Charles Bernstein
interviewed by Philip Davenport
NYC
October 12, 2011
Photo texts composed/designed by Darren Marsh
Photos and text Philip Davenport
for THE DARK WOULD anthology
Philip Davenport: How come you guys lost the battle? (laughs) It feels embattled and it feels like we stopped being, in Britain anyway, ambitious. People started to accept ‘Oh well, I’m in the bunker, and that’s where I’ll stay …’
Charles Bernstein: … the poetry battles are different in the U.K. than in the U.S., that’s for sure, going back to what we were talking about before, Bob Cobbing and the Writers Forum, not to say the whole business with Eric Mottram and the Poetry Society. What I was going to say also, in respect to the TLS, when the TLS ran a piece about Prynne last year, it was so strange, they just picked this one small book of his, the review was almost written as if … here’s this odd person who nobody’s heard of but who “obscure and difficult” but, wow, still he is really great, So Prynne is extolled, but he was presented as if he were a cult, hidden from view, which surely he is not. Prynne is one of the most prominent British poets of the time, teaching much of his life at one of the main British universities, and he has a volume of collected poems and scores of articles about his work. But TLS chooses to review this one pamphlet. Why treat him in such a miniaturizing, or exoticizing, way? His collected was previously reviewed in TLS more than a decade ago, at which time he was billed as the “invisible man of English poetry.” I mean if he is invisible what about all the actually neglected poets in the UK? What are they? Unmentionable or inconceivable I guess. But there is a conflict between the official verse poets and Prynne and Co., Ltd,, in Cambridge. But then again there is a conflict between Prynne’s Cambridge and Cobbing’s London, one that is perhaps more fierce because there are real poetic vales at stake. Which brings us more to where you intersect with U.K, poetry – visual, concrete, VVV, experimental too – a term I don’t like –
PD: No, I don’t.
CB: But that kind of work really has never had much legitimacy and acceptance in the U.K or in the U.S. The advent of the web has changed that. It’s allowed us to have alliances and affiliations – transatlantic is what they used to say – across national borders, to set up affiliations which are not so much based in those national cultures. And the web has made available the historical record of visually centered poetry (and verbally centered art) to a much greater degree. But, you know, when Swinburne wrote his book about Blake in 1868, Blake was a completely marginalized figure. The issue for Swinburne and for Blake, the relation of their work to the visual, is crucial in terms of the history we are talking about because the Pre-Raphaelites, like Blake, worked as visual-verbal artists and indeed their decorative or ornamental approach to visual and verbal art continues to raise, well if not red flags than pleated ones. As much as the present of poetry needs to be continually claimed, so, equally, does the history of poetry need to be reclaimed. The revenge of history can be an exhilarating force, the return of the repressed. And there remains a powerful desire to repress the material history of the book which is very much at the heart of contemporary Official Verse Culture and its profound disinterest – if disinterest can be profound – in the history of writing and inscription. I made a joke years ago, in an essay about Johanna Drucker, that there’s two things that are ignored about poetry: its look and its sound; that is poetry itself is ignored. [laughs] So I guess I am just responding to your sense of disappointment and annoyance and anger about poetry histories that you feel were hidden from you. –We used to say in the 70s that grammar, that syntax, exerted a kind of control over your thinking, which I think is true, but people would reply, “Oh, you think you can just change the words around and you’re going to change the society!” But we didn’t think that at all. We were not naïve. Nonetheless, the way in which we use words does affect how we understand and interpret reality. As George Lakoff says, it’s a question of framing: what we frame, what we foregrounded, what we regard as insignificant. I think Erving Goffman’s work on frame analysis, along with Lakoff’s, is crucial. Lots of the poetry I care most about frames as significant that which doesn’t even register as semantic for some readers and critics. And that is surely true of the visual domain of verbal language that is your focus. For some, those who’ve been schooled, it just doesn’t count, it’s like noise, it’s irrelevant; or it’s like bad printing, it interferes with deciphering the supposed content. So one byproduct of alphabetic technology is that it represses the embodiment of language, to use a phrase of William Carlos Williams. Accent is paradigmatic of the problem: Standard English – the koine, in the U.K. southern English – is idealized. And when that happens other – nonstandard – social, racial, ethnic, regional tongues are stigmatized. Language is rooted in social interactions: it’s never just individuals who speak; the social speaks through the individual. That’s the power of verbal language: no matter what you do to it or with it, you’re always dealing with a social body. Visualizing language, whether in alphabetic writing or visually oriented poetry, has the ability to make tangible what is otherwise an immersive stream. We get to touch it, hold it, hear it, see it. When I was in China recently one of the terrific graduate students, in a paper about Rae Armantrout, said that I had always put forward, along with my contemporaries, the idea that the work that we were doing was non-referential. “No,” I told her, “I have always said the opposite.” Ken Edwards published an essay of mine in Reality Studios, in 1977, that started “Not death of the referent.” [laughs] That was one of my first published essays, refuting this idea that seems to stick to me like zebra’s stripes on a panda bear. … But the reason that happens is … some among those who advocate visual or sound poetry, or the kind of things I do, proudly wave the banner of meaninglessness and non-reference. But I hate that, always have. I don’t hate the people that say it. I understand what they are getting at. But I see it a different way: we are creating new semantic domains, not abandoning the semantic. And the reason that those zebra stripes keep getting put onto my panda ontology, well, it’s just that some folks like to think it’s only possible to understand verbal language if it sheds its dependence on look or sound. And, in contrast, for those people who celebrate the obliteration of meaning in a Dadaesque way; well, I won’t embrace this as a positive description, because it seems to me you’re giving up on a real struggle over language. Now I realize a visual mark doesn’t have the kind of verbal associations and references that even a single letter has. Visual marking and alphabetic writing are different enterprises, not to say empires. Combining them, of course, is a fundamental project for art and their separation is a fundamental problem. In Attack of the Difficult Poems, I take this back to the archaic – and try to trace the invention of the Greek alphabet 2,500 years ago, emphasizing how much we are still in the thrall of alphabetic technology. Phonetic alphabet script, either Hebrew, which is a little earlier, or Greek, uses letters in entirely instrumental ways to cue sounds. The alphabet by itself does not specify the full range of verbal sounds but rather cues them. You have to project the full vocal range onto the script. Acoustically, alphabets are evocative rather than denotative (we each pronounce the same word differently). But we so instrumentalize the alphabet that it’s treated as if it’s like a digital code, which it isn’t. And therefore whenever anybody pulls the alphabet apart, or for that matter works outside of the standard grammatical/syntactical patterns, people see red: all they hear noise, they think there is nothing going on there. And that … that’s what you are advocating, the destruction of meaning, isn’t it? And it’s very hard to get beyond that barrier. That’s the way I understand what we’re talking about, in response to your wanting to do a “language art” collection and yet your telling me you are not informed about poetry … that’s why I want to take it back to the reception of some of the British poets. That’s why I want to connect the fact – the symptom! – that a journal as sophisticated as the London Review of Books has such appalling poetry: because they don’t actually take poetry as an art form, they can’t. There is an enormous resistance to understanding what the art of poetry would be because it presents a challenge to the very discourse that they operate in, and their own verbal design, which they take as neutral. But it would not puncture their authority to change their poetry tune. Poetry makes nothing happen, right? Like many who abhor the new poetry, such publications are overreacting. It is quite possible to operate at many different rhetoric levels – you can certainly write standard expository prose without that being undermined by poetry. It’s almost as if such places take poetry too seriously [laughs] because they are unable to consider it at all, as if it is a kind of virus or black magic they better keep clear of. And maybe it is. As if publishing a pataque(e)rical poem would displace the whole symbolic order. [laughs] Like deviant sexuality, it has to be repressed. It’s like you’re afraid that homosexuality is contagious; and yet queerness may be, even if homosexuality isn’t. Turns out everything does not come unglued, turns out this dark other side is always operable, whether you acknowledge it or not. Even the person that is most repressed about poetry or its polymorphous perversity still has it in them [laughs] and operates with it all day long, every day. It’s always there and they are living with it. Just relax, accept it …
PD: It doesn’t kill you.
CB: No, on the contrary, it just makes you freer in your choices. I always say, when I teach a class that just uses constraint-based and non-expository writing, that a class like this should be required for all the students – in addition to the mandatory expository writing class: students need to take abnormal writing to balance their class in normal writing. Non-expository writing will only make your expository writing better: it would potentially you better able to conceptualize what you are doing in rhetorical terms. So there’s my sophistical sleight of hand … because if you don’t believe standard issue expository prose is a rhetorical choice, if you believe that it’s rational and it’s the best possible, most apt, expression, then what I’m saying is treacherous, as many people feel. You’d have to accept that there is no “best” expression only chosen expressions, each of which comes with its own baggage. Rationalized expository writing that represses its looks and sound is only one among many possible ways to engage ideas, philosophy, politics. Why do people occupy Wall Street? Why don’t they sound like the Democratic Party and have a platform like the Democratic Party’s platform? And yet for some, such departing from the established rule of the road seems akin to anarchy or nihilism …
PD: It’s really fascinating, because, by accident I met the people who are running the Wall Street occupation protest, because I was sitting beside them in a café, and they were talking about plurality, and that there’s a great pressure on them to have a message –
CB: Well, they have a message; they just don’t know if it’s a poetic message. Perhaps it is ambiguous, but ambiguity is also a message.
PD: There are many groups who would like them to say one thing or another thing.
CB: There is pressure on the Occupy people to have policy goals as defined by the mainstream media and two dominant political parties.
PD: Yeah, but because they’re not doing that, I thought it was very intriguing that they were sitting talking about existing, sitting and existing with the idea of not having clarity, and it responds to what you were just talking about.
CB: Another way to think about these issues is in terms of the many senses of performance … to understand writing always as performance – the visuals of performance, performance as/in translation. Occupy Wall Street has a very explicit political perspective, couldn’t be more explicit, so that when people say that we don’t know what they stand for … how could it be more apparent? It reminds me still of that non-referentiality thing: what do you mean they don’t stand for anything? Obviously they have views. It’s not put in terms of a congressional legislation, and it’s frustrating for people for whom that’s the only … but, of course, in that, OWS reminds me of the 60s, which was a vexed period, but nonetheless aspects of the new left moved in a related direction. In England, it was the art schools that were the most magically powerful instigators of that 1968 experience. And so that goes again goes back aesthetically radical strands in English art and poetry history. I have William Morris in the back of my mind: it’s all connected. And that’s relates also the origin of punk, anyway the part that picks up on even people like Burroughs, like P … – What’s his name? P-Orridge?
PD: Genesis P-Orridge. Yeah, he very much entwined with Burroughs and the Situationists. I think, via Malcolm McLaren.
CB: A student I worked with at Penn, Gregory Steirer, wrote a fascinating dissertation about those connections. One of his chapters made that point that Paris ‘68 is almost typically remembered as a fight about labour issues or legislative political demands, but mainly it comes out of university reform – our classes are not relevant. It’s the students rebelling against the irrelevance and the hierarchy of the classes in France that was a crucial motor to ‘68. And then in England … art schools and then punk. Greg makes an at first counter-intuitive argument, associating punk with neo-liberalism – and he’s not against it, he likes this aspect. My less historically accurate sense would have been to see British punk as vaguely connected to the left, Rock Against Racism and so on; but Greg sees product branding that celebrates the free market as far more central than any ideological critique of capitalism. So for Greg the apparently dissident subcultures are the pure product of neo-liberal capitalism, which, again, for Greg is not “bad” thing. For the successful bands, their brands were worth quite a lot. Poetry culture almost never offers the possibility of lucrative commodification (so our commodification must be done just for the sheer love of it!). Well, perhaps hip-hop – given its connection to poetry – is a liminal case. And the art world has a market dimension unavailable to poetry. But I want to keep returning, Philip, to your sense of injustice in/around poetry and its reception in the U.K., which you expressed before we started the interview. You are already seeing, as you meet poets interested in your anthology, that we have a number of overlapping interests. I like to say that the radical poetry web you are beginning to cruise, well … let’s just say you have fallen through the poetry rabbit hole, just like in Alice in Wonderland – and found a subterranean world that’s very dense, it’s a whole ecosystem and one not free from hierarchy, everybody can’t enter into it in the same way, it’s a highly defined space. It is not a subculture as is familiar from music or even the visual arts, which often have a relationship to mass culture or to money that’s different. Poetry is to some degree unable to enter into those markets – if it could it would. I don’t think the poets are immune to wanting to have those kinds of success; it’s just not open to them in the same way. Poetry is unpopular culture. But the density and the complexity of the infrastructure is something that’s extraordinary; and with the internet, these kinds of webs of communication that go back even a hundred years or longer are either to trace, a (not so) secret history. Actually, the secret history of poetry that we’re talking about really goes back over two hundred years –
PD: When I was talking to Jerry Rothenberg, I’m aware of –
CB: Jerry has done so much to make explicit this history, as, in a different way, has Jerome McGann …
PD: I mean, Blake is almost the first, there’s a certain trail of outsiderdom, which is –
CB: But it’s also the verbal-visual aspect of Blake’s work and the fact that it wasn’t conventionally published and didn’t circulate, which is also true of Dickinson. So that history is symbolically powerful.
PD: For me, there was a sense of, as you said, dropping into a hole – I felt as if I’d gone over a wall and suddenly there was this garden.
CB: Or through the looking glass … because Lewis Carroll is part of that history himself.
PD: Absolutely. But there was a sense then of it suddenly becoming very intense, the experience became very intense, because it was as if this was a rarity, it couldn’t just be accessed.
CB: Poetry isn’t really marginal, or it’s marginal only to a point. I’m often subjected to this kind of … critique, let’s say … because I have a job at an established university and I’ve been published by big presses … so some people like to say – how can I advocate what I advocate. But I would like to see more people have the kind of jobs I have and more of the “kind of poetry I want” – to used MacDiarmid’s phrase – get reviewed. And what I’m saying about the London Review of Books of course is not that if somebody I liked was reviewed in there that would be a sell-out, I’m saying the opposite – that it would be fine! Things would go on even better, the paper’s own intellectual projects would be enriched, not harmed, or probably just go on unchanged. I’m absolutely against this “us” against “them” … bunker was the term we used. I’m not sympathetic to it as a choice, if it’s a choice, and I don’t romanticize it, I recognize it as a survival thing for many people and so I accept it, but I think it’s an unfortunate situation.
PD: Well, bunkers are useful for surviving in, but they also tend to be very limited in their outlook (and the food’s terrible).
CB: It’s a World War I metaphor, which brings to mind both the Futurist moment and the war in England. For me, Owen and Sassoon, the whole issue of cacophony is very important, in terms of gas masks, in terms of the explosions – that’s a very important part of breaking things apart in the social structure, which then gets reflected and refracted in the poetry. So it’s not – “Oh, the poets just decided to fragment things in this way on their own.” The world that they were in was doing that, they were responding. Like Preston Sturges put it in Christmas in July: “If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee it’s the bunk.” I love that. It’s very explicit of course in Owen and Sassoon so that becomes, I’m not the first to say it, one of the iconic moments to understand what goes on in Modernism, not just Stein. The problem with the bunker mentality is, bunkers are good when the bombs are dropping, but when the bombing stops and you’re still in the bunker (laughs) … that’s a little scary, right? Even a few months later you can understand, but at a certain point when some move into houses, and the ones still in the bunker say, “Oh no, you betrayed us, you’ve sold out, you’re not staying in the bunker.” But that’s a lot of bunk! So you say, “Oh no, you could get another house right next to mine, we’ll have a reading up here.” Poetry has a remarkable resilience and also an incredible, even, well OK I’ll say it, respect within the culture. Despite all that we’re saying, it’s an art form that has a very resonant and even talismanic power within North American and British culture. No matter how much we talk about the mistreatment of innovative poetry as something not getting attention, still there’s something much beyond that that’s even stronger about its cultural station.
PD: Do you have a sense that you are in some way a carrier or a transmitter of that?
CB: As David Antin likes to say, “I am sure we all do the best we can.” What’s ironic to me is that in an English department everyone is talking about multidisciplinary while I’m one of the most traditional professors, in the sense that I teach poetry as an art form, which has a claim to being part of infrastructure of literature departments. Nothing more old-fashioned than that. Even if most people who teach in English departments were to have scant interest in poetry, still, you can’t imagine an English department without poetry. Maybe the wrong kind of poetry [laughs] but even so poetry is built into the foundation of the teaching of the language that everybody speaks. It cannot be completely eradicated. You could say, in K through 12 in America, there’s an appalling treatment of poetry, but nonetheless lip service is paid. Then again, a couple of years back I would have said the same thing about classics – before the State University of New York at Albany announced it was eliminating not only its Classics Department but also French and Italian literature too. So just forget what I am saying.
PD: …It’s simply my own personal framing, but that I have a family of many successive generations and that I feel that right here there’s also progenitors and there are people who are inheritors ... That transmission is very interesting to me and I wondered if you might just finish by talking about that. … [transmission] from a generation of practitioners to another generation of practitioners –
CB: I have saturated myself in the work of the couple of generations before me and my own generation and I have, obsessively, taken on the task of archiving and disseminating. At the same time I’m very critical, or wary, about the nature of how that transmission occurs, and the kind of exclusions that set in. I am not wedded to the group of the poets that I was young with in the 70s as the be all and end all, and, in contrast, see us as particularly particular, brought together by contingent circumstance. Yet, in keeping with the spirit (but not the letter!) of our founding years, I try to stay as open as I can to things that are outside of the histories of transmission that I deeply, irrevocably embedded in. Teaching the history of such transmission is one way to at least try to break its insulating hold. But it’s very hard not to be insular – just time and loyalty work against you. I’m a very loyal person, and so it’s very hard for me not to be limited, because the world of poetry is so huge, there are so many different poetry cultures and there are so many different people working. It’s important to keep in mind the limitations of what any of us … and certainly I’m very aware of the limitations of my views. But … still … I have a very specific historical interests and lineages of which I am a caretaker. I have a historical and dialectical – indeed a pragmatic – view of lineages and transmission. What I call midrashic antinomianism. That means acknowledging any given path, any given tradition, any given trajectory as contingent, as situational, historical, peculiar – not the “best” not “universal,” not formally inevitable. That is, to see literary history not a fixed – the one we get too often in schools and in LRB, NYRB, the New Yorker, PN – but as pataque(e)rical. (By fixed I mean both what they do to pets and to sports games). But circling back to bunkers and Bohemians, I am also wary of the reaction formation, circling the wagons, since pataque(e)ricas charts a history of specific and often incommensurable reactions against the norm or standard.
PD: I think that’s a very important relationship to broker, isn’t it, because if you happen to be in a place, or your contemporaries do, which has involved an element of bunkerism, and then on top of that your own practice is perhaps one that is not easily … the transition between that and the rest of the culture around it is at times a vexed one … and then there’s also the process of aging as well and that idea that you talked about, loyalty – you can only be loyal to so many people: you live a life, there are going to be a number of people you form alliances with and you can’t keep doing that. So that’s a third reason for shutting down, so how do you break that apart?
CB: Loyalty often is seen in terms of both coterie or friendship and the bonding within aesthetic (or political) movements. Both coteries and movements are to some extent built on exclusion. Coterie’s problem is favouritism, college chums and all. Aesthetic movements have the problem of going from band to brand, which can be a radical swerve away from opening things up, if, indeed, that was part of the founding mission, as is was with L=A=N=G=U=A=E. In retrospect, anything that gets recognized creates a de facto bunker. The minute something is labelled and characterized, whether as a group (aesthetic program) or individual (voice), if you decide to promote that as a label, then that may lead you into an often overly narrow understanding of both what you yourself doing and what’s going on around you. That’s why there was and is so much ambivalence – the laddy doth protest too much! – about the “Language” label among many of the practitioners, because resisting branding was one of the aesthetic principals. And that made for difficulties. But it’s a paradox: the external acceptance of what you do can increase the bunkerliness of your understanding of what you’re doing. Insofar as you’re being labelled as doing one thing, then that’s your calling card, your signature, your logo, and so that recognition comes with … to some degree, you’re going along with this … And artists often have that problem – they become narrower as a result of their public recognition or characterization (you're the person who does x or is part of the y group). Like any other identity formation, this occurs externally, because no man (or woman) has an identity formations entire unto him or herself. Our identity is formed by the way other people recognize us. Now, you can reject those characterizations, in a kind of neoliberal humanist way, “I Am a Sovereign Self I Am / a Total Original not Part of any Clan”; but at the same time, if you cling too much to identity formation that can be very narrowing too. This is especially interesting to me in terms of Jewishness, a marvellous arena of complexly contested identity formations. I’m interested in radical poetic practice in a secular Jewish context. In that frame, the Jewish understanding would be to resist certain kinds of identity formation, so we have our slogan from Kafka: ‘What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even know what I have in common with myself.’ I would say that of art movements too. The thing about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which I edited with Bruce Andrews (1978-1982), at least from my point of view, not shared by everyone else involved … I was very conscious of questioning and exploring the way in which language operates to categorize and identify and also the way that can end up being reductive. So our poetic practice – both having essays that were not expository or discursive, and focusing on poems that departed from conventional modes of representation – was an attempt to get outside of … the way language operates to close down. Maybe I have always been too phobic about singular identities, starting with the singular voice of the poet; I know a lot of people accept and even welcome and promote such things. I am obsessed with these issues. As I get older the diachronic (transmission) issue you raise creates ever new problems, as family, aesthetic, or personal loyalties fray and regroup. Anyway: I was born in this briar patch. The basis of my poetics is to question characterization, labeling, and, in that Steinian way, the dominance of nouns. Keeping in mind, though that, frames and categories are the means by which we both perceive and measure the world: I am not against framing any more than I am against meaning. But I am interested in pushing back against frames in a dialectical, historical way. Maybe it’s futile! You don’t dispense with frames any more than you dispense with your body. But what is your body? How does it work? One of my students yesterday at my grad seminar was talking about how in Stein visual images of the body are rarely presented: there’s a lot of sex but you don’t have depictions her body (“Lifting Belly” being an exception). Similarly, in the new disabilities poetry anthology Beauty Is a Verb the point is made that Larry Eigner rarely describes his disability. It’s an interesting point, but I would never think of it that way. You don’t see the representation of the body, but the work is made of language perceived as or in or on a body: it’s not letting you look at the body as a voyeur, it’s actually letting you share an experience, as if you’re getting satellite transmissions from the mind experiencing the world as it is perceived in and through that body.
[break in recording]
… It’s fascinating, thinking of Cobbing, the visual poems that he would read as sound poems. Other people do this too, there is a tendency to take visual poetry as scores for performance – I mean, Cobbing could be given a carpet as a script and he would perform the carpet. Johanna Drucker writes about this in her essay on visual poetry in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. You create a visual work that doesn’t have obvious phonic dimensions – of course, if you’re messing with the alphabet then it isn’t something that would necessarily have a phonic dimension – think of Gombringer’s “Silencio”; but still, the analogy is very … evocative.
PD: It’s an unwritten space that you’re talking about isn’t it, and (written) work that exists unwritten …
CB: A wonderful thing about poetry that foregrounds its visual dimension is that resists the phonetic. But at the same time I’m fascinated when such a visual poem becomes the basis for a phono-tour-de-force, as with Steve McCaffrey’s Carnival.
PD: Well, it’s a leaping off point.
CB: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the classic 1950s Noigandres concrete poetry or Gomringer … there aren’t performances of those pieces because of the very nature of their grid-like repetition and iconic signage. So they’re called neat concrete, don’t they say neat verus messy?
PD: Clean, yeah.
CB: Clean concrete might not be performed, while messy concrete does seem to lend itself to a sound poetry performance. And yet you can hear SILENCIO.
PD: Somebody like Robert Lax I think of as being very clean-swept concrete.
CB: And he performs? … How about somebody like Thomas A. Clark? He’s almost a concrete poet in a way. I’ve never actually Thomas A Clark read. Does he?
PD: I’ve seen pictures, very pretty pictures.
CB: … when you get to that extreme minimalism, or maybe in his case miniature is a better term – there is also a sound dimension, silently heard within the context of the book.
PD: I’m going to pull us back to the two questions that arise out of what we’re talking about. I would like to just come back to how you started and you were talking about the brutality of ignoring certain people and their achievements. So, in Britain you were talking about Maggie O’Sullivan …
CB: Maggie O’Sullivan is one of the great British poets, who should be celebrated as she turns 60; but, in fact, she has received little support in a culture that prides itself on its literary and cultural traditions. That was true of Bunting too; Bunting was virtually impoverished at the end of his life. About ten years ago, Maggie applied to the Arts Council in her region … I wrote a letter as did Keith Tuma – who was the editor of the Oxford anthology of British and Irish poetry, and there were other distinguished references from Britain of course, but despite that the Arts Council said her work was not poetry! And they wouldn't fund her. What a travesty. She applied for a modest amount of funding to do her work. And here is where this ties it into your project: my sense is the work was rejected as poetry because of its strong visual element.
PD: I think there’s a terrible split in Britain between the overground stuff and then anything that has a notion of experiment about it, and it’s really been a problem. I believe that that is changing now.
CB: If you look at the way poetry is represented in many forums with wide circulation, you realize it is treated as a kind of ugly stepchild who needs to invited to the table but is best kept as quiet as possible. People do not read The London Review of Books or The New Yorker for its poetry coverage but if they think that if this is what poetry is about these days, then will also think that is really is fifty years behind the other arts. The poetry coverage many of the general readers of these publications see is slanted toward those who are adamantly opposed to formally radical poetry of the past 100 years, work which is either trashed or ignored, with a few signature exceptions, such as John Ashbery, who provides a lot of cover, or let’s just say plausible deniability. In contrast, in the art world, comparable formal developments are extolled on museum banners. So there is always that famous asymmetry – not in terms of practice, which is comparable, but in terms of reception. The economic value some visual art works attain is not something possible for a poem. Yet it still needs to be noted that most visual artists see little or no economic returns for their costs or labour, and operate – this is truly shocking! – like poets. But the huge amount of money in the art world skews the economic picture for everyone. Still, the fact that poetry operates in its own symbolic economy, somewhat removed from the market economy, has its advantage. There is a way that the market culture in the arts has turned active works of visual thought into trophies. And this has also led to a straitjacketing of critical discourse and curatorial choice exemplified by the compulsory orthodontics of October magazine (where even a grin looks grim). In this canon neither poetry plastique nor radical poetics can have a place, except if it is declared uncontaminated by poetry, as with Carl Andre or Lawrence Weiner or Jenny Holzer. That radical poetics remains unsettling for both official literary and art culture is telling. The banality of much of the verbal language in blue chip art allows it to be assimilated into a market and museum culture that resists linguistic complexity while supposedly celebrating visual difficulty. But you can’t have one without the other. Think about Décio Pignatari’s “beba coca cola / babe / coca / caco / cloaca” [drink coca cola / drool / glue / cocaine / cesspool] which remains incendiary and then think of the excruciatingly bland use of language in Ed Rusha’s work of the past decade (yes I understand it’s supposed to be nondescript, as with the verbal material in so much hyperdry conceptual art, more filler than poetry) … I still go for Pignatari’s startling use of logo. That’s the sort of visual-verbal work I admire, along with, now, the work of Johanna Drucker and Robert Grenier. Then I love the fact that I feel such a deep connection with these poets so much connected to wilderness in the work of O’Sullian and Grenier, and in Bob’s case to the pastoral, even though I would appear to be living a life, and doing work, quite aversive to that. Bob, as you know, has wanted to present his work in an art context, with disappointing results.
PD: I think that there are various things mitigating against it, one of them being that perhaps, as well, he is so comfortable in that pastoral context. As a person I felt that I discovered Bob much more spending time with him in Bolinas and that he does have a level of discomfort when he’s in an urban environment, but if you’re in the gallery world it is about selling and hustling – I’ve spent the last few days walking around Soho, shaking people by the hand, doing little card exchanges and all of that kind of stuff, and you have to be able to do that and he’s just not a slicker.
CB: There are certainly examples of people in the visual arts world who are extremely resistant to professional socialization, in the way that Grenier is, that nonetheless are successful for one reason or another. But what I think is interesting about your description of what the art world is like … and this is what I mean that you could say that poetry is fifty years ahead of the visual arts … because this professionalisation and corporatisation of the art world is a detriment to the exchange economy that’s possible within poetry. So Stein remains a vexed figure in official literary and art culture in a way that is not true of Picasso. It’s telling that the Museum of Modern Art is comfortable including Cendrars, Apollinaire, and Kruchenykh in their upcoming modernist abstraction show (but only on the condition that there be no translations), but Stein is impossible for them to even consider. What’s that about? I guess because Stein wrote in English so people would be able to read it! And then let’s come back to now. Allen Fisher would be an interesting example: why is Allen Fisher so obscure and Rachel Whiteread so successful?
PD: What does Rachel Whiteread do that is not what Allen Fisher does?
CB: They’re both interesting, they’re both about at the same level of difficulty, and they both have entirely individual projects. One is enormously successful and the other has tremendous presence but yet isn’t able to break through. That’s an interesting fault line that probably has nothing to do with either of those people. The London Review of Books would fall apart if they had an Allen Fisher piece. I guess that’s what they must feel!
PD: We’d love to, Allen, but unfortunately we’d fall to pieces!
CB: But it presents no problem for them to have a piece of an artist of his generation who is comparably difficult and conceptual.
PD: But Rachel Whiteread, famously one of her early pieces was a cast of a house in London and that caused a great furore and there was a lot of viciousness about that and that piece was actually destroyed.
CB: I’ve seen that piece. She may be controversial, but the controversy is reported on, she’s in museums and she has a presence that someone like Allen doesn’t have. Also, Allen’s work has to be understood more the way you would understand a visual artist’s work: the way he uses materials, the way he uses shapes, the different kind of book projects and so on.
PD: They are actually diptychs, aren’t they, a lot of them – they are a painting and a piece.
CB: Right, but you can’t understand Allen within a traditional literary context. You have to have some sense of him working within the larger art field. I just give these examples because we’re talking about England.
PD: Well that’s where I come from and I have to be careful because that’s where I sit, and I come, to an extent, with a chip on my shoulder, as we say, that there’s that annoyance, because I only came across Cobbing in my thirties and it was by accident almost, and I felt extremely annoyed, at myself partly, because I hadn’t figured that this was going on, but also because I felt, well, how come this wasn’t passed onto me? Because this seemed to me extraordinary work.
CB: Official verse culture in the U.S. and in the U.K. never gave Cobbing or Jackson MacLow their due. Conservative isn’t even really the right word …
PD: I think Georgian would be the word to use.
CB: In any case, Cobbing and Mac Low were not conventional. In contrast, much of the prized poetry of our time is quite dull, though I know that is not the experience of those who give those prizes.
PD: Maybe it actually parallels what you’re saying about the art world, you know. I do wrestle with this, and the people are nice. I don’t like being annoyed or having confrontations or being horrible about somebody, but at the same time I have a boredom threshold and I feel that it’s being taxed severely.
CB: Boredom threshold. I like that way of putting it.
PD: Well, I’m trying to be gentle.
CB: I’ve come to terms with my annoyance. While I’m annoyed by my annoyance I realize I have to live with it.
Image credits
Darren Marsh is an artist who uses books as his zone of making to track the traces between the ambiguity of things - human / non-human and the possible spaces / worlds that we inhabit / imagine.
Subsequently, Davenport exhibited fragments of the book in the form of “price labels” attached to trash on the street — mostly discarded consumer goods — at Liverpool Biennial.
In 2011, during a residency in New York, Davenport brought the poem out into the wider world again, this time using business cards. This was done during the time of the occupation of Wall Street by Occupy Wall Street protesters.
The 2011 NYC photographs have now been adapted by Marsh to become a new visual sequence, once again incorporating fragments of this already-fragmentary poem. These new pieces were made especially for this occasion of sharing the Charles Bernstein interview that originally appeared in The Dark Would (2013).
Davenport was the originator, compiler and editor of The Dark Would language art anthology -- Darren Marsh was the designer. Many more of Marsh’s bookworks can be found at his website.
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