The American Century: Literature since 1945 725is an accomplished poet, his numerous collections of poetry including Poetic Justice
(1979), Islets/Irritations (1983), Rough Trades (1991), and Girly Man (2006).
Sometimes, the two vocations – which are nevertheless linked for Bernstein – come
together. Artifice of Absorption (1987), for example, is an essay in verse that makes a
core distinction between absorption and impermeability in literature. The one,
suggests Bernstein, connotes all that is “rhapsodic, spellbinding, / mesmerizing,
hypnotic, total, riveting, / enthralling,” the other everything that is to do with
“artifice, boredom, / exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression,
interruptive, transgressive.” Absorptive writing pursues the realistic, continuous, and
transparent; impermeable or antiabsorptive writing favors artifice, discontinuity,
the opaque. It is the impermeable, clearly, that Bernstein prefers. “In my poems,
I / frequently use opaque & nonabsorbable / elements,” he declares, “digressions & /
interruptions, as part of a technological arsenal.” His aim, Bernstein writes, is for the
reader “to be actively involved in the process of constructing its meaning,” and, as far
as both reader and writer are concerned, “to wake / us from the hypnosis of
absorption.” In Artifice of Absorption, Bernstein cites his poem “The Klupzy Girl”
as an example of his poetic technique. With typically antic humor, he takes an all-
American Klutz of both French and British descent (since she bears a close
resemblance to Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”) as his demonic muse here.
He then uses a rich mix of styles, redundancies, clichés, awkward or irrelevant
constructions to create what is called, toward the end of the poem, “a manic / state of
careless grace.” The artifice is foregrounded by various cinematic devices: cutting
and shifting focus, unanticipated breaks, disturbing and distorted perspective. It is
this disjunctive rate of change that dictates the poem’s rhythm, as it lurches from
statements so bold that they border on parody (“Poetry is like a swoon, with this
difference: / it brings you to your senses”), through disconnected snatches of
conversation, phrases that might be overheard in the street, comments that float
unanchored. Art, Bernstein has insisted, must be extraordinary, aberrant, abnormal.
“It partakes of both good and ill, of the agreeable and the disagreeable,” as he puts it.
“Or rather, it is within its mass that these oppositions are able to sketch themselves
out.” Bernstein pursues an oppositional writing and in “The Klupzy Girl” he
manages just that – with a style that distorts and a strange, disturbing lady as his
muse and the poem’s occasion.
Michael Palmer has said that he is “a little bit outside” “the way many of the
so-called language poets work” because the way “I inhabit language, or language
inhabits me, is in a sense more traditional.” Certainly, his poetry betrays other debts,
to the Black Mountain and New York poets in particular; and in his critical writings
he has admitted the inevitability of narrative. But his work is fundamentally of the
language movement because of his core commitment to what he calls “radical
discontinuities of surface and voice” – to a poetry that resists and interrogates. He is
interested, he has said, in a poetry that “will not stand as a kind of decor in one’s life,
not the kind of thing for hammock and lemonade, where at the end everything is in
resolution.” He is also concerned with the political implications of style and form:
his work questions the status quo on the rhetorical level, supplying a critique ofGGray_c05.indd 725ray_c 05 .indd 725 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM