Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as coeditor of both the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of Guggenheim and NEA grants. Among his many publications are three books also published by the University of Chicago Press: Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems.

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ATTACK of the DIFFICULT POEMS

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

I PROFESSING POETICS..............................................................................1The Difficult Poem................................................................................3A Blow Is Like an Instrument: The Poetic Imaginary and Curricular Practices.......................7Against National Poetry Month as Such.............................................................27Invention Follies.................................................................................33Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment............................................................43Wreading, Writing, Wresponding....................................................................49Anything Goes.....................................................................................59Our Americas: New Worlds Still in Progress........................................................65The Practice of Poetics...........................................................................73II THE ART OF IMMEMORABILITY......................................................................81Every Which Way but Loose.........................................................................83The Art of Immemorability.........................................................................91Making Audio Visible: Poetry's Coming Digital Presence............................................107The Bound Listener................................................................................121Hearing Voices....................................................................................123Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics......................131III THE FATE OF THE AESTHETIC.....................................................................159McGann Agonist....................................................................................161Poetry and/or the Sacred..........................................................................171The Art and Practice of the Ordinary..............................................................173Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies...............................................................181Poetry Plastique: A Verbal Explosion in the Art Factory (with Jay Sanders)........................187Speed the Movie or Speed the Brand Name or Aren't You the Kind That Tells.........................193Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime..........................................199Fraud's Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with Fraud.....................206Fulcrum Interview.................................................................................227Radical Jewish Culture / Secular Jewish Practice..................................................231Poetry Scene Investigation: A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff..................................239Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?.......................................................257Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers.................................................267IV RECANTORIUM....................................................................................269Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka).......................................271

Chapter One

One of the Fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum daemonum, because it filleth the imagination; and yet it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt. FRANCIS BACON, "OF TRUTH" It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN Still, how to bear such loss I deemed The insistent question for each animate mind, And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed A pale yet positive gleam low down behind THOMAS HARDY, "GOD'S FUNERAL"

THE DIFFICULT POEM

All of us from time to time encounter a difficult poem. Sometimes it is the poem of a friend or family member and sometimes it is a poem we have written ourselves.

The difficult poem has created distress for both poets and readers for many years. Experts who study difficult poems often tie the modern prevalence of this problem with the early years of the last century, when a great deal of social dislocation precipitated the outbreak of 1912, one of the best-known epidemics of difficult poetry.

But while these experts have offered detailed historical discussions of difficult poems and while there is a great deal of philosophical speculation and psychological theory about difficult poetry, there are few practical guides for handling difficult poetry. What I want to do in this essay is explore some ways to make your experience with the difficult poem more rewarding by exploring some strategies for coping with these poems.

You may be asking yourself, how did I get interested in this topic? Let me be frank about my situation. I am the author of, and a frequent reader of, difficult poems. Because of this, I have the strong desire to help other readers and authors with hard-to-read poems. By sharing my experience of over thirty years of working with difficult poems, I think I can save you both time and heartache. I may even be able to convince you that some of the most difficult poems you encounter can provide very enriching aesthetic experiences—if you understand how to approach them.

But first we must address the question—Are you reading a difficult poem? How can you tell? Here is a handy checklist of five key questions that can help you to answer this question:

1 Do you find the poem hard to appreciate?

2 Do you find the poem's vocabulary and syntax hard to understand?

3 Are you often struggling with the poem?

4 Does the poem make you feel inadequate or stupid as a reader?

5 Is your imagination being affected by the poem?

If you answered any of these questions in the affirmative, you are probably dealing with a difficult poem. But if you are still unsure, look for the presence of any of these symptoms: high syntactic, grammatical, or intellectual activity level; elevated linguistic intensity; textual irregularities; initial withdrawal (poem not immediately available); poor adaptability (poem unsuitable for use in love letters, memorial commemoration, etc.); sensory overload; or negative mood.

Many readers when they first encounter a difficult poem say to themselves, "Why me?" The first reaction they often have is to think that this is an unusual problem that other readers have not faced. So the first step...