So Charles Bernstein, we could pick any number of Bernstein poems.
We could pick a section of dysraphism, which would
be difficult to read at the level of the phrase and of the word.
But here we have a more recent poem, it's called In a Restless World Like This Is.
And so what would you like to say about it?
Dave, for an experimental poem by a language poet, I think you find this.
I wouldn't say accessible, but you get it somehow, do you?
>> I do, yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with
the confusion it creates intentionally in different areas.
Starting out with the uncertainty of memory and time just sets you up for it.
I think it really communicates a lot throughout.
>> What's it communicate about?
Max, it communicates a lot, says Dave, what's it communicating?
>> There's a definite feeling here of restlessness,
of course, because that's in the title.
And I think it's a feeling that we've all experienced, and
it's one that I've definitely experienced.
You're trying to start something, you're trying to tell a story, and
you just keep on derailing yourself.
You're sort of restless, there's almost ADD kind of
moment where you're just trying to pick up on different things at once.
And you're derailing yourself, and then you never quite get there.
[LAUGH] >> Have we seen a poem like this in
this course?
>> Yeah, I mean, Portrait of a Lady,
by Williams is definitely one that starts and then second guesses, and
then starts something else and then second guesses that.
And I can't help but also thinking about Hejenny and
especially with thinking about restless language.
I think here, you sort of have like almost a combination of those two things,
of starting a thought and then second guessing and
then changing the speaker changing his or her mind.
And then you have kind of a language that goes along with that.
>> There's also a little bit of the swerving from Dickinson.
>> Yeah, it definitely reminded me of that.
>> Yeah, I mean, it's important to say that the language poets
are influenced by lots of writers.
But particularly in the American poetic canon by Gertrude Stein,
by Emily Dickinson, by John Ashbery, by William Carlos Williams,
and also by Lewis whom we've unfortunately not talked about in this course.
And so, you can see some of that in this poem,
I'm imagining a detractor, a doubter say, look, okay, granted.
It's hard to say the thing you're trying to say and you're getting all balled up.
But isn't poetry or isn't communication supposed to clear all that
away when it's time to actually say what you want to say?
And just, why do you have to tell us all the stutterings
that took place before you got on track?
Why does that have to be in there?
>> Well, it's the difference that we talked about between of an impressionist
painting and a 17th century Dutch still life.
You have the difference between this veneer and
this totally polished no brush strokes visible work.
And the impressionist painting that leaves every stroke n the canvas to show you
exactly how you got from sketching it out to the finished
>> What's to be gained from that here?
What's to be gained from showing all that?
>> I think it allows more participation on the part of the reader.
>> Okay, we've said that a lot, and I think that's certainly true.
What else does it do or show?
>> I think it communicates confusion.
I mean, how do you express in words what is inexpressible in words?
It's by trying to inspire that same untranslatable feeling in someone else.
And how else to do it than by putting them in this immense state?
>> And authority, too, if you kind of remove the authority of the poet
as the one who has this poetic past to be able to tell something.
>> The best one in the room at reporting something clearly, yes,
if you remove that.
>> What do you have?
You have the writer and the speaker,
or the writer and the reader, I guess, kind of on the same level.
And the reader's invited to participate and not just read.
When he says, you can see for
yourselves there's nothing up my sleeves, that's a disarming statement.
Emarise, what is he doing there?
>> When I read it I was sort of reminded of Barbara Guest poem.
Thinking about the dreamlike state that the poet might be in and
that sort of associative brainstorming stage of writing a poem.
And in the same way I feel like it meanders, but
it does have a certain flow to it.
And he's talking about turning around the corner, and the idea of three sides,
well where did this third side come from?
When he gets down to nothing up my sleeves,
there's no central meaning that he's trying to disorient us with.
But it's just this sort of impression and
this idea of restlessness in language and in life that he is communicating.
>> Who is it that says,
in our world, who is it that says there's nothing up my sleeves?
>> Magicians.
>> Yeah, the trickster, there's a slight of hand going on here.
And he says, you can see for
yourselves, which is hilarious in a Charles Bernstein poem.
You can see for yourselves what?
I don't know.
>> [LAUGH] >> Dave's the only one I've ever heard of
who, I don't mean to ostracize you.
But you're remarkable in saying, well I got this.
>> [LAUGH] >> I mean it's kind of an ironic statement
for Charles Bernstein in a poem to say,
you can see this for yourself, it's plainly to be seen.
So somewhat hilariously, you can see for yourself there's nothing up my sleeve.
Why would Charles Bernstein or any language poet say that, such a thing?
What's in effect being said?
>> That there's no poetic artifice here.
You don't have to go through and count the feet.
You don't have to go through and look for a rhyme scheme.
>> Well, there's plenty of artifice.
>> Yeah. >> [LAUGH]
>> But, what you mean is-
>> No, like traditional artifice,
in that sense. >> Yeah,
okay. >> I'm not sure he's saying there's no
artifice, or that it's not wrought.
It's complicated, and it's very wrought,
but there's not sort of cosmetic work done on it after the fact.
He's not hiding his process, and
he's not trying to fool you in certain dishonest or disingenuous ways.
>> And so if you strip away that foolery and
that tricksterism, what is he saying you're left with?
>> But a magician, though, is fooling you at the end of the day.
If there's nothing up his sleeves, it means there's something in his pocket or
in his [INAUDIBLE] >> [LAUGH]
>> And so, I think.
>> So what's he fooling us on?
>> That there is a lot more control here than we have been
reading into it at the moment.
It's much like Dickinson in that respect.
He's showing us this derailment, but it's
sort of orchestrated, he's created for us the moment of derailment.
He worked on it on this poem of poetic process.
And so I don't think it's quite the same as the brush
strokes in the impressionist painting.
>> What's the tone of the poem as he reads it?
>> It's very colloquial, very, you know, me talking to you.
I think it's a little bit humorous, too.
>> Not as he reads it in the recording, but as it would be read by us.
The tone of the poem as it's written on the page is certainly that.
But what's the tone of the poem as he reads it?
He performed it in 2003 or something like that.
What's that tone?
>> It's a little Woody Allen-esque, I think.
>> [LAUGH] >> Really?
My goodness, wow, we have a disagreement.
I hear sadness.
>> Really? >> I think it feels pretty sincere and.
>> I hear sincerity, I mean we'll just have to take it outside,
Kristin, and listen to it.
>> [LAUGH] >> I hear him saying,
you know this time I'm not, now it may be ultimately a trick.
But, this time I'm not tricking you,
I really do really believe that this is the state we're in.
That we're not going get started,
that it reminds again of a poem we didn't study in this course, To Elsie.
There's no one driving the car, we don't know where we're going.
Where are we going?
Who are we?
What are we doing?
I can't even get started in telling you that.
As far as you go in one direction, all the further you'll have to go on
before the way back has become totally invisible.
I don't even know where that sentence is going, its idioms are all messed up.
So when he says, there's nothing up my sleeve, and
did you notice that the most solid things, the most stable things in
our world actually break up the fragmentation?
This is a post-9/11 poem so we have to put that in there,
but fragmentation is the natural state of things.
Everything falls apart.
Okay Kristin, so one of us right [LAUGH] about that.
But I think you're right about the tone of the poem as it's written,
which you said colloquial.
Not long ago, or maybe I dreamed it or made it up, or where am I going with this?
What story am I telling?
I'm telling a story about how I can't tell a story, I don't know where I'm going.
I don't know what I'm saying to you, you know what?
I think that's what I want to say to you, so I hear Woody Allen in that.
>> That's what I meant, I didn't mean that it wasn't a serious poem.
>> But I think it's a big deal, because Bernstein is very, he's very into schtick.
He studies comic musical writing of the 1930s, he's What?
You know a little bit about Charles Bernstein, what kind of personage is he?
>> Sorry, I was in a line of thought about the poem.
>> [LAUGH] >> Go ahead.
>> Can I just say it?
>> [CROSSTALK] >> Don't tell us about Charles Bernstein,
don't let me digress you.
>> [LAUGH] I was just thinking, in a restless world,
people are so hungry and desperate for meaning and for certainty.
And so it seems here like he's mocking these bleary-eyed fortune tellers who seem
overworked, that's how I interpret the bleary-eyed.
And maybe the rock is a metaphor for the opaque language poem.
That if you try hard enough, yes,
maybe you can break it open with one specific meaning.
But that would be a disservice to the poem, I think.
There's going so far that in one certain direction,
in one fixed and blind idea of what the poem means.
You lose the fragmentation and
the divisibility of associating about it the way we have in all these discussions.
And so he's saying that's not the way to approach or to appreciate it.
It's to enjoy that restlessness and see how it represents the world.
>> What is the way back?
Keep doing this, the way back to what?
>> The way back to a language that's free of all of the connotations and meanings.
The way that we said we were auto-filling on the poem.
To get rid of that sort of natural impulse, because we desperately want
meaning, because we want something to feel familiar and to make sense.
>> So it's an illusion that we could get back to such a state?
>> Well maybe I mean get back in the Steinian sense,
to just sort of be the first- >> Clearing the landscape of
encrusted social connotation, make it new.
>> Yeah, to the first effects of [INAUDIBLE]
>> So I think I disagree partly.
I think that's the modernist project and I think this is a postmodern project.
I think there is an illusion, Bernstein and his colleagues are very Steinian.
But I don't think that they think there is a way back.
I don't think that they think that you can make it new.
I think that we have the devastation and
fragmentation that we have, and that the way back is an illusion.
And the way back as far as you go in one direction,
all the further you will have to go on.
The further you'll have to go or the further you'll have to go on,
go on meaning continue.
Before the way back has become cut off, or had become merged with everything else.
>> Or the way back has become the way forward.
It's like traveling halfway around the world,
and then the way back is indivisible from the way forward.
It doesn't matter which way you go because you're headed back to where you started.
>> What's it?
Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it, or made it up, or
have suddenly lost track of its train.
If I bend around the corner, come at it from all sides, what's it?
>> It seems like the only way, or at least the way that I inevitably read it,
is what he's talking about, the message.
The thing that he's trying to communicate from all these different perspectives,
different angles, different mediums.
>> The thought.
>> Yeah, the thought, which never gets there, not quite.
>> So in the Ashberian sense, it is the message that never gets delivered.
It's the content we can never get to.
It's the meaning that we sort of dreamed once upon a time we could have.
If we got good enough at understanding the world we would.
>> In a restless world like this.
>> Wow, here he is.
>> [LAUGH] >> Kristin, listen
to the tone that was an accident, listen to this tone.
>> Made it up or have suddenly lost track of its train in the hocus pocus
of the dissolving days, no.
If I bend the turn around the corner, come at it from all three sides at once, or
bounce the ball against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune tellers.
Well you can see for yourselves, there's nothing up my sleeves, or
notice even rocks occasionally break if enough pressure is applied.
As far as you go in one direction, all the further you'll
have to go on before the way back has become totally indivisible.
>> Kristen?
>> I hear the tone.
>> I think I'm coming to your side, and you're coming to mine.
[LAUGH] Do you want to say something about that?
>> I was thinking about, back to the question of what it is.
And I think it is the acts that he's trying to bear witness to in this poem,
and he's finding it impossible to do.
>> It's impossible.
>> And in the PoemTalk, everyone discusses that this is a post-9/11 poem.
I mean, maybe that's what it's about.
>> Well I agree, I think we may finally disagree.
And we don't have time to explore it, we'll take it outside.
I think I agree with you that it is the x, the unsayable,
it is the traumatic truth of the thing itself.
It's the prelinguistic that can't be reported, that's not going to be
described, and that this poem is not even going to attempt to do.
It's going to refer to how hard it is To do it.
The song upon which this is based, it's called When I Fell In Love.
Has the two lines,
in a restless world like this is, love is ended before it began.
How is that possible?
I mean in a romantic 40s tort song kind of way,
how can love be ended before it's begun?
Emarise, is that possible?
Don't speak from personal experience.
>> [LAUGH] I don't know if it follows a conventional narrative arc or
if you imagine the loss before it begins.
Maybe that's a natural jump to make.
>> Or the girl goes to another guy before you get the chance to even ask her out.
>> So why did Bernstein take that, and what does that have to do with this poem?
This will be your final word, anybody.
Max, what does that have to do with this poem?
You knew I was going to ask you.
>> I did.
>> [LAUGH].
>> In a way that this poem ends before it even begins,
I think.
He makes like he's trying to tell us something, like he's going to.
But then he can't, he can never start to tell us that and it's over.
>> I like that, it makes me think of Rae Armantrout's The Way,
and of course Rae Armantrout is one of the people in this group.
And we're not reading her specifically in this chapter because we
don't have a lot of time and we read her in the context of Dickinson.
But it seems to me that it is possibly the once-upon-a-timeness
that we just can't have, that's so completely false.
So that it becomes the story that can't be told.
It becomes the narrative that's impossible and
that's cognate to love is ended before it begins.
That would be true of the story of it.