Silliman on "Thank You for Saying Thank You"

Monday, September 29, 2003

Thank You for Saying Thank You

This is a totally
accessible poem.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any
way difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
to the point.
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person speaking
to you now.
It is all about
communication.
Heart to heart.
This poem appreciates
& values you as
a reader. It
celebrates the
triumph of the
human imagination
amidst pitfalls &
calamities. This poem
has 90 lines,
269 words, and
more syllables than
I have time to
count. Each line,
word, & syllable
have been chosen
to convey only the
intended meaning
& nothing more.
This poem abjures
obscurity & enigma.
There is nothing
hidden. A hundred
readers would each
read the poem
in an identical
manner & derive
the same message
from it. This
poem, like all
good poems, tells
a story in a direct
style that never
leaves the reader
guessing. While
at times expressing
bitterness, anger,
resentment, xenophobia,
& hints of racism, its
ultimate mood is
affirmative. It finds
joy even in
those spiteful moments
of life that
it shares with
you. This poem
represents the hope
for a poetry
that doesn't turn
its back on
the audience, that
doesn't think it's
better than the reader,
that is committed
to poetry as a
popular form, like kite
flying and fly
fishing. This poem
belongs to no
school, has no
dogma. It follows
no fashion. It
says just what
it says. It's
real.

Last Friday, wading in some of the bathos that is Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi, I footnoted the caveat that, had Charles Bernstein written those lines, I might have read them differently. Of course, on Thursday night last week, I sat outdoors in the new Class of 1942 garden at Kelly Writers House & listened to Charles read the above poem, which appears in his relatively new Chax Press chapbook Let’s Just Say

Bernstein’s poem raises the question of how one reads or believes a text in interesting ways – and it’s not the only poem of his to raise that issue. Nor do I think the question is nearly so simple as it might first look.

The first question here might be posed as when does the reader “know” that at some level this plainspoken text is ironic. Different readers will answer this differently, of course. Is it the word ideas, with its resonance of William Carlos Williams? Is it the phrase purely emotional? Is it the title? And, had I put Charles’ name at the top, would it have right there, even before getting into the text?

Seeing this work in print fails to capture Charles’ reading style, deliberately employing “inappropriate” pauses & the most awkward imaginable pauses for linebreaks. What stands out is the degree to which “plain speech” is anything but transparent, but rather is something much more like a membrane, a surface controlled in large part (although not exclusively) by the speaker. For the listener to “get to” he- (or she-) who-speaks represents an almost language-shattering task.* To expect transparency of a language object, however well intentioned, is inevitably to court disappointment if not outright disaster.

At one level, this poem might be read as a joke, the verbal equivalent of a Magritte painting. Yet on another, also like a Magritte painting, this poem no less conscious of its process, that it needs to govern the rhythm of the reading – it is no accident that the longest sentence comes close to the end. Only four short sentences follow with the last sentence the shortest of all.

But like the painting of the not pipe, Bernstein’s “plain speech” depends on a shifting set of referents – contexts in which we might understand each sentence, both separately & in conjunction with all these others. Much of what makes this poem work is that not every sentence here is a lie. In fact, I think one could go through the text assigning “levels of confidence” to each sentence, lets say green for those that can be taken at “face value,” red for those that are patently false and – just because of the color scheme of the blog – blue for statements that fall into some ambiguous space in between:

This is a totally
accessible poem.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any
way difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
to the point.
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person speaking
to you now.
It is all about
communication.
Heart to heart.
This poem appreciates
& values you as
a reader. It
celebrates the
triumph of the
human imagination
amidst pitfalls &
calamities. This poem
has 90 lines,
269 words, and
more syllables than
I have time to
count. Each line,
word, & syllable
have been chosen
to convey only the
intended meaning
& nothing more.
This poem abjures
obscurity & enigma.
There is nothing
hidden. A hundred
readers would each
read the poem
in an identical
manner & derive
the same message
from it. This
poem, like all
good poems, tells
a story in a direct
style that never
leaves the reader
guessing. While
at times expressing
bitterness, anger,
resentment, xenophobia,
& hints of racism, its
ultimate mood is
affirmative. It finds
joy even in
those spiteful moments
of life that
it shares with
you. This poem
represents the hope
for a poetry
that doesn't turn
its back on
the audience, that
doesn't think it's
better than the reader,
that is committed
to poetry as a
popular form, like kite
flying and fly
fishing. This poem
belongs to no
school, has no
dogma. It follows
no fashion. It
says just what
it says. It's
real.

I read the poem has having eleven red or “false” statements, seven “green” or true ones, four “blue” or ambiguous ones. Thus half false, but also half something else. It’s possible of course to argue with any one of these designations – and in fact several of the sentences, within each color set, are entertaining to think of as fitting into a different color. There is, I would argue, a valuable reading to be had here precisely by taking the statement about the author’s feelings as true. & I think Bernstein both feels & appreciates exactly these tensions. It is because this poem can be read just as it claims to want that we can feel all the complex tugs & strains at its various divergences, the result of all the complex social relations we’ve experienced in our lives, making it impossible at least here for us to proceed as naïve readers.

Thus the level at which this poem’s claim to be “purely emotional” can be understood as true is important. Bernstein here is not mocking emotion but rather the mask of sincerity – consider that title – that serves as an elaborate filter between our lives & the social world in which we must live.

* Indeed, getting beyond language represents one of the true thrills of sexual intercourse, at least until one realizes that this too is another “discursive” mode, filled with all the positionality & power of anything else.