Don Share’s a bright guy and a fine poet. And I have a lingering cold that’s made me kvetchy—tired and irritable; not too tired to kvetch, but too tired to go on at length. SO: Share posts this snippet today from Charles Bernstein’s new book of essays, Attack of the Difficult Poems (forthcoming from U of Chicago Press; 288 pages; $95 cloth, $26 paperback [I shit you not]):
When reading poetry is not directed to the goal of deciphering a fixed, graspable meaning but rather encourages performing and responding to overlapping meanings, then difficulty ceases to be an obstacle and is transformed into an opening.
— Charles Bernstein, “Creative Wreading & Aesthetic Judgment”
I’m betting this is a misquote of some kind (the grammar is bad for a fellow clever enough to concoct the word “wreading”), but the meaning is clear. Share calls it “attractive pedagogy,” but as it stands (i.e., out of context and so, essentially, defenseless) I’d have to call it borderline idiotic.
Bernstein’s subtext is that poetry can not only convey multiple meanings (I hear Homer Simpson barking “D’oh!”), but that the more overlapping meanings it can generate, the more it is transformed from obstacle to opening. In other words, more ambiguity equals more openness which equals more aesthetic value.
This conception handily absolves the “wreader” of all responsibility for understanding the poem, and simultaneously—”How conveeenyent” the Church Lady would say—absolves the pedagogue as well. Furthermore, it absolves the poet of any responsibility for communicating anything. But then the poem, in Bernstein’s universe, does not exist to communicate, but to pour as many frequencies as possible into a single channel. In the universe outside the University, though—you know, the world you and I inhabit as opposed to the world Bernstein (Donald T. Regan Professor of English* at the U of Penn) inhabits—the result is simply so much static.
There. Believe it or not, I feel a bit better. Now it’s time for my dose of tongue-numbing cough syrup. I’m hoping for luminous dreams….
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* Bernstein’s professorship is named in honor of the former Merrill Lynch guru who became Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and a prime architect of “Reaganomics.” Here’s hoping that Bernstein, the anti-capitalist, enjoys the irony as much as I do.
I've tried everything, Awyn. Time is the only healer for this one, though. All I can do is tamp down the symptoms. Today is much better, though!<br /><br />I don't know that "what poetry is or isn't" matters at all. It's like a parlor game—most like "Telephone," I guess. For me what matters is that the words summon up the Imagination and satisfy it. One can
Am with Ed here in disagreeing that the reader should be held responsible for not understanding a poem, or need absolution for incomprehension. The meaning of the quote from Bernstein was not so clear to me, but what I heard him as saying (based on the words he used and the title of his book) was: Look Reader, stop being put off by poems that seem difficult or ungraspable or strange. It's
AHHHH MIMI<br /><br />as Maurice had it:<br /><br />"I remember her well"<br /><br />was not she that Virgin Prostitute that sculptors like<br />Donottelluh and Michalanellelo mad huge marble statues of<br />and put in ….. temples and museums and charged big bucks to watch her slide up and down on that golden pole ?<br /><br />is this MIMI yet available?<br /><br /><br />K.
I remember Mimesis! We called her Mimi. A pole dancer at Whiskey Bill's, as I remember. Or maybe she was just Polish. Anyway, she had survived a long-rather-sweet relationship with Erich Auerbach and missed him pretty bad, far as I could tell. She's probably in Eternity too, by now….
so<br /><br />you got "good" syrup, eh?<br /> from a Real Doctor?<br /><br />hope that dope don't deconstruct your last<br />vestiges of any trace of<br /><br /><br />I tried DERRIDA but he swamped me with:<br /><br />"Now, mimesis, all through the history of its interpretation, is always commanded by the process of truth."<br /><br />&<br />this Mimisis FLOORED
And Lyle—clarity can be difficult, yes? But in Bernstein's formulation, difficult equals unclear. He valorizes static—that tangle of frequencies in a single channel. But I hold with old Bobby Frost: Poetry "ends in a clarification <br />of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion." Yet there is
Oh, Ed—my syrup's not over-the-counter, so the codeine's there, though maybe only in "trace" amounts (in deference to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction)" rel="nofollow">Dr. Derrida</a>).
the poem ONLY does what the words do..<br /><br />the reader has the multiplicity of meanings..<br /><br />anyway<br /><br />NINETY FIVE DOLLARS?!! for a 288 pps BOOK<br /><br />that is from/out of such-much clevernesses?<br /><br />I am uh tellin uhaul<br /><br />I ain't responsible for the wreader's intelligence OR understaning<br /><br />seems to me too many of "these Poets"
"For that to happen, the poem has to contain, some clear writing somewhere". 🙂
It occurs to me that probably any poem, if it's doing the kinds of things poems generally do (or that poets generally aspire to do with them), will have multiple "meanings," though I'm not sure if "meaning," as such, is the point.<br /><br />Obviously, having "overlapping meanings" doesn't necessarily mean that a poem will be free of difficulty, or that