Charles Bern­stein, whose trans­for­ma­tion into the Billy Collins of the poetic left is nearly com­plete, has caught the atten­tion of folks at Gawker and Harper’s and every poetry blog in between with a little piece called “Poetry Bailout Will Restore Con­fi­dence of Readers,” which he read recently at the Best Amer­i­can Poetry 2008 launch.

I’m sure the thing played well in the room–oh dear, isn’t he clever–but you’ll for­give me if I decline to share a chor­tle. Maybe I’m just humor­less, but it’s a slow Sunday in Chicago, and the whole thing just seems so, well, depressing.

And no, of course I’m not talk­ing about the finan­cial crisis. Those guys deserve all the black humor and scorn we can con­jure. But con­sider two points:

+ First, the obvi­ous thing: Bern­stein was read­ing at a Best Amer­i­can Poetry launch event. Yes, that Charles Bern­stein, the self-​appointed scourge of Offi­cial Verse Cul­ture, who once wrote:

At any moment [OVC's] resiliency is related to its abil­ity to strate­gi­cally incor­po­rate tokens from com­pet­ing poetry tra­di­tions and juggle them against one another while leav­ing for itself the main turf. (Content’s Dream, 249)

I leave it to you to decide whether Bernstein’s don­ning the mantle of “strategically incor­po­rated token” (pos­si­ble syn­onym: pawn) could rea­son­ably sig­nify any­thing other than the basest, most oppor­tunis­tic form of hypocrisy. But at least Billy Collins has integrity enough not to advo­cate regi­cide at the same time he’s cash­ing a check from the king.

+ Second, the BAP piece plays on the fol­low­ing metaphor­i­cal equiv­a­lence: “bad poetry” (which, for Bern­stein, bad boy that he is, is actu­ally the good kind) is like bad debt: it’s risky, trou­bled, and dis­tressed. “Good poetry” in the world of the satire (i.e. bad poetry) is like good money: untrou­bled, free-​flowing, and stable. Here’s a sample:

Illiq­uid poetry assets are chok­ing off the flow of imag­i­na­tion that is so vital to our lit­er­a­ture. When the lit­er­ary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from read­ers and writ­ers to create a pro­duc­tive part of the cul­tural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poi­son­ing of lit­er­ary mar­kets has the poten­tial to damage our cul­tural insti­tu­tions irreparably.

All fine and dandy and funny enough, right? Except that there’s a very good chance that Bern­stein actu­ally believes the metaphor­i­cal hinge that makes his satire go. Recall that he repub­lished Steve McCaffery’s “Politics of the Referent” in the LAN­GUAGE Sup­ple­ment No. 1, which very seri­ously (and very ludi­crously) argued that ref­er­en­tial lan­guage was, by the very fact of its ref­er­en­tial­ity, a co-​conspirator in the crimes of cap­i­tal­ism, and that a person can fight cap­i­tal­ism by, well, not making sense. Ready? Hold your breath (or your nose):

Language-​centered counter-​communication con­cen­trates upon fac­tors of for­ma­tion inside of lan­guage and not on the cen­trifu­gal func­tion­ing of words; it is hence counter nar­ra­tional and counter-​commodital at the same time. Seen through a Marx­ian per­cep­tual set, the cipher is a strate­gic method of cre­at­ing non-​commodital process-products…

Bern­stein picked up the theme in his own “The Dollar Value of Poetry,” albeit some­what more carefully:

So writ­ing might be exem­plary–an instance broken off from and hence not in the ser­vice of this eco­nomic and cul­tural–social–force called capitalism.

And:

Regard­less of what is being said, use of stan­dard pat­terns of syntax and expo­si­tion effec­tively rebroad­cast, often at a sub­lim­i­nal level, the basic con­sti­tu­tive ele­ments of social struc­ture–they per­pet­u­ate them…

Notice that McCaf­fery and Bern­stein are not making an unex­cep­tion­able argu­ment that lan­guage can be used as a means of oppres­sion–for exam­ple, an argu­ment that stan­dard gram­mar is a means by which elites mark them­selves and main­tain their status against non-​elites.* They’re argu­ing, rather, that syntax and ref­er­ence–i.e. two of the fea­tures that make lan­guage lan­guage–are com­plicit in pro­mot­ing unjust social struc­tures, which is a bit like blam­ing bricks for the oppres­sion of fac­tory work­ers. What’s more–and, I con­fess, what I find most galling–they’re argu­ing too that asyn­tac­tic, non-​referential lan­guage as such is an effec­tive means of resist­ing those unjust social struc­tures. Sorry, but that’s just non­sense–and not the good kind.

Look, we all want a better world, and most of us want to be better people, and for me at least there’s no doubt that poetry has a place in both aspi­ra­tions. But while writ­ing and read­ing dif­fi­cult poetry surely mean many things to many people, the notion that they are avenues to moral and/or polit­i­cal hero­ism is, in all but the most excep­tional cases, patently false. And that makes the smug­ness that shim­mers just beneath the sur­face of Bernstein’s satire even more unpleas­ant than the kind one might find in a more con­ven­tional poet, since it adds an aggran­diz­ing self-​righteousness that the latter type lacks. Hell, I study Dante, so I know this kind of pos­tur­ing is noth­ing new. But still I can’t shake the feel­ing that it’s one of the worst lega­cies the Lan­guage move­ment has passed along to our con­tem­po­rary avant-​garde.

+++++++

*Note: Here’s the late and much-​lamented David Foster Wal­lace speak­ing elo­quently on that argument:

The real truth, of course, is that S[tandard] W[hite] E[nglish] is the dialect of the Amer­i­can elite. That it was invented, cod­i­fied, and pro­mul­gated, by Priv­i­leged WASP Males and is per­pet­u­ated as “Standard” by same. That it is the shib­bo­leth of the Estab­lish­ment and an instru­ment of polit­i­cal power and class divi­sion and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and all manner of social inequity…