American Poetry

by Bradford Morrow

  BERSSENBRUGGE: I find your everyday environment of persons shouting and gesticulating wildly extremely stimulating.

  In the poem “Hearing,” I’m thinking about hearing as an ideal, like an ideal form. Now I’m interested in the audience as an ideal form of hearing, which is novel, because I never considered the audience before. “What the audience likes” is a mantra I’ve been saying to myself with curiosity. And this goes to entertainment, listening, etc., comedy, which I know you like. For me, being heard was existing. That’s why I became a poet. Do you have anything to say about the audience? The practice of audience, as transcendence or as attention, or commerce?

  BERNSTEIN: I’ve never met an audience I didn’t like. At least not until tonight. Mister, could you at least turn off your phone during the diminuendo? That’s right you over there, with paisley hip huggers. Jeeze, you folks couldn’t tell the difference between an amphibrach and the little green knickers I bought from Jimminy Cricket at the Atheneum. …

  Which is to say … the idea of audience can be a foil that can be looped back into the poem, poem talking back, as if the imagined reader isn’t silent. It’s curious how an audience at a reading affects the performance; any performer experiences this, though in different ways. For me, it’s probably most fun to read to an audience familiar with the work, which responds vocally and viscerally to the poems, so that the response creates a kinetic action that goads the performance onward. Yet there is another kind of reading, often at universities, where everyone is absolutely quiet, if no less attentive, and that situation seems to make me work harder at articulating the overall shape of the poem and maybe lets the poem be heard more on its own, since less interrupted (by laughter, for example). Because the frame of poetry readings is “serious” you get a suppressing of laughter, even at the most verbally slapstick material, which possibly brings out the uncanniness that roams at large in the poems, where the comic is always close to its double or doubling back on itself. The effect of an audience not laughing as a man laboriously slips on a linguistic banana is near perfect.

  I think you had in mind the abstract idea of an audience as well. As time goes on, what’s most meaningful to me is the particular responses of an individual. I never believed in a one-size-fits-all poetry and it’s of most immediate interest to me what resonates with someone in particular. It’s the sense of “getting it.” That a few people do may just convince me that the limb I’ve most recently climbed out on is breaking in style.

  How about you? Your own performances are remarkably enveloping—and you are a reader one really has to listen in for, you aver voice projection and therefore good electronic amplification is a fundamental part of the process. So who do you think is the audience for poetry—or for your poetry?

  BERSSENBRUGGE: I like your idea that the double of a poem comes out when the audience is suppressed. It’s true my idea of audience is more abstract. Up to now it has been about a hearer to verify me, that the hearers are hearing me, which goes along with a low voice. Then I started thinking about the natural wisdom of the audience, and the value of entertainment. It correlates to what I was saying about caregiving, “taking care” of the audience—letting things slip in, realizing that they’re short on time, etc. Now in the middle of this dialogue, I’ve finished a poem about audience. It turns out in my poem, it’s of no consequence whether I am heard, whether you hear your audience or they hear you. What goes on is some innate dynamic, a mirror or “doubling,” some kinetic that works. Which may be why the internet seems so adequate, because of the movement.

  I’d like to point out the unusualness of our speaking like this, who are friends but so disparate in history. I recall a dinner at your house after which your daughter Emma was crying in the next room, because the mother in the movie she was watching on TV died. Both you and her mother Susan Bee called out, “Stop crying, Emma!” which I understood as advice to her not to be so easily manipulated by media. This made an impression on me, because I’m one of the audience who cries at any sad story, loss, any emotional dynamic whatsoever, TV, commercials. When I look at my earlier work, this emotionality seems highly uncool. All the time I’d been striving to make a continuum of mental actions, thought and emotion, thought and perception, thought and physicality, even with autonomic physicality. For balance. You seem always to have been articulate, highly aware, evolved in world view, in balance with your persona, and effective in the world, with the audience. Which is a world audience, as well as the one-on-one you speak of. First, how do you reconcile your savoir-faire, clarity and ethos with your statement in My Way: “For my themes, to call them that have consistently been awkwardness, loss, and misrecognition.” Is this solely a political “awkwardness” of position, which you have maximized into a life’s work, or are you speaking of other arenas also?

  Second, a question I alluded to earlier, concerns my experiences at some recent poetry readings. Your moving reading of “Rivulets of the Dead Jew” for Kathy Acker, who had just died, the Walter Benjamin libretto and “Reading Red.” I find a powerful and unequivocal emotional weight in this poetry and in many poems in Residual Rubbernecking (in Republics of Reality), which differs from earlier wit and versatility. Do you have anything to say about this? Is this connected to your interest in and exploration of performance, the emotional forum of audience?

  BERNSTEIN: Isn’t one of the interesting possibilities for poetry that it can bring apparently disparate things together—with necessity? Some people seem to think that the point of that is to flag the disjuncture; but when it really gets interesting it’s quite the opposite, it shows the exceptional necessity of the unexpectable.

  I think it’s fine to cry during commercials, just as long as you don’t brake for animals too. Or brake for animals, just don’t break my heartache.

  I wish I had a dime for every time someone said I wish I had a dime for every time …

  I guess I’m saying I like “uncool” better than cool. I think I’ve tried to make “uncool” cool—and maybe that’s what you’re getting at. Uncool of the sort I always harp on (as in Harpo not harpy) is emotional. There’s a loony perception that complexity of form rules out the emotional or that indirectness isn’t emotional. As if the only way to signify as emotional is to declare it. Maybe complexity of register is motivated, in part, by ambivalent emotional dynamics. I prefer pathos and even bathos to the “emotions of normal people.” If I’m haunted by pent-up feelings of being misheard or misjudged or misaligned, it’s not that I necessarily feel those things more than anyone else, but rather that I am more interested in them than most people, who spend their lives overlooking what I go alooking for. I’m a poet of anxiety rather than depression, of the private and inexplicit rather than the sunny and declamatory.

  I don’t like to be told to feel something but to be allowed to experience a feeling without naming it, without wanting to name it.

  Anyway, the thing about commercials is that they make no bones about what they are selling and that they are so abstracted and condensed. I’d rather watch a sentimental commercial (remember the one for Hoffman’s soda? or those “phone home” ads for long distance?) than read most dyed-in-the-workshop emotionally “bare” poems or watch emotionally hyperventilated confessional TV. In other words, for afternoon fare I prefer soap opera to Oprah, which I say as much for the off-rime as anything else. And speaking of opera, I am totally enthralled by Puccini and Verdi, though I don’t find it more emotional than the explosively self-contained polyrhythms of João Gilberto or the exquisite acoustic textures of Morton Feldman.

  I find emotion in your work is achieved through indirection; it’s introjective, concave; thus: intimacy. It takes you inside it. Offers sanctuary, not facts. (And that is particularly marked, to come back to this, in the acoustic interiority of your performances.)

  It’s a very sonically enveloping poetry, which leads me to ask you about your collaborations with Kiki Smith on Endocrinology and other projects. What’s the valence of t
he visual in those works?

  BERSSENBRUGGE: I like to think of this necessity between us in poetry.

  I’m a person who strives for directness, but I have difficulty actually naming things and am uncomfortable with expository writing. I was trained in poetry that achieved emotion through images, and I’ve loved images, although not lately. I try to make language into a net for my meaning which tends to be emotion in continuum with some perceptual or conceptual slant. Net, grid, sieve, appear often. My voice is given to me. I try to use it without strain. My only conscious intention with voice is to deliver the words. With words I consciously make the net. Lately I’ve been trying a new sound, so as not to get in the habit of a sound that sounds intimate. Agnes Martin once said, “I have everything I ever wanted and still when I wake up, I feel depressed. That proves emotions are abstract.” I’m experimenting with emotion that doesn’t sound emotional.

  My intial hope with Endocrinology, was to learn from Kiki how to express emotion as a direct narrative. She was working with the body, tears, milk, blood flow, dead loved ones. When asked to describe our process, Kiki said, “It was great. Mei-mei asked me questions and I cried.” Text and visuals were generated by our conversations. It was also part of a long-term exploration I started with Richard, to try and align the visual and verbal mental planes, a separation you referred to as channel separation. Kiki and I treated visual and verbal as a continuum of material, and the valence was the energy of our interaction, for which her visual power was a marvelous given. The resulting book is like a body—transparent, layered with blue organs and ligaments of text. This dialogue continues; for example, she coincidentally bought her first statue of Kuan Yin on the same day I bought mine.

  For me, the visual, in landscape and art, has always been a vital and liberating location from which to work in language.

  I find the poems in Residual Rubbernecking beautiful, full of pathos and extremely elegant. To me, they represent a connection with early work, and also a flowering. I want to ask what you want to write next in poetry. Also, what you imagine would be the best poem you could read, that’s just been written?

  I’m curious about the source of this elegance. It’s not a style elegance. I feel it’s something internally generated by the kind of language you need, as well as your literary sources. Is that accurate? I know you also have a great deal of experience in philosophy and the visual arts.

  BERNSTEIN: Whatever elegance there may be in my work is implausible, not unlike the charm of a top as it wends its way to a warble. Over time, a wobble may become song. Elegance is part delusion, part self-composed, part glass. This is the aspiration I have for poetry, an activity that achieves nothing by conventional measure. The aversion of efficacy is the most elusive necessity of poetry, just that it’s easy to lose faith in so refractory a medium. It’s not that failure is becoming but that loss is acknowledged without bluster, played out on the fields of the untenable. The poem begins in doubt and ends in something that transforms doubt into a fricative certainty. I keep returning to Jobim’s song “Desafinado” (“Offkey”). This isn’t syncopation or stressing the offbeat. The acoustic pattern is out of tune, the offnote sounds off. Thelonious Monk knows that score.

  A lot of this has to do with nonstandard language, second language speakers. Give me solecisms or else death by asphyxiation. I don’t know any other language than English (know in the Biblical sense). And yet, doesn’t Jabès almost say?, the poet is only at home when she or he makes their own language foreign, the better to converse with it. All of which is my way of asking you about “Nest,” about the echo of Chinese (“mothertongue”) as it enters the resolute “American” homestead of your imagination. “But some lives [it could just as well be lines] veer off the straight path to community.”

  That’s always the hope for American poetry, dangling in front of us, until we realize our ceiling really is made of glass but if you stoop down low enough so you don’t bang your head, why you can see way on up to big top, which is painted with stars (or is it stairs? or stares?).

  In “Nest,” Chinese and Kuan Yin are both female presences and, as you’ve said, Kuan Yin is the “she” of “Hearing”; also, “Nest” is, finally, addressed to Martha, the no-longer “four year old girl,” your daughter. “Nest” invokes a matrilineal inheritance of language and/ as compassion, something the last line suggests you had to find for yourself. What can you say about the gender narratives in these poems?

  BERSSENBRUGGE: We have symmetry, since I seek elegance and efficacy, any balance, any firm ground in poetry. I imagine an ideal that is, the bird opens its mouth and sings. I suppose that would be innate communicativeness of the species. (Is it the evolutionary equivalent of your wobble?) I’m not committed to loss as an ethos. I’m very interested in comedy in your poems as a place of loss. Your comedy appears to me as sudden convexity, opaque areas. I don’t correlate elegance and convention. Perhaps your statement is your fricative, refractory route to a “characteristic” elegance of form and diction?

  Being born into Chinese, then changing my language very young, gave me an experience of relativity that led me to poetry, which I often think of as systems of relations or proportions, like math, trying to make an equivalent world. One tries to recreate a starting point, but that is not a whole world, so one is potential. It’s loss, but I don’t want to be committed to it.

  It’s hard to separate my idea of myself as feminine and feminist with what’s expressed in these two poems. (Even though Martha, a fourth-generation feminist, has given me a substance of girl, the “Four Year Old Girl” is myself.) In “Nest” I was reading the writings of women from poor countries, and I tried to write about homelessness (no home, loss of your home language) as powerlessness. I suppose I also ask again if women’s giving necessitates the loss of power. If being able to “see” your mother (home, mother-tongue) gives enough/more power. These issues are complex, because I came to English from the empowered position of having an educated Chinese mother and an American father.

  “Hearing” moves to the wider arena of compassion, transcendent and particular giving expressed by hearing, as a source of power. There’s a synapse between hearing a cry and understanding its meaning, a synapse where all fragments occur. This is explicitly a feminine, if not feminist, power.

  BERNSTEIN: If the criteria for elegance are refinement, tastefulness, clarity, grace, then it is bound to a range of socially inflected values regarding gender, class and ethnicity, among other things, which are reflected in poetic diction. Who gets to be elegant? Perhaps what we are talking about is the aesthetic, which, in a poetics of invention, is often disruptive of received models of clarity and refinement. In my own experience, much that is regarded as tasteful in poetry is rather insipid: it’s not that I object to the aestheticism but find the work not aesthetic enough. In the American context, an excess of aestheticism in a male poet may be negatively regarded as effeminate or patrician or both, while for women poets “of sensibility” (to use Jerome McGann’s term, which also has a relation to the emotionalism we have been talking about), aestheticism has often been the justification for dismissal as decorative or minor. Aesthetics is always implicated in politics and vice versa. Any shortcut to aesthetic correctness is treacherous because aesthetics is not something to overcome but to acknowledge. Now this gets me to one last question I wanted to ask you—about the use of the language of information and science in your poems, since such language is commonly seen as “unpoetic” (despite a number of influential precedents in the history of modern poetry).

  BERSSENBRUGGE: I persist in complimenting these poems as elegant “enough,” if I think of elegance as grace or pleasure of parts to a whole and to intention. I first used scientific concepts, because it seemed interesting to try and feminize scientific language by altering its context and tone. This was in the late ’70s. Later, I appropriated texts from philosophy, Buddhism and contemporary art as well. A self encompassing or embodying what it interacts with was
more articulate than trying to speak for myself. This is the literal situation of our bodies which are porous and continuous with the world. Tom White told me, after a few days in the Sierras one’s internal flora has more in common with the surrounding pine trees than with people back in Berkeley. I feel that my unconscious has more freedom choosing from language that isn’t personal. I prefer to move and change words that are in the world, rather than in myself. I like plasticity. I like texts of “information” as a counterweight to personal experience, which is so dynamic.