The language of poetry
Language Poetry is a movement of convincing authority in contemporary poetics. Often viewed as an estranging, intellectual (as opposed to purely aesthetic) movement, the poets have other things to say about it. Catalyst had an opportunity to interview one of these poets, Charles Bernstein, by e-mail. He will read Friday evening.
Catalyst: What is Language Poetry and could you describe your personal vision of it?
Bernstein: As Bruce Andrews and I wrote in our introduction to The LANGUAGE Book, we were interested in poetry that did not assume a syntax, a subject matter, a vocabulary, a structure, a form, or a style but where all these were at issue, all these were explored in the writing of the poem.
I think we wanted to put the art part back in poetry, which means considering many different ways that one word can follow another, one phrase can collide or merge with the next. And many different types of language. Indeed, to compose poems with widely variant forms of language - to make a rhythm from the variations in the types of language used.
Catalyst: Part of the myth of language poetry is that it is fundamentally nonreferential. Words in a language poem, like lines in a Jackson Pollock painting, celebrate of the materiality of the medium. Is this a fair assessment?
Bernstein: From my very first essays in the 1970s (collected in Content's Dream) I have argued against the idea that the sort of poetry we explored, for example in LANGUAGE (the magazine Bruce Andrews and I edited from 1978 to 1981), was nonreferential. Words are almost always referential, but what many of us were interested in exploring were nonconventional forms, allowing the expressive (and nonexpressive) features of language to roam in different territory than possible with tamer verse forms. So what you get might better be called polyreferential in that the poems do not necessarily mean one fixed, definable, paraphrasable thing.
Visual representation typically concerns whether or not a painting "looks like" something identifiable - a landscape, a person, a bowl of Rice Krispies. But what if what is being represented is not a bowl of soup but the soup bowl inside your mind. Then again, what happens if that obscure object of representation is not being represented but created in the process, so it is not a report of some thing seen or know outside the poem but an act of making.
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