Contemporary Poetry

74 contemporary poetry

wrested from our control is a world taken from us – a world

in which language becomes a tool for the description of the

world, words mere instrumentalities for representing this

world.^42

Bernstein links the ‘artifi ce’ of poetry, or what he calls ‘writing
centered on its wordness’ (p. 32 ) with an ambitious political and
social claim:

Language is commonness in being, through which we see &

make sense of & value. Its exploration is the exploration of the

human common ground. The move from a purely descrip-

tive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on

its wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in

its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, of the

place of our connection: in the world, in the word, in our-

selves. (p. 32 )

The section ‘World on Fire’ from Bernstein’s volume Girly
Man ( 2006 ) examines the role of poetic language in a culture of
the political soundbite.^43 Bernstein interrogates ideas of poetic
responsiveness and the relationship between rhetoric and political
enquiry. The title, taken as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s deprecation
of Democrats in 2004 as ‘girly men’, is used as an affi rmative chant
dedicated to Bernstein’s son, ‘The Ballad of the Girly Man’:

So be a girly man

& sing this gurly song

Sissies & proud

That we would never lie our way to war. (p. 181 )

The eleven poems in ‘World on Fire’ can be read as a poetic
sequence which tackles the repercussions of 9 / 11. Indeed, ‘Some
of these Daze’ marks the publication of Bernstein’s initial responses
to 9 / 11 posted on the Internet, with titles such as ‘It’s 8 : 23 in New
York’, ‘Aftershock’, ‘Report from Liberty Street” and ‘Letter From
New York’. Bernstein acts as a bewildered reporter attempting to
understand ‘skies unnaturally clear of airplanes’ (p. 18 ) and the
‘What I can’t describe is the reality; the panic; the horror’ (p. 19 ).