Hello.
Welcome.
Good afternoon.
[BACKGROUND CONVERSATION]
Is the mic working?
Test, one two.
Test.
Hello.
Is the mic working?
Yeah.
Great.
Welcome to Conceptual Poetry and Its Others.
We're thrilled to have all of you here.
I know a lot of you have come from great distances, cooler
distances, and faraway time zones.
So we're appreciative to have you here.
Thank you for making the effort.
And I am Frances Sjoberg, the Literary Director
here at the Poetry Center.
And we're thrilled to have you here as we define, explore,
and celebrate conceptual poetry over the next three days.
Conceptual poetry and Its Others is made possible by grants
from the Arizona Humanities Council, the National Endowment
for the Arts, Poets and Writers, and we have also
received symposium support from the Arizona Inn,
College of Humanities, Book Stop used books,
and friends of the Poetry Center, most especially,
Helen S. Schaefer.
I would also like to thank Marjorie Perloff
for her inspiration and her participation
in the development of this program.
It's been great to work with you.
Throughout the symposium, I will introduce the poets
by reading seven carefully excerpted sentences
from his or her published articles, reviews, blogs,
or interviews.
[LAUGHTER]
I tried to limit myself to five, but rebelled
against my own constraints because I consistently couldn't
exact those last two cuts.
So these entrance intros I hope will serve two-fold.
They will give you a sense of the range of each poet's
articulated poetic, and they will
keep my mic time relatively brief
as we are here to hear, foremost, our featured guests.
Feel free to supplement these non-chronologized,
non-contextualized statements with the bios
in your program that are a little more standard.
Our symposium begins tonight with readings
by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris.
Tracie Morris, from HereComesEverybody.Blogspot.com,
Hemi.NYU.edu/jou rnalAfroFuturism,
TraciesWebsite.net/Afropoetry, TracieMorris.blogspot.com--
Oh god.
--VillageVoice.com, TraciesWebsite.net/Lit.
Oh God-- it's out there.
It's there for me to use.
One.
"Conceptual frameworks always determine the scope and form
of my poems, particularly the improvised ones."
Two.
"We often associate medical advances as helping the body,
but here I want to emphasize the structural or conceptual
dystopia of sexism that impacts the structure
of the female body."
Three.
"We will be looking at the performative utterances
of Black women poetically, and in some cases, musically.
The interpretation gives us insight into how different
vocal modes, sounds, and tones are understood by the listener
and reader."
"Philly-- if I ate cheesesteak, I'd be in heaven.
But as it is, I'll be happy to be back East with the hardcore
language school posse as they beat me into submission
before I join the club."
[LAUGHTER]
Five.
"The text is the body.
The body tests text."
Six.
"Racial and sexual power dynamics
have not changed for 500 years," Morris says,
and she "doesn't expect a change for 500 more."
[LAUGHTER]
Seven.
"The requirements are consistent attendance and promptness.
This is mandatory.
No late papers will be accepted and no incompletes
are offered for this class."
[LAUGHTER]
Please welcome Tracie Morris.
[APPLAUSE]
- I am so glad I have been prompt today.
[LAUGHTER]
Would have got busted!
Thank you very much Frances.
I'm very, very happy to be back in Arizona.
And this is my kind of weather.
I am not complaining about the weather at all.
It's beautiful-- hot.
And I'm glad you mentioned some of those things.
I forgot I said them, so now I can repudiate and denounce
myself.
Can be like-- well, anyway, I'll talk politics
a little bit more later.
Me, talking politics-- it's so surprising.
I'm going to ask a favor.
I got to get my power strip.
Because one time I did a reading at a big, fancy, Ivy League
presentation on Langston Hughes, and right when I was going on,
my computer went dead.
This is sad, but I obsessed over it so much
that I had kind of known it by heart, which is bad,
because it's an academic paper.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
So I don't want that to happen again.
I had that experience.
And now I just need to plug this in.
Right behind you.
Yeah.
He's going to use the power strip, though.
Thank you, Charles.
So I'm very, very happy to be back in Arizona
because I'm an ardent McCain supporter,
and I just want to be here to give him the love.
[LAUGHTER]
It's funny how, you know, when I don't make jokes, people laugh.
And when I make jokes, people don't get the jokes.
No.
Just kidding-- both times.
[LAUGHTER]
So I thought I would try some things
in honor of the really prestigious company I'm
trying to keep here.
It's very unnerving to be in such--
I'm not being humble, I'm really like who?
Why are you calling me?
So I'm very, very honored to be here.
So I thought I would try a couple of things
that I have read before, and some stuff that I
haven't read before, and also work with some found text.
And I guess during the talks over the next couple of days,
we can talk about why I want to read stuff I read,
or we can talk about something a little bit more interesting
than my problems.
[LAUGHTER]
And I know I look like--
I was telling Charles-- like the old lady who really does have
like a million bond in her homelessness suitcase,
but I can't really read stuff before I know where I'm at
and how it feels.
Tried that a few times in my career, and it hasn't worked.
So I just decided what I'm reading just now.
But the landscape here reminds me
very much of living on the planet Earth.
I was telling the gentleman-- where
is he-- who drove the van.
Where's the man who drove the van?
What's your name again?
Tony.
Thank you, Tony.
I'm sorry.
I'm nervous.
I like the plants here because they're
very rebellious kind of plants.
They kind of like, we're living in a desert--
deal with it.
[LAUGHTER]
They're like New York plants.
They're like what?
What?
[LAUGHTER]
We're green, we're in the desert.
You tell me it's hot?
I'm a plant.
So anyway, for a while I was writing
these poems about the environment
because for all of the import that race, and gender,
and sexuality, and class and all that stuff,
it's very, very important, and I read about that a lot,
but you know, if we don't have a planet,
it's really kind of hard to talk about all those other things.
[LAUGHTER]
It's moot without the planet.
The planet is essential.
So this one is called "Apology to Pangaea."
"I sent you blue, the silk on a peacock feathered eyelet,
corona around the old's pupil, dye with expensive taste.
Red corpuscles of dyers, heavy in the underbelly
of current coffin canoes weighing down.
Here we are with our capes, Spandex, big hair,
hieroglyphs spelling us super duper people who made atoms,
momma molecules, and mourning.
That was me with the buck dance and chicken head,
me making grits gris-gris, wif.
Can I say sorry for let them sweep over your feet, ma'am?
Do I throw coarse salt over my shoulder?"
This next poem is--
it's a poem, but I'm kind of making
it a found poem, Kenny, by making it
sound a little bit different.
I hear this poem as lyric, so I'm
going to recite it as lyric even though it's
an established poem.
And I know you guys will know who it is, to poetry eggheads,
but I'll tell you after.
[LAUGHTER]
"Dream Within a Dream"
[SINGING] Take this kiss upon the brow, and in parting
from you now.
Thus much let me avow, you are not
wrong who deem that my days have been a dream.
Yet if hope has flown away in a night or in a day, in a vision
or in none, it is therefore the less gone.
All that we see or seen is but a dream within a dream.
A dream within a dream.
Dream.
And then that's an excerpt from whom?
Anybody know?
Poe.
Yeah.
Edgar Allan Poe, "Dream Within a Dream."
Yeah.
I just keep thinking of what we're imagining.
Like imagining we're going to have a planet
and how fabulous we all are while everything
is crashing down around us.
The next poem I'd like to read is kind of long.
It's a poem that I wrote after Allen Ginsberg passed away.
And since this is the right month coming up--
Allen was a Gemini, is a Gemini, and so am I.
And that's way too much information.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm still not telling you my age, Kenny, so don't even
ask me again.
But yeah, so I wanted to read something
in honor of the May time and the spring time.
Made me think of Allen.
He used to kiss my hand, which is true.
"Oh Allen, now after your death, I finally
look at you working under my current age in school,
after you left school funny.
After the shows, the floral arrangements at St Ann's.
After reading Poe together, I see your notes.
You read the bells.
I thought of L.L. I sang 'Dream Within a Dream,' and who'd know
you'd become one right after?
We'd pay tolls to get from one stop
to the other, wish for stars, not to become them.
Wanting always to touch and be one.
After your tie, glasses, neat male pattern
baldness of the cranium circumscribed
by the ears, your teachers hip at Brooklyn College, Columbia
U, this is beyond irony, it is.
In death, I call you familiarly, first name.
Chuckle.
Now this-- our paths cannot cross your trail.
And it was fun to see you in the mirror, camera
turned to the side to see your other half.
You in silhouette, profiling me for clip, clip,
at this type-writerly way, ostensibly
is what we have in common only, besides our affection
for Amiri LeRoi Baraka's Jones.
Icons of mine and not ologies, but ials--
financial, commercial, residential, et cetera.
I'd shock optimism.
You were not a '50s cleaver, but someone did.
You subbed them for Eldridge.
I remember my OGs--
Rakim, Mos Def.
Should we lie for a poem?
Should we untruths together, exaggerating
in the name of what?
Salvation?
Second coming?
Two.
It is not the North Star that binds us.
It is the heavens.
20 from the month of heat and flowers, your birthday
came earlier than mine but bound by hands.
Every time we read, you would take my hand and kiss the back.
You know my kind, and would like that.
With jazz, hip-hop for me.
And you, bagels, and don't forget Bob K-- as if.
How do you human interact on ology,
cause, the diamond crystals of sunrise ship?
Our stars roll shoulders, talking, thinking,
doubles and dados.
Getting down with fractions.
How do I get it all in like you, ticking off each thing?
Conflagrations, these are not yours list simply.
These are wars with your precious self.
There is Nixon in this poem, and with the barrage,
Kaufman's silence, and Ted's, then James'.
My generation's minds were not as
eager as yours to eat from the Garden of Good and Evil.
We eat McDonald's, wore Victoria's Secret personal ad
meat markets.
The refinement of a conscription at the watery gate,
we drown in vertisements and get words from the same place.
You talk reflections every place-- same, same, same.
From all spots, we get deluged by sound bites--
not from one, no diff, diff stiff.
1 plus 1 plus equals 1.
We're not one, one us.
Three.
I wish we had a god to call.
I wish we had angels.
I wish we had angles clear.
I wish we could trust planes, logic, common sense.
I wish there was a synthesis now.
We are not in the Aquarian age, you'd
hope, hopping here and here.
We are not in waves, air, just the cold hard element.
We are not a blend, not in multiple states--
un-revolution, un-stasis, unrequited stillness,
undirected motion.
Who are the cabalistic words to intone now?
Tree of life stumped from saying Om.
Have you seen the foliage in Brazil lately?
A long lawn.
Speaking of bored, it is catchy, is it?
All of the names have become curses.
No power to invoke or intimate.
Martyrdom has become endorsement, neon anti
deep breath against ozone.
Did you know that there was an albino kangaroo born
in Australia whose ears they had to put suntan lotion on?
Portal to hell, I think.
Deceptively spherical.
A heavenly body.
I am feline, AG, sitting on your papers and purring.
You bray here, stubbornly and canine.
Bray and Bray.
Pray and pray."
OK.
It's another seasonal poem that I took,
been messing with a little bit.
Been trying to mess with some words, some sounds, lately.
I can find it.
OK.
[SINGING] Your dad is rich and your mama's good looking.
So hush, don't you cry.
Baby, don't cry.
Tonight.
Tonight won't be just any night.
Tonight, no morning star today.
The minutes seem like hours.
I was lonely until sky is light.
And last day and night yesterday.
Yes days I knew happy, sweet sequestered olden days.
Mad romance, gay youth was mine.
Joyous, free, and flame and life, then sooth was mine.
Sad am I, glad am I, for today I'm
dreaming in a dream of yesterday.
Yesterday, sequester day.
Your daddy's rich and mama's good-looking.
So hush, little baby, don't you cry.
Don't cry.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, it's a medley.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
This one, I don't know if you caught
this one in your surveillance of my work there, Ms. Sjoberg.
But this one is a poem.
This is a lot of odes today, actually, I'm now thinking.
Probably because I'm around so much tradition
and this prestige.
But this is a poem that I wrote that was
in Callaloo for Bob Kaufman.
It's called "The Clicker."
"Instead of Orville, Deborah Norville
breaks it on Hard Copy.
Norwegian grass is blue.
Poverty is eunuchs crying about high pitch
while choruses wail away at the Amen corner."
And this is a piece that I wrote for someone else, Ralph Lemon.
It's an excerpt.
I think I read this the first time myself with you,
Charles, when we did it--
Right.
-- at EMU.
--EMU.
"My mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy,
my mammy, my mammy, my man.
My mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy, my mammy,
my mammy, my man is guarded, guarded, guarded, guarded,
guarded, guarded, guarded,
guarded, guarded, guarded, guarded, gone.
Is dead, is dead, is dead, is dead, is dead, is dead,
is dead, is dead, is dead,
is dead, is dead instead."
This is another poem about slavery.
It's like, those poems were about slavery?
Probably every poem I write has something
to do with slavery, which is why I'm so pro-McCain.
Because he was there for Martin Luther King!
[LAUGHTER]
Who, as we know, was running a hostile anti-American,
anti-slavery platform.
"Her mind was halved by the horizon.
One.
Not the water she wished.
She remembered when she went under.
There was a brook by her home.
It was the last babbling she heard that was intelligible.
Then the blindfold, two by two.
The arc of her back to the pole.
Mast against water.
Heartbeat slow to waves frozen in the deep.
She dreamed of a weird womb, an underbelly.
Where is this [INAUDIBLE] and what is Neptune?
Salt still in and on her face.
She was backwards.
Something tied her.
She's 16 and playing dead.
Her meat smelled, and so she was left in peach.
Two.
Even the sun was evil.
She married the depths to be in stasis.
She recalled rays as an aside.
Shoots used to hold them by the same toe, the squeak now likes.
It would later blaze on the white Earth which blinded her
by those sails of bone.
Ash and arms pull to the outside, displaced from posture
and pose.
Not a foot pedestrian simply scraped.
The day was brighter than teeth."
How am I doing on time?
Five.
Five?
OK.
This is a poem that recently became a cycle.
Two of them, I wrote this in my second book, Intermission,
and the third one is not.
It's from the "Plutonic" cycle.
The one that's not is in lieu of Demeter.
It's the Yoruba goddess Oya.
So I'll just read those three.
The first one is on Pluto, the second is Persephone,
and the third one is Oya in place of Demeter.
"Plutonic."
"One.
Dusty death piled and fell around her dress.
Me truly due to delve deep, melt the seed.
Sweet pheremone Persephone, elicits,
elixir the first life I've seen since my flames flickered
invection.
Unearthly allies, she bewitching I and Hell's fury [? bowed ?]
apron string smother.
Cupidity trickster in the cheeked [? full up ?]..
Stoke flushed my pyre, blush is fire unbrushed.
Eye make-up, dye space, the five bride price, worldly sacrifice.
All others mistake and hasten to make me beast
bequest their failure.
Two.
Just I lust for one shard of light being cut off and under.
Spacious coffin does not delight bring,
but done springs hot and heaven sent revealing.
Come see.
I mirror of thee.
Three.
Now the world's weight falls on me.
Whining I pine, ever motherly.
Yearning, return of garden's gift locked in diamonic glass.
She bloomed mine in violet crystal.
Ache of ripened fruit plucked, felled, beguiled, bruised.
Nuanced colors.
Blue deeper.
A huge denouement.
I recall the first frail pink that synced her time with mine.
Her redressed twists skirting north winds fly.
I'm pounding, desert dry.
Cooling at twilight.
My scream linked, tearing the barren banshee's broken rope.
[SINGING] Eee-- ah--
aha-- ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Four.
I know green grass grew tired of unrelenting dawn and reaching.
It beseeched me for sleep lest it cease.
Blessing the rapture endow time for torpor.
Fate appreciated my recreation.
Huddled, formed embrace awakening me greater.
Full arrest of verdant heat.
Treasured treat betrothed and sweet, sweet, sweet.
Hard Kore.
In the end, I said fuck it.
Everything had changed anyway.
Yeah, sure, I'm raw--
rubbed the wrong way.
He came to me in youth.
I was wearing something frilly.
Bugs' wings?
He was the coldest man I'd ever met, and from such a hot place.
And had a big dick."
[LAUGHTER]
"How could I help but notice?
Innocent, not blind.
I walked, half kicking and screaming.
Dark there, but pitiless.
Well, an abrupt introduction to everlasting, to say the least.
Mother was frantic, weathered.
Oh, me?
True, I swallowed seed.
Held out, but eventually hunger got the best of me."
"Django's Wife."
"Red is my love's hair.
Masai mud his face, painted white with chalk.
The outline of Black line, a seam of skin so round,
round the nose, his cleft chin.
Nina's lips, vagina, the color of blackberry stains,
them Brenda Sykes's luster.
Matted hair, he has coiled at the base, a borrowed
Senegalese palm roll.
Look how Black gold reddens the skin.
Iron ore coagulates the blood, brings together that color.
The hidden head, his uncircumcised self mischievous
peekaboo, my own peek in the mons.
He was along the tree like dog doo.
In the tree, cobwebs.
Up the tree, a nest.
The hollow sound's a skull, a seashell to the ear, see?
The young god wins, a tangle."
OK.
The last two poems I'm going to read are sound oriented poems.
And this one is the coda of a poem
that was called "My Great Grand Aunt Speaks to a Bush--"
[COUGHING]
--which I will not read.
Let's just say he was told off.
And [LAUGHING] even though my aunts didn't actually
settle things with words.
They settled them with violence, back in the day.
I'm a word person, I guess.
So this is a coda to that poem.
[SINGING] Je-- sus, save your soul.
Je-- sus save your soul.
Je-- sus save soul.
Je-- sus saves soul.
And the last one poem I'm going to read is--
started as a collaboration.
I guess it's worth telling the story quickly.
There's a sample of that one of my collaborators, Val Jeanty,
who's a wonderful electronic drummer,
she had this little piece with the great Geoffrey Holder.
Anybody know Geoffrey Holder?
Show your age.
Nobody wants to tell.
All right.
See the original "Doctor Doolittle" with Dick Van Dyke,
and you'll see Geoffrey Holder.
[LAUGHTER]
Really way too much information.
Anyways.
She's tall.
She's got this like beautiful voice.
And he comes-- I swear to god it's him, because his
is a sort of singular voice.
And he says, "it all started when we were brought here
as slaves from Africa."
Very like, Afro Shakespearean diction.
[LAUGHTER]
And so Val used that sample, and then I kind of did
a vocal leads based on that.
And after that was recorded--
I think it's in the marked scene,
you can still find it online--
we did a collaboration.
But we couldn't get the sample right, so it started as--
[SLOW, DISTORTED SPEECH] It all started as we were brought here
as slaves from A-a-a-frica.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was like, now you're doing my job, Geoffrey.
And we could never sample it the way that he originally did it.
It was strange.
So I decided to do a poem found on Geoffrey Holder's
reading of this one line in this piece that Val already did.
I swear that's how it happened.
[SINGING] It all started when we were brought here
as slaves from Africa.
It all-- sit all, sit all, sit all, sit all, sit ar, sit ar,
sit ar, sit ar, it all started when
we were brought here as, as, as, as, as, lafs, lafs, lafs, as,
as slaves from Afr, it all, it all, it all, it all, it all, it
all, st-- it all, it all, it all, it all, sta-dall,
sta-dall.
It all, it all, start-- it all, it
all, st-art, st-art, st-art, st-art, st-art, st-art,
start, it all started when we were br-- brought,
brought here as sl-sl-slaves, slaves, slave, slaves,
from Africa.
It all st-dall, it all started when
we were, when we were, when we, when when we, when when we,
when when-- it all started when we were brought here as sla--
slaves from Africa.
It all-- it all started when we were--
when we were brought, when we were brought,
when we were, when we, when we-- it
all started when we were brought here as slaves from Africa.
It all st-- it all when we were Afr-- it all started wi--wi--
with Africa.
It all started with Afr-- with Africa.
With Africa.
It all started when we were-- when we, when we, when we,
were Africa.
It all st-sta--sta, it all s--
it-it all, it-it-it all sta-- it-all sta--
it-it all started when we, when we were Afric-- it all, it all,
it all started when we were brought here as sla-- as sla--
as sla--
in Africa.
It all started when we were brought here
as sla-- from Africa.
It all started when we were-- we--we-- when w-w--we,
when w-w-we, when w-w-we, when w-w-we- when we, when w-w-we,
w- when we, w-w-w-w- we, when w-w-w-w--we were,
when we were when we were Africa.
It all started when we were Afri-- it all started,
all started, all, when we, we, we, were African.
It all started when we.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for coming to hear me talk.
So now you got the real headliner here,
Charles Bernstein coming up.
Thank you.
Charles Bernstein from UbuWeb.com,
a conversation with Richard Forman, EPCBuffalo.edu,
Seminary Co-op Bookstore's interview,
PShares.blogspot.com, Press.UChicago.edu,
Home.JPS.net/TildaNada, an interview with Bradford
Senning, Writing.UPenn,ed u/Bernstein/experiments,
ArgotistOnline.co.uk, an interview with Eric Denut.
One.
"In poetry, they talk about finding your voice, which
is too often a way of evading the voices to be
found in the writing."
Two.
Not only do I consider works of official verse culture
to be poetry, which is not for me an honorific category--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--but also one of the key features of official verse
culture is that it could necessarily include some poetry
that I like quite a lot."
Three.
"I prefer minerals to insects, but I've
been working on this with my ontologist."
[LAUGHTER]
Four.
"As an alternative to National Poetry Month,
I propose that we have an international anti-Poetry
Month.
As part of the activities, all verse in public places
will be covered over from the Statue of Liberty
to the friezes on many of our government buildings.
Parents will be asked not to read Mother Goose.
Religious institutions will have to forgo reading verse passages
from the liturgy, with hymns strictly banned.
No vocal music will be played on the radio
or sung in concert halls.
Children will have to stop playing all slapping,
and counting, and singing games, and stick
to board games and football."
Five.
"Oddly, it is a form of dissent these days
to hold out that art that doesn't get the market share
can actually be as valuable as the art that does.
I'm for the ketchup that loses the race."
Six.
"Attention: write down everything
you hear for one hour."
Seven.
"There is still a great deal of conceptualizing that leads up
to any intuition."
Please welcome Charles Bernstein.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
I'm going to read one work tonight called "Recantorium--
a Bachelor Machine after Duchamp after Kafka."
But then on Saturday, in the session,
Tracie and I will read the collaborations we did
and I'll read some poems.
So today, just this one work--
"Recantorium."
"I, Charles, son of the late Joseph Herman,
later known as Herman Joseph, and Shirley Kay, later known
as Sherry, New Yorker, aged 58 years,
arraigned personally before this esteemed body and kneeling
before you, most eminent and reverent readers, inquisitor
generals against the heretical depravity
throughout the entire poetry commonwealth,
having before my eyes and touching with my hands
the books of accessible poets--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--swear that I have always believed, do believe,
and by your help will, in the future,
believe all that is held, preached, taught,
and expressed by the books of accessible poets."
[LAUGHTER]
"I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that National Poetry Month is not good
for poetry and for poets.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy,
and I now freely and openly attest
to the virtues of National Poetry Month
in throwing a national spotlight on poetry.
So crucial to keeping verse alive in the 21st century.
I was wrong.
I apologize and recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that only elitist and obscure poetry should be praised.
I abjure, curse, detest, and renounce the aforesaid error
and aversion.
And I now freely and openly attest
that the best way to get general readers to start to read poetry
is to present them with broadly appealing work
with strong emotional content and a clear narrative line.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that to raise the profile for poetry,
events involving celebrities reading poems--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--such as the one each year that is the centerpiece
of National Poetry Month are not as valuable as events
presenting poets reading their own works.
I acknowledge and regret my error.
Poets would turn off the large and wealthy audience
of arts patrons.
Like the retarded or crippled stepchildren in fairy tales,
it is best to have the poet stay in the back room
during the party lest they frighten the guests."
[LAUGHTER]
"I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether reject, abjure and denounce
the sarcasm that just now has undercut the sincerity
of my profession."
[LAUGHTER]
"My comments about poets as retarded or crippled
stepchildren are offensive.
I abase and prostrate myself in humbly and sincerely asking
for your forgiveness, and the forgiveness of all those
who seek, above all, sincerity and authenticity in poetry.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
Midway in my journey as a poet, I
have given my name in encomium and book cover endorsement
both for ads and announcements, catalogs and brochures, print
and digital, to works that are not of the highest order
as established by time, authority, and fashion, lapsing
into stubborn selection based on personal preference,
or appreciation, or liking--
on intuitions and hunches rather than rational principle
and promulgated theory.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon and renounce the false opinion
that poetry is a social and ideological construction
and not the expression of the pure feelings of the poet,
and declare the sovereign human self
is the sole origin of authentic expression and meaning.
In full recognition and acknowledgment of my error,
I hereby declare and swear to all present company
that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way,
whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said
false doctrine.
I was wrong.
I apologize and recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that the head of a major writing organization
was out of line when he called me morally repugnant for not
sharing his views about poetry.
As one of the blessed of the doctrine of authentic poetry
pointed out in rebuking me, he is entitled to his views,
and my criticism of him was divisive, and partisan,
and morally repugnant."
[LAUGHTER]
'I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that official verse culture, through prestigious prizes
awarded for merit and reviews in nationally circulated
publications selected for major importance,
and including the appointment of the poets laureate,
do not represent the best and the finest,
the most profound and significant,
the richest and most rewarding poetry of our nation.
And now that I, myself, in my person and through my work
have ascended to this exalted company
and joined the rarefied and incorrigible company
of official verse culture, do here cast stones and sticks,
and call an abomination, and curse, and scorn, and repudiate
any who would not cherish and adore both the process
and product of that official verse culture
that has embraced with trepidation, and embarrassment,
and with noses tightly pinched and ear muffs
in place, my unworthy ascent.
I was wrong.
I apologize and recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that there was a value in working together
collaboratively with other poets,
along the lines of shared aesthetic engagements.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion.
I now see clearly and openly, and without coercion
acknowledged to all virtually or actually present,
now and in the future in this life
and in all subsequent lives on Earth,
as well as on planets populated by intelligent beings,
that only poets working in solitude
and individually can produce poems of enduring value.
I did wrong.
I'm sorry.
I recant.
Having advocated in youth a set of radical approaches
in poetry, I later abandoned, or altered,
or undermined these very approaches
of my own and my comrades devising, shifting my views
with the tides, putting my personal aesthetics
above these principles, my preferences and interests
above the ideals and interests of the group.
I did and was wrong.
I recant and renounce the time for my way's
erroneous and peripatetic errant and wandering has expired.
The time for a poetry of the doggedly particular
and the quotidian detail of the un-symbological,
of the minor and the off-key has expired,
just as the time has expired for obscurantist theories propping
up obscurantist poems, poems that
turn their backs on meaning, story, emotion,
and pleasure as these values have been promulgated
in the books of accessible poems which is the only
sure guide away from empty rhetoric
and toward the pure achievement of meaning,
story, emotion, and pleasure.
I now, and I aver this before you assembled here
virtually and actually, before you
I aver and embrace a poetry without limits
of time or place, a poetry of universal address
and true to the timeless human spirit.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandoned the false doctrine of social poetics
in which poems are read in their cultural and bibliographic
contexts.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy.
I now declare openly and without fear of punishment, ridicule,
neglect, disparagement, or coercion to all
virtually or actually present now and in the future
in this life, and in all subsequent lives
on Earth as well as on other planets populated
by intelligent beings, that social poetics demeans poetry,
which in its purest form is a timeless expression
of universal human feeling.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I totally and absolutely, with shame and guilt,
abandon the false doctrine that social and cultural history
might include poetry in the field of study or use poetry
as models for thinking about society and culture.
I abjure, curse, detest and renounce the aforesaid error
and aversion.
I now admit and acknowledge, proclaim and announce openly
and without coercion, or fear, or punishment, or ridicule,
or disparagement to all virtually or actually present
now and in the future, in this life
and in all subsequent lives on Earth, as well
as on other planets populated by intelligent beings,
that prose narratives are the only suitable work
for cultural and historical study,
and that expository prose can provide the only
suitable models for such study.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether and totally, completely, and thoroughly,
without reservation, quibble, or question,
and with newly faithful heart, abandon the false doctrine that
meandering, digressive, or paratactic prose, prose that
fails to state clearly its meaning,
sentences that get caught up in their own rhythms, and sounds,
and cadences, nuances and nooks, rather than
in getting to the point, or meat, or heart of the matter,
or meaning, or substance, or as I say,
I abandon and renounce the false doctrine
that crooked and bent prose can have
any value for truthful discourse or accurate representation.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion,
and the many related errors and aversions that flow inevitably
as a consequence of the aforesaid error and aversion
as a baby inevitably flows from its mother,
or an ocean from its rivers, or a false conclusion
from a flawed premise, or a disease from a virus,
or death from repeated blows with a blunt instrument--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--or gorging from a starving child given food.
Clearly written expository prose with delineated argument,
including a beginning, middle, and end,
is the only guarantor of rational mind.
I was wrong.
I apologize and recant.
I altogether abandon the false doctrine
that ambiguity and irony are anything more than sophistry.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy
which I have lapsed into again and again,
like an habitual drinker seeking his 5 o'clock
Martini, or an erotomaniac seeking
non-procreative sexual experiences,
or a worker idling on the job, or an habitual truant passing
notes in class.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that abnormal poetry techniques such as fragmentation,
dissociation, discontinuity, collage, disjunction,
seriality, constellation, and unnatural constraints
of whatever times have any contribution
to make to poetic craft.
After it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was
contrary to the books of accessible poets,
I wrote and published works in which
I discuss this new doctrine, already condemned,
and adduced arguments of great cogency in its favor
without presenting any negation of these.
And for this reason, I have been vehemently rebuked.
I abjure, curse, detest and renounce the aforesaid errors
and aversions which are symptoms of a queer
and degenerate avoidance of meaning, coherence, truth,
morality, and the literary tradition
if rightly understood."
[LAUGHTER]
"I must not hold, defend, or teach
in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing,
the said false doctrine.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion that form in poetry
is political and social.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion,
which is a symptom of a queer and degenerate
avoidance of meaning, coherence, truth, morality,
and the literary tradition if rightly understood.
Form in poetry is a transparent means
of conveying the emotional truth of the poem
and should never interfere with or contradict
the emotional truth of the poem.
I was wrong.
I apologize and I recant.
I altogether abandon, disavow, and retract the false doctrine
that the imagination is anything more than can
be grasped by rational mind.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion
which I have lapsed into again and again,
like a milkman singing on his route
or a pony that refuses to be ridden."
[LAUGHTER]
"I was wrong.
I most humbly apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon, disavow, and retract the false doctrine
that poets should write poetics and criticism.
I recant my cant.
I abjure, curse, and detest and renounce
the aforesaid error and apostasy,
and the merely related errors and apostasies
that flow inevitably as a consequence
of the aforesaid error and apostasy
as a baby inevitably flows from its mother,
or an ocean from its rivers, or a false conclusion
from a flawed premise, or a disease from a virus,
or death from repeated blows with a blunt instrument,
or gorging from a starving child given food.
Poetics and critical thinking inhibit
the creativity of the poet and should be left to academics."
[LAUGHTER]
"I am filled with regret and overcome
with the errors of my ways, for I
have preferred the crooked path over the straight,
the bent over the upright, the hunched over the erect.
I recant my cant.
I recant and cant my recantation while supporting
the work of small and independent and non-commercial
publishers, presses, magazines, zines, mags, rags, periodicals,
blogs, organizations, groups, galleries, websites, series,
centers and non centers.
I nonetheless, with callous disregard for these loyalties
and affiliations, have betrayed, abandoned and disappointed
these publishers, presses, magazine, zines, mags, rags,
periodicals, blogs, organizations, groups,
websites, series, centers, and non
centers by arranging and agreeing
to have my work published, presented, and co-opted
by established, and mainstream, and commercial publishers,
presses, magazines, journals, periodicals, blogs,
organizations, groups, galleries, websites, series,
and centers.
I am, with regret fill-ed--"
[LAUGHTER]
"-and by errors o'erwhelmed, having chosen the broken path
over the righteous, the warped over the erect.
I cant and recant.
I've altogether abandoned the false doctrine
that poets can remain radical while working as academics.
After it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was
contrary to the books of the accessible poets,
I wrote and published works in which
I discussed this new doctrine, already condemned, and adduced
arguments of great cogency in its favor,
without presenting any negation of these.
And for this reason, I have been vehemently and justly rebuked.
I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion.
Academic employment is the mark of a compromised
poet who has sold out.
Radical poets prove their authenticity through poverty."
[LAUGHTER]
"I am with regret fill-ed, and by errors o'erwhelmed,
having chosen the broken path over the righteous,
the warped over the erect.
I cant and recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that advocacy or partisan positioning
has any place in poetry and poetic.
Poetry and poetic should be reserved
for those who look beyond the contentions of the present
into the eternal verities, the truth beyond this world that
never changes as represented in the books of the accessible
poets.
I further stipulate that I recant categorically
that poetry is an activity of the intellect,
and herewith and hereby declare and proclaim
that poop-- that true poetry--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--is an affair of a heart and only the heart.
I was wrong.
I apologize most humbly before you and with great contrition.
I recant.
I altogether abandon, and renounce,
and revile the use of found or appropriated texts and poems,
whether attributed or unattributed,
or the use of any external constraints, operations,
procedures, algorithms, engines or devices,
whether machinic or manual, automated or calculated,
digital or analogic, real or imaginary, virtual or actual.
Such approaches to poetry soil, defame,
and besmirch all traces of human expression, which
is the necessary foundation for all poetry.
And in pernicious and insidious ways,
foster depersonalization and inauthenticity
by means of the substitution of the plagiarized
and manufactured for the original and creative.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon, renounce, and revile
syntactic and grammatical turpitude,
improper coupling of subjects, and verbs, and objects,
run on sentences and sentence fragments,
suppression of natural connectives,
erosion of necessary subordination of clauses,
intentional and unconscious solecisms,
or any relaxation, deviation, perversion,
or inversion of the highest and strictest
standards for English.
I am with regret fill-ed and by errors o'erwhelmed,
having chosen the broken path over the righteous,
the warped over the erect.
I cant and recant.
I altogether abandon and renounce the false opinion
that American poetry is founded on a mixed and miscegenated
overlay of languages from the native tongues of immigrants
to the echoes of Africa, to the lost
languages of natives indigenous to our social space.
I abandon and altogether renounced the false opinion
that slangs, patois, pidgins, accents, dialects and idialects
are any more than bad grammar deserving an F--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--and a slap on the face by those who uphold grammatical
correctness and decry the deterioration of proper English
usage and pronunciation.
I altogether abandon and renounce the false opinion
that bilingualism, trilingualism and n-legalism has
any place in our literature, and I endorse those efforts
real and imaginary to build a wall
from shore to shore that separates us
from any foreign contamination of our linguistic norms.
I am filled with regret and overcome
with errors of my ways, for I have preferred
the crooked path over the straight,
the bent over the upright, the hunched over the erect.
I recant and cant my recantation.
I altogether abandon the fetishizing
of sounds, and forms, and appearance,
and rhetoric of a poem.
The innermost meanings of poems reveal themselves
when form, appearance, sound, rhetoric, and oratory
fall away.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the opinion that beauty
can be found in the tattered, torn, ripped, battered,
crippled, crumpled, odd, discounted, inconsequential,
or in the asymmetric, particular, approximate,
conceptual, cacophonous, or cacophonous,
in the clouded or off-key, in the stray marks on the page
or in the transient or ephemeral.
Beauty is always and only the manifestation
of the ideal or perfect.
Beauty is only and always the image of the eternally true.
After it had been notified to me that the said doctrine
was contrary to the books of the accessible poet and the beliefs
and doctrines of all poets and readers
who believe in authenticity and expression,
whether true or not, memoir or fake memoir, lyric or epic.
Nonetheless and still, even though I had been warned
and cursed, I persisted, wrote, and published
works in which I discussed this new doctrine already condemned,
and adduced arguments of great cogency in its favor
without presenting any nullification
of these arguments in accord with decency,
and right thinking, and the moral approach
to poetry and poetics.
And for this reason, I have been vehemently rebuked.
And I say and declare, vow and proclaim
to all assembled here who may read this document in print
or digital form, or may hear it through audio recording,
I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever,
verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
Like the black sheep who strays too far from the adoring flock
or like the drunk with a pale green beret--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--who deep into the night and desperate for one more absinthe
before closing time babbles uncontrollably to the deaf
and crippled barkeep.
I embraced an elitism that put me out
of touch with the sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs,
preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia
of everyday, ordinary, run-of-the mill people.
The Johns, and Joans, and Janes and Jills.
The Billies and Bobs, the Shirleys and Toms.
The Frans and Fritzes, the Millies and Moes.
Not only thinking I was better than John and Joe--"
[LAUGHTER]
"--Mary and Harry, but that their sentiments, feelings,
convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives,
and dyspepsia did not matter.
I spent my time hunting for thoughts rather than
hunting quail."
[LAUGHTER]
"My solipsism overcame me so that I wrote and professed
for others to write words that communicated to no one,
that meant nothing, that defied the laws of meaning
and the fundamentals of grammar, praising over and above clear
sense and good syntax the incoherent, the nonsensical,
the aberrant, the foolish, the deformed, the contradictory,
the awkward, the frivolous, the ungainly, the self-indulgent,
the infantile, the stubborn, the phony and fake--
the prevaricated, the disorderly.
In my promiscuous dalliance with affect rather than emotion,
I cast my lot with the excessively cerebral
and the cerebrally excessive.
I recant this cant.
Now I stand before you to repudiate and abjure,
to cast away and revile this stiff-necked arrogance in order
to dedicate myself to the freedom in right thinking.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
Like a rat seeking a dark cavity to eat its hapless prey,
I succumb.
I succumb to the dictatorship of relativism,
a state of profound confusion in which I could not recognize
anything as definitive and base my judgment solely
on my own ego and desires.
In this graceless state, I falsely
believed that the real tyranny was
intolerance to those who do not adhere
to the aesthetic values of honesty, coherence, clarity,
and truth, as revealed to all with a moral conviction
and a commitment to the timeless human story.
I repudiate this gutless indulgence
toward benighted and fallen ideas
and commit myself to the dictatorship of obedience.
I was in error.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false doctrine of Midrashic
and bent studies which I have promulgated in my writings,
lectures, teachings, with its base and cowardly insistence
on ethical, dialogic, and situational values
rather than fixed and immutable moral laws.
I loved language more than truth,
discourse more than reality, and so
allowed to spread in myself and in others
an intellectual virus that uproots
the plain sense of the word.
I was wrong.
I apologize.
I recant.
I altogether abandon the false opinion
that the sun is the center of the world, and immovable.
And that the Earth is not the center of the world, and moves.
I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever,
verbally in writing, the said false doctrine.
Quivering with tiny, rapid oscillations,
these recantations are inscribed upon the bed of my thought
as a harrow incises the ground before the seeds are planted.
My sentence is written onto me as I merge with it,
yet I cannot comprehend it even as it apprehends me.
For yet, you have already seen my errors abound around me,
and I, I am engulf-ed by them as an harpooned whale
is overcome by the very waters that had buoyed him.
I am in anxiety and in sorrow for my wrongs known
and unknown.
For I have here, now, in this very moment
done badly and wrongly with the hypocrisy, the bad faith
of this recantation which reflects pride and arrogance,
flippancy, sarcasm, resentment, hyperbole,
and a fundamentally false analogy.
And I regret already as my mouth speaks
the words my unsupportable and an offensive
identifications in placing myself,
even if only imaginatively, rhetorically, or didactically,
even if only paratically, or satirically, or ironically,
in the position of poets, and writers, and artists,
and scientists in the past who've
confronted most cruel, most terrible, and most violent
sanctions for their work, for their thinking,
for their discoveries.
But also poets, and writers, and artists,
and scientists in the present, now in this moment as we speak
and as we listen, here and in other places,
at home and abroad, who daily, and even hourly
confront most violent, most terrible, and most cruel
sanctions for their work, for their thinking,
and for their discoveries while I am at leisure, relatively
free of fierce and wounding reprisals
and may cant and recant.
Recant and cant, for the most part at my own discretion.
For verily, I have fallen deep into error, an error
that I can't ironize, or satirize, or joke my way out
of.
And I have a queasy feeling of unease in my regret,
for I realize I am making a mistake.
These words are all out of proportion
and grotesquely exaggerated, suggesting equivalence
of violent political repression with often minor,
and petty, silly and stupid, ignorant and harmless
doctrines, beliefs, sentiments, or even sometimes perfectly
reasonable views and perspectives
with which I have had cause to quarrel, and whose only crime
is my disagreement, fomented by an increasingly,
and inexcusable, and unjustified crankiness, ungratefulness
and belligerence abetted by a morbid fascination
with the structure of such disciplining machines.
Perfected by a series of reigns of terror
from all of which I have been spared,
or else such exercises as this would be impossible
since it is my freedom, however relative and circumscribed,
that both lets me compose this and is
the measure of its failure.
For after all is said and done, after the fury and the sound,
after the pomp, and bombast, and self-regard, after the myopia
and insufferably inappropriate and unjustified
delusions of persecution, this recantation
enacts a false and offensive analogy to woefully pernicious
life-destroying belief systems, states, or religions.
And for this, I recant my cant.
Cant and recant.
I am wrong.
I have strayed from the path of decency, restraint, and honor.
Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds
of your eminences and of all faithful poets and poetry
readers this vehement suspicion justly conceived against me,
with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse,
and detest the aforesaid errors and aversions, and generally,
every other error, apostasy, and sect whatsoever
contrary to the books of accessible poets.
And I swear that in the future, I
will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing,
anything that might furnish occasion
for similar suspicion regarding me.
But that should I know any dissenter or persons
suspected of dissent, I will denounce him
to the inquisitor of the place where I may be,
and also to the inquisitor that is in me, that I have become.
Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe
in their integrity all penances that have been
or shall be imposed upon me.
And in the event to my contravening
of any of these promises and oaths,
I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed
and promulgated in the canons and other constitutions,
general and particular, against such delinquents as myself.
I, the said Charles Bernstein, have abjured, sworn, promised,
and bound myself as above.
And in witness of the truth thereof,
I have with my own hand subscribed
to the present document of my abjurated and abjection
and recited it word for word at Tucson,
formerly Cuk Son at the base of the Black
Mountain in the long shadow of Baboquivari
in the County of Pima, state of Arizona,
on the border of Estados Unidos Mexicanos
on this last day of May in the year 2008 of the current year."
Woo!
[APPLAUSE]
Woo!