Quick Thoughts on Latta on Bernstein
John gets in some good jabs here, and delivers up a number of the complaints I had about Bernstein’s poetry before I ever heard him read in person: “sophomoric hoots and cleverness,” “some equivalent of mental doodad-making,” “mock voicings (a means of policing sentiment).”
I’ve always preferred Bernstein’s criticism to his poetry, and John nails one of the major reasons why: the poetry seems always to be talking down to the reader without achieving any of the altitude that a credible rhetoric of condescension (e.g. of Geoffrey Hill or Lisa Robertson) requires. Bernstein’s poems ask us to marvel at the unmarvelous, admire the unadmirable, and laugh at jokes that no decent comedian would touch with a turned-over telephone pole.
But there’s something missing in John’s account, something he nears and swerves away from when he writes, “Someone ought to examine the nature of Bernstein’s voices.” That something is the extent to which many of the poems are less poems than scripts for Bernstein’s live performances.* To see Bernstein live is to realize that a crucial transmutation accompanies the poems’ leap from sight to sound. When voiced, the poems shed much of that feeling of relentless condescension, and whatever survives feels much less obnoxious because Bernstein works hard (through his introductions, through his stage patter, and through his vocal stylings) to bring us in on the joke. Bernstein knows three things that any poet who gives readings should be killing themselves to emulate: how to read a poem as if it were something other than a poem, how a work a room, and how to enlist a crowd on his side.
“Dear Mr. Fanelli,” a section of which John quotes, is a perfect example:
I’m sorry
I can’t get your attention
Mr. Fanelli because I really
believe if you ask
for comments than you
ought to be willing
to act on them—even
if ought is too
big a word to throw
around at this point.
Mr. Fanelli
I hope you won’t
think I’m rude
if I ask you a
personal question. Do
you get out of the
office much?
Do you go to the movies
or do you prefer
sports—or maybe
quiet evenings at a
local restaurant? Do
you read much, Mr. Fanelli?
I don’t mean just
Gibbons and like
that, but philosophy—
have you read much
Hanna Arendt or
do you prefer
a more ideological
perspective?
On the page this reads, as John says, like “a peculiar combo of naïveté condescendingly deliver’d and taunt.” In person, though, the poem is fast, frantic, and funny, with the words “Mister Fanelli” serving as the only stable center of an ever more eccentric orbit of loopy, hilarious hectoring.
The different lives Bernstein’s poems lead on the page and on the stage present a real problem for poetry critics, who tend to demand the absolute priority of the former mode over the latter. It seems we don’t have a good way to talk about those poets (Keston Sutherland is another, Tom Raworth a third) whose work does not proceed, à la Olson, from the HEART to the BREATH to the LINE but which stops at the second term and sets up shop there.** To judge those poems as performance is to dodge the question too neatly, for they do not become plays or monologues simply by being read. They are still poems, but they’re poems in which vocal tone, tempo, and modulation are prosodic elements that matter as much as rhythm, rhyme, and meter.
+++
* Pedantic footnote to any and all: this does not make them “performative” in any but the most banal sense of the word.
** That’s your signal to bop me on the head for my ignorance of slam poetry and events like Poetry Out Loud. Hip hop is another possible comparison, though my unprofessional impression is that the key axes of hip hop are flow and lyrical ingenuity, two categories that aren’t really useful for the kind of poetry I’m talking about here. (Raworth being a possible exception.)
Always thought an analysis of Wordsworth in terms of flow, by someone with chops re both terms, would be illuminating.
Can you say more about “a credible rhetoric of condescension,” please? You’ve hit something there.
Condescension is not the mortal sin in literature that it is sometimes is in life, and if Latta wants to rule it out of the former (not saying he does) I strongly disagree. Meaning, I think it’s fine–and often like it–when a book talks down to me, but only if it first convinces me that it’s gained a certain height. Surely this has much to do with spending most of my days thinking about Dante, who put this near the head of the Paradiso:
I much prefer successful command performances to modest books that try to win my allegiance with oh-shucks-gee-whiz chumminess and charm. The key word, though, is “successful”; there’s nothing worse than a book that puts on airs it doesn’t own.
And see, I prefer successful performances of any kind. To each their own, then.
It’s one thing to grant condescension to a canonical writer, and an altogether other thing to tolerate it from another living person. This is why someone will eventually have to smite Robbins, for example.
Bobby,
What I meant by “Someone ought to examine the nature of Bernstein’s voices” is more along the lines of whose voices does he mock? (Similar to complaints of what kinds of voices do the Flarf boys “scrape up” off the cyber-floor.) There’s a need in Bernstein to belittle, basically, those who need not be belittled, is my sense.
As for “Bernstein works hard (through his introductions, through his stage patter, and through his vocal stylings) to bring us in on the joke”: I’m sure he does. I just don’t think comic histrionics is tantamount to la poésie.
Robertson’s condescending is something I hadn’t thought of. Yesterday, reading R’s Boat convinced me she was wholly “faking it,” beyond caring for the reader. Which is a form of condescension, I suppose.
That’s fair, and I certainly agree about Flarf. I still think, though, that there’s something about the live presentation that sheds much of that feeling of condescension. It’s not really, as I suggest, that he “brings us in on the joke”–that makes it sound like he’s allowing us to be part of the club. Has more to do with a hint of vey ist mir affect in his performance that keeps the self-regard from sounding so haughty.
Who’s belittling whom?
Whenever I hear the word “condescension” I think of Bruegel’s great painting of the 3 blind paupers falling into the ditch. Not sure why.
Michel de Ghelderode wrote a grim little play about that painting. Michael Robbins would like Michel de Ghelderode, I think.
Condescend to everyone, I say. For they are all beneath me. But SRSLY as much as I hate CB’s poetry, the periodic-table reading described in NYTBR makes up for all his sins.
That’s funny…. the poem I’ve been working on for the last 2-3 years is titled Lanthanum (“La”). It’s # 57 in the periodic table. From the Greek for “hidden, secret.”
http://www.amazon.com/Lanthanum-book-one-Henry-Gould/dp/0557274710
CB has played my opposite number before… !
But I was pondering this post on my way to work. See this bit from the ill-famed Gabriel Gudding review : “If I were foolish enough (and I am) to try to characterize that milieu, I would say we live in a time of near-systemic obfuscation — political, economic, educational — amid which the sphere of poetry hovers with an air of insouciant and facetious cleverness. Poetry per se has evolved, it seems, into light verse…”
Not that I have anything against light verse, or humor in poetry… but with regard to Bobby’s partial defense of CB based on his disarming & clever live acts… it does seem that comedy often serves to mask or deflect deeper emotions… what we get perhaps is more “funny CB in his own write” rather than a free-standing poem…
& what is a free-standing poem? It has an inner spine of verbal harmony which sets it apart somewhat – this apartness serves to crystallize a particular emotion or act, to characterize it, to nail it, so to speak… & that can be an uncomfortable feeling …
Humanity being the “animale compagnevole” – companionable animal (Dante) – we need the shared release & escape offered by comedy… but “funny is money”, as the comic said…. & a lot of those jokes we could be telling (& often do tell) each other better ourselves, for free…
There are 2 kinds of poets, the naturally chattyesque (it’s a whole genre now) and the naturally reserved, the taciturn… the latter compensate for their tongue-tied, halting, stuttering, anti-social shyness by UTTERING something carefully, in writing, in secret – the writer’s revenge…
The chattyesque poet bonds with the audience (see John Lahr essay on Neil Simon in latest New Yorker).
But the taciturn poet bonds with the mute & speechless (non-writers) of the earth.
Short & long. Mutt & Jeff. Shem & Shaun.
So, Henry of the blog comments, which are you, chattyesque or taciturn?
The Jim Beam helps. Creates an “arc” from T to C & back to T (with groans & head-slaps). But that’s only my public demeanor. Totally compartmentalized.
I was thinking recently that in a sense there are two kinds of poetry. Anytime you say “there’s two kinds of,” it’s wrong, always. As in: there are two kinds of walnuts, two kinds of people — that’s ridiculous, of course. But bear with the idea anyway.
–Ron Padgett
Benchley’s Law of Distinction:
There are two kinds of people in the world:
(a) those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world
(b) those who don’t.
‘There are 2 kinds of poets in the world : Charles Bernstein & Henry Gould. & here comes Ron Silliman, to color-code their coffins.”
- Geoffrey Hill
p.s. Jordan – re the Ron Padgett link –
Elena Shvarts said the following about what RP seems to be getting at…
“She says to me (roughly translated): Americans use the poem to
find out what they’re going to say, and they take a long time
getting to it. The Russians wait until the whole poem is there,
and then they commit it to memory.” (from “Journey to Hoboken”, in Witz : http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/witz/4-3.html ).
2 kinds of poets : Russian & American.
H-bomb, the Shvarts remark is apt, but I think it speaks to environmental and social differences rather than, um, ontological ones.
PS BB the Benchley is dreamy but then we expect nothing less etc etc
“t speaks to environmental and social differences rather than, um, ontological ones.”
- with you there, Jordan. There are actually 14 kinds of poets – which can be narrowed down, with great intellectual labor, to about 3-4 species. I’ve asked Northrop Frye to stop bye later & help us with this. So stay tuned, people (those of you, that is, who are the sort of persons who stay tuned to things in general, that is).
Oliver Wendell Holmes: “There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes….blondes who are such simply by deficiency of coloring matter, – negative or washed blondes, arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are others that are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various degree, – positive or stained blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a snowball.
….
Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all.”
A suggestion for Ollie: there are two kinds of metaphors: those that declare the want of a cold shower and those that do not.
SRSLY! Was Henry James a blond, by the way. Oops, Leon Edel is watching
Uh oh, Bobby. Methinks I hear the imperfect, washed-out, negative tones of our jealous and snowball-hearted host.
My heart, I’ll have you know, is an orange. And my moonlight genius prefers brunettes.
We like likers of brunettes.
Has anyone here read Robert Herrick’s “To a Taciturn Brunette”?
None of the brunettes I know are taciturn, present company, I presume, included.
I had a stick of gum around here somewhere …
Check your shoe.
Not surprising that Latta’s ill-tempered rococo rant passes for critical thought among academics. I don’t myself care much for Bernstein’s poetry, but this is just a series of jealous contortions sans any real insight. It sounds like someone who decided to treat their myopia by rubbing their face in a patch of brambles.
“jealous contortions”, maybe; doubtless lots of us elder po’s writh’d (to use lattaspeak) in envy over CB’s FSGization and critlaud . . .
Found it! It was stuck to James McNamara, under a rock.