Poetry for people

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993, Theodore Enslin

Such is the beauty of Theodore Enslin's Then, and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993 (National Poetry Foundation, $19.95). It records a 50-year-long dialogue between nature and a man. Reading his poetry is like looking at nature outside a window or watching TV at a camp-site - a funneling of things seen as if through a rhombus of experience. His "ah's" and "oh's," leftovers from the days of romantic rural poetry, are so abrupt they could be reactions to the poet's stubbing a toe against a bed frame. His views are wedged into place: "The wisps of New Hampshire/shut in/the horizon/under a sky/threatening/snow."

Enslin's new selection of poetry is culled from 70 volumes (I mean, 70 volumes!) of the poet's work. He writes in an interview that the landscapes that infuse the poetry could have come from just about anywhere. Sometimes they come from nowhere, perhaps from a fever or from the simple urge to be somewhere. In "Markings," Enslin describes imprinting nature for significance:

It is not the best place,
or, sometimes, any place at all.
But to leave the mark,
we must not leave
before the mark is made.


Enslin, a musician by education and a walking-stick whittler by trade, uses nature for elements toward a condensed composition. He writes, "Most of what I use is directly around me." His poetry carves a seat for you out of nature's odds and ends and puts you right there with him in the front row.

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat My Way: Speeches and Poems, Charles Bernstein

Before Charles Bernstein visited Tucson for the recent Tucson Poetry Festival, Catalyst got to interview him. He explained what is behind his aesthetic, describing a poetry of experimentation and dissent and insisting upon poetry that is referential, but in exponential ways.

One of the things he remarked upon was the materiality of the word, treating the flux of language in a poem as a film director would - cutting and splicing, obscuring the scene with fog or orange gels. He described wanting to put the art 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."

In many ways, Bernstein has become the apologist for a form of poetry that gradually came into acceptance in the '70s. It's called "language poetry," and Bernstein continues to explain its square, intimidating name in his most recent volume of poetry and criticism My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, $18.00).

"'Language poetry' is a term I prefer not to use," he writes. For a poet who experiments with the polyreferentiality of language, with poetry that "explores identity rather than fixing it," "language poetry" is simply one more nail to remove from the wall-space of language art.

Language to Bernstein is a children's game of sliding scales and conceptual peek-a-boo. His poetry indulges in a wet-pants art of changes, seeking dry breeks when the old ones are too saturated with lucidity. His poem "Don't Be So Sure (Don't Be Saussure)" examines likenesses of sound for their disparity of meaning, with a kind of "let's call the whole thing off" resolution:

My cup is my cap
& my cap is my cup
When the coffee is hot
It ruins my hat
We clap and we slap
Have sup with our pap
But won't someone please
Get me a drink


His poetry sometimes has a Dr. Seuss-like humor to it that pleases while it interrogates. My Way is more criticism, speeches and essays than poetry, but the basic thrust of his life-long apology for "language poetry" is still rigorously expressed within.