Bernstein’s Up To His Old Tricks: Knockin’ ’Em Dead In Wordland

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new book of old work by Charles Bernstein, David Gray Chair of Poetry at the University at Buffalo and one of the great irony producers of our age, is getting rave reviews from the national literary community.

No surprise here. For those whose peculiar avocation it is to smack units of meaning around like croquet balls, Bernstein is patron saint and leader of the band.

Bernstein is dangerous, culturally speaking, because he challenges some of our most basic and deeply held assumptions, the ones that hold together the massive body of belief most of us hold about what is good, what we really value and the roots of that knowing.

He is a subversive who "always manages to find the furthest reaches of any norms of 'good taste,' creating a poetics that reveals the social codes hiding behind all the poetry's tropes and forms," writes an admiring critic, citing the famous 1990 Bernstein collection whose title is one of the most engagingly sardonic in postmodernity: "The Absent Father in 'Dumbo.'"

Lately, however, it is Bernstein's "Republics of Reality: 1975-1995" that is attracting critical attention. A collection of his writings that have not appeared in any of his previous break-through volumes, it recently was published by Sun & Moon Press and was called, in the March 27 issue of Publishers Review, a book of "outstanding quality."

The unattributed review calls Bernstein "at once the most paradoxically controversial and popular, accessible and most difficult of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. He is also," it continues, "the writer of that group who strove early on to experiment with the extremes of its newly minted methods."

Comic and bleak in turn, Bernstein's terrain is 20th-century America, his lingo 20th-century American. It ranges from advertising cant and technobabble to high prose, sales pitch and TV dialogue.

Bernstein once was called "an imaginative mensch who fruitfully complicates poetry." For reasons having to do with his complications, he stars among avant-garde writers, but remains an elusive figure among the unbaptized. In fact, Bernstein-the-poet could turn the "average Joe" into a self-doubting head-scratcher adrift in a sea of black turtlenecks, something Bernstein-the-person rarely does.

For language poets almost everything is, in some sense, a coded poem and Bernstein burrows into the cultural strata at a deeply subterranean level, cracking our cryptic semiotic system of symbols and bringing them into the light where they make us gasp or gag.

To many of those who know him at UB, Bernstein is soft-spoken, hard-working, totally dependable New York City-Buffalo commuter, devoted to family and cause, and blessed with a dark and sparkly sense of humor. For someone as self-effacing as he is in his collegial life, his influence is amazingly wide, and of a kind that inspires original and fortunate prose in those who write about him.

"I find these mixed-genre essays to be stimulating, energizing, dismantling, inventive, taking the grounds of "a poetics" into a newfound land of play, risk, and stylistic mixture," writes untethered literati Rob Wilson of a Bernstein collection in one of his 31 unrequited reviews for Amazon.com.

Wilson continues: "Sinatra did it 'my way,' and Charles Bernstein (like a zanier Bob Dylan watching a Marx Brothers movie while reading Deleuze and composing the Greenwich Village Joe Hill Blues on a used mouth harp) did it his, and "official verse culture" in the United States will never be the smug same old poesy again. Not for those whose version of pastoral is still made of petunia flowers, tylanol (sic) and sheep."

Excerpts from many of Bernstein's published poetry and essays, critical analysis of his work, audio of his public performances and interviews with the writer taped at various venues can be accessed by connecting to the UB Electronic Poetry Center Web site devoted to Bernstein at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/.