descriptive terms: a series of “autonomous explosions.” The difference between this and an approach to a poem (for us, principally, that of Mallarmé) that precisely plays with typography and variable spacing to indicate a tempo (accelerations/slowing down) and that structures internal dependencies around the “common thread” is that here, in Bernstein, there is no detectable hierarchy between the elements. Capitals do not dominate the literal terrain. Total equality between units: from the letter onto the words. So that all the particles (the line units exploding, turn after turn), and not just those that immediately sign this direction (hinges/reconfiguration/connections/inter-propositions . . .), possess, in addition to their immediate ability to generate fictional drift, a virtually metapoetic value: from “there is” (“there’s”) (so obviously transversing the whole work as indicative of a project of objective seizure, without prejudging the “poetic”) to the “face to a,” or to the “TO FACE” that restores the adventure (enterprise) (a Rimbaldian word for us)⁷ to its committed dimension, of “scratch,” inscription “ethical” and polemic in the field of the institution—the poetic academic, but not only.

“here. Forget.” The “Poem” (the work that opens the collection Shade) begins here. That is to say, by the word “here.” Not elsewhere, and especially not in those elsewheres where poetry prevails. On the contrary: here, and the poem is made to repatriate us there. There is no elsewhere that heals here. Or, again, and it’s a useful variant: elsewhere is here. Here is an open space, unknown, indefinite, infinite. Hence the injunction—same line, clean, in order to finish, and to begin, begin to be able to begin: “Forget.” It would be too long and tedious to enumerate everything that it is necessary to forget or try to forget, in order to begin to be able to say. And first what we have been taught, inculcated, learned to think, everything that hinders us and habituates us and dresses us, including, and first, a certain way of saying, peculiar to “the” poem. One could simply argue that Charles Bernstein’s poetry implies a first gesture of active oblivion. Then “sit down with it,” with what’s there. With “simply” what’s there: this, this, “and so on.” I am, understandably, very impressed by Shade’s incipit, the first lines of the first poem in Shade, and I know that the poem is about the poem, since Poem is its title—of what it is to say in a poem: it addresses me, summons me here, appeals to my capacity or my desire to forget, proposes to sit “with it” because “It’s time.” And it is then, only then, that everything could, or even can, engage. For example, say a wall, give the possibility that this “wall could be said.” A real adventure (enterprise) of transformation (“Anyway transform everything”), and of the objective world (words and things, language and reality), and subjectivity (“this thing inside you”), and of perceiving, looking, fantasizing, or dreaming as well, of all that falls within the powers of desire. All. “Transform everything.” So, the poem says what it does, and does what says.

This sequence of verbs: “flutter & cling,” this also: “digress, reverberate / connect, unhook,” and this also: “detach, unhinge,” for which subjects, which objects? Words (“this . . . set of words / all turns, all grains”), series or volley of words, (of “signs,” the poem also says, or of things, because “which are the things”) in roundabout movements, which, in their displacement (dance, seemingly aleatoric rotation), such as specks in space (“speck upon speck,” word on word, line on line), drag or squirt the meaning, hang it, pick it up, multiply it and disseminate it. “Thought stumbles, blinded,” yes, of course, but liberated too. I am not saying that this, the relationship between body and consciousness, space and meaning, the deciphering of signs, clouds, or constellations of particles, poetic commitment, and transformation, is accomplished without violence. It is no doubt “harsh” (Bernstein), “rough” (Rimbaud).

For which subjects? For which subject? Very quickly in the book, the question is settled: “Everyone has feelings. It’s always the same.” On the face of it, I have nothing of my own, in ownership. The unique is the same. We are all common singularities. I can always (it’s endless, bottomless) declare to myself: I’ve done this, that (I suffered), I’ll do this, that (I’ll travel), I’m against this and for that (for nature, against drugs), I have opinions on this and that (the stock market, or politics, “is death”), I can confirm, even if it doesn’t do much good, that this is not that (“A branch is not a root”). Under these conditions I can say that I am telling the truth and that I will tell it. But when I say “I will tell the whole truth” (as in court), or when I am aware that this truth is nothing (that tautological farce, muddy ideologeme, inconsistent biograph) or indeed that it is something else and that if I say that I will say it (all) it is that also I suppose pertinent to a proposal like (Cézanne, 1905): “I owe you the truth in painting and I’ll tell it to you.”

Or “in poetry.” I owe you the truth in poetry and I will tell you. Literally and in every way. To this always the same it is possible to oppose “a proper place,” one’s own place: “my writing / writing / even talking like this”: writing, speaking, thinking, pushing the limits of thought by working on the possibilities of language (writtenspeech [écritparlé]), that would be the task, which can always be called “poetry,” why not? The question is asked: “It could be my own” . . . My own what? My own voice, my own writing, my madness. If I have something of my own, it can only be (from the point of view of the norm) my madness: “this could be sort of the / the source of my crazy hood/ness.” A blind spot: I don’t know. The experience itself is ambiguous: the experience of writing is, no doubt, less the experience of things than the experience of the emptiness between things, a feeling of space. It is here that Cézanne could return—who paints less apples than the space between apples, less the rock than a certain abstract structure, emptiness, and distance. But it is Stanley Kubrick who emerges (if we dare say): objects float “separately” in the void. They do not induce any particular affect on my part. They are detached; to which my own detachment responds: I witness this floating, it is perhaps my madness, the source of my madness, which gives me to write, to experience the truth of writing or the desire to write in truth: in a state that could be defined: a certain positive “indifference” to the real. A “laissez faire.” A way to be present to the present. And it is then, thanks to this immediate vagabond immobility, that, beyond the initial and necessary exercise of forgetting, memory can return and work, a memory itself capable of refreshing experience. Otherwise to give sense, some value for the present, to this otherwise senseless present.

wall,” as. Again the wall comes back. The one that could be said. That has just been said, but the phrase that was heading toward him has moved away, effaced. The wall stays, “as.” New effacement, the comparing is off base. Or it doesn’t know what to be. The framing here is violent, violently sharp and subtracting, to capture only what is needed, which is necessary for the revelation of what must happen here because it will be said in a didactic parenthesis: “(it may be asked).” A wall, no doubt, incomparable. If the wall is “as,” it is nothing but like a wall. It is even that, what it is, for this reason. What is standing here. And we understand that here, that is what separates. That? There are them, or those who . . . There is sharing of space. Just now empty (where things and words, particles of matter or sound and sense circulate) here it is cleaved, there is also us, or all. And so-called community (each one’s own). Because all of this is taking place somewhere. The chair on which the poet likes to say that he is sitting doing nothing (when he writes) is not simply an experimental place. But a social place. And the poetic operation takes place in a society where there is something called “poverty,” and something also called “property.” The poem writes the two words by quoting them, the first is in quotation marks, the second in italics, two words that, in real society, designate positions and maintain a relationship of reciprocal involvement. Alongside poverty, charitable practices (“bread-for-alms”) . . . The question posed is a moral one. If it is possible (in connection here of the object of charity) to write “is immoral,” it is because values are at stake and the object of many discourses (“duties, statements, virtues”), it is that society, unequal, conflictual, engenders exclusion. The question is in fact moral, social, and political. “Certain ‘agitations’” cannot be ignored, even if the definition of protest (“to protest: is”) is suspended, even if “resists” is said to be “in fiction.” The question, therefore, arises, possible or impossible (“happiness?”), dependent or independent, “with others” or not. The word “socialism” crosses the stage. Poetry is concerned, visibly, with the existence of the wall.

Of course there is “emotion” (in this poetry without lyricism and emotion), “felt emotions” (see “For,” which is a poem for, I mean the opposite of a poem against), “loves” and even love, a subject “in love ‘with,’” and even “envy,” and, reiterated, “need you,” “you,” “& me,” and “we,” and “some physical” (i.e., “present,” “desires,” “a kind of strength”), an inscription of “lack,” the fact of “distance,” a climate in which the call is imposed, and the fear of a kind of madness (“come / before I go crazy”). Simplicity grappling with complication (and confusion), intimacy struggling with news (or, probably “the” news, everyday mythology), interiority and effacement, de-personalization, assertive, infirmed, fragile identity at least in its kind of presence—(“now, exactly, I,” “again, here, I,” “you?”) you certainly. Enough to compose and recompose (the puzzle is at the same time a motive) a scenario, several, with, as the end of the text says here, “false starts, fresh starts.”

The occurrence of . . . With each replay, therefore, a fresh start, a false start, a new beginning. There is no question of giving up. The wall, you also must cross it. Collide with it. Cross. We are familiar (I was going to write specialists) with the notion of obstacle. How can we not feel concerned, embarked? But all this (let’s say it’s a journey) starts badly, and even threatens not to start. Almost initial paralysis. It will take several beginnings for it to slip, and that something “it” can then escape, pass between the lines. For now: “Something begins to jam me up & I know it won’t be possible to pull it out.” In my dialect: “Something forces someone.” What “I know” (or rather what I think I know) is first that writing is under duress, and my powerlessness. Would have to do with something that will not be named under any circumstances. And probably not, at least not first, what they call the outside world or what they also call the inner world, interiority: “no presence, no ‘things.’” That’s why, for some, it’s scary. And how. Since we have understood that there is “nothing left to say.” We know only too well, on this side of the Atlantic, how much poetry is a matter of presence, and of consideration of things. It will have to be treated differently. Take things back differently. Let it be said. Listen to how it speaks low and fragile, possibly contradictory. Try everything to enlarge the field. Take everything into account, equally: “radical flattening of interest.” Spread branches, brambles, knots, and “Go for it”: determination and speed are essential here. Overcome malaise, obstacles. Don’t believe too much in the boundary between the outside and the inside, the subjective and the objective. And yet these things, even if “extremely hard to locate,” finally appear, and jostle: socks, cats, spaghetti, pies, hat, eggs, etc. They will never be able to invade the field. Neither plays their small role in this story (I mean function as clues or evidence; we know how it works in police series and realistic novels). For, it is understood, life goes on, and the poem is continuously connected to the frequency of life: I-you-it-she-one: I/you: “Don’t say that. No. Please.”; I/he: “If he wants my help let him ask for it.”; “No sooner had she turned the block than it became clear . . .”; One/you: “One hears so much about you but never seeing you. . . .” Something happens, a lot of things happen. And pass. Taken. So the poem insists that it continues in the present. That everything that happens, happens in real time, in the present of writing: “Other things happening now & can’t go back.” In other words, what is done is done, what has been said has been said, and now it is something else that is being said and is happening. What the poem writes of meaning, we can only say of what carried by the current is composed and broken down into narrative, acts, events, feelings, words exchanged: “as if meaning were no more than a dancer.”

Thus, I understood the writing as a spinning: it turns on itself, and faster and faster; and the faster it picks up the more the landscape drawn on its belly blurs and disappears; it then draws on the surface where it evolves a path that fades as it takes place, “a deconstruction of meanings, coming unglued.” I will say of Bernstein’s poem that it is this spinning dance. The meaning and the landscape, the places and things, the characters and their dialogues are written there in their effacement, are effaced, and peel themselves off by inscribing themselves there. They become, little by little, in my mind as a reader “floating substances.”

It is then, of course, that I believe I hear and can respond to the central injunction: “Get back & make your own track in the unseen (so far).”

No, there is no “glyph.” So, no key. “Tell you all about it” (proposed here as a writing decision) would involve getting lost in the indefinite of beginnings. What I decide to tell you is not telling, it is a story of stories, there are several leads, what happened, what happens, “what . . . will reemerge,” etc. No, no glyph. Yes, a “potlatch.”

At the end of the book the poem asks to “imagine a page.” In fact, all of them are always imagined, built, redone, written by the reader. Irregular, like the ground, like our face. Unacceptable like this image, in the mirror, or on the screen, or on the window of the photo booth, or in the square of a Polaroid. Unknown, indecipherable. Let’s take it back. Let’s retouch it. Writing, reading (the one who writes and the one who reads constantly exchange their roles, love each other and kill each other), is this work of rectification of lines, of reprise, of adaptive reformulation, approximate, tense, of uncertain recomposition. And “it becomes,” Bernstein writes. I becomes, I “become.” For this and I to become, it must also unbecome (deviate): where the “readjustment” is first “punctuation,” punctuation, or overdose, “unmake” (ordinary uses), undoing (“borders of logic”).

Thus goes, in this poem, in this book, the desiring, deviant writing, to the realization of which I am, we are, very fraternally invited.