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.

 

© 2003 Charles Bernstein

 

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.