American Poetry Read online

  She holds a span of real time over this sense of being touched that’s continuous with the copresence of dresses.

  3.

  Plum blossoms in snow give way to fragile cherry blossoms, blowing mist on water in the foreground to lighted clouds on the horizon.

  It’s responsive, not perspective.

  The plane tips up and completes our world with transparency, synapse between birdcall and hearing it, pink and shade facets of small waves, butterfly on tongue.

  Hearing, then meaning, is an arch of slender arms where I visualize myself the way she thinks about me, energy latent in her mind, openness under the hand on my head.

  The light is not real like a collected object, but its direct, concrete application warms real things, concreteness as a luminescent skin of being herself, subject, wife, envelope of human limits of things.

  The potlatch settles around me in a house, designating an exterior that’s toward you, not endowing stone with interior.

  That depends on deep matter for which a woman opts for deep acting, suppressing irritation at demands of family members by inventing reasons to sympathize with those boors, to feel sincere though alienated from her bodily expression, screen simulation.

  Light goes through it to the plane of the sea, of mother-tongue.

  In nothing in the beautiful room could I recognize myself.

  A nontransparent self is needed, an aesthetics of documentation where images have power, because the drama is real.

  They withdraw from matter to representation which gives more agency, point of presence, bird falling along a stitched in and out of my hearing it call and its ceasing to exist.

  4.

  I found I could take words from one discipline and intersect them with another, such as generous feeling with listening to supplicants.

  Empty space intersects with the dignity of stars, of homelessness, health ruined by addiction, to help supplicants.

  Trying to be part of the neighborhood, school activism, etc., with serene demeanor of an object not caught in form of fairy or butterfly, wing of an alternation of calmly breathing, alternating with the physical situation, someone ill, someone tortured.

  Hearing is the fractality of fragments occurring (that are disintegrating).

  Immanence is outside that as absence of the totality of fragments.

  Everything shimmers in autumn light.

  Her body (translucence, colored leaves) is a surface you try to make transparent, uninscribed, unlined by good deeds, abstaining from lineage.

  Join lineation and surface of her body by voice and hearing, small animals, fragments swept away, lost colors of refractions inside cells, feathers, albino, crepe de chine.

  Hearing as good annuls being toward another.

  It gathers good aesthetically into relationship like a figure, her body as you remember it, as in a family, space behind each person.

  During her last weeks, Madame Lucie reached the end of memory.

  Present and future prospects shed perspective, so birds flying away remained the same size, although her gaze in memory on beloved children retained the physical latency of hearing them.

  Reading Red

  Charles Bernstein

  1.

  Reading red

  only event

  over & under

  fuses

  green with

  (no idea

  2.

  Road Show

  Face on face

  hides (divides)

  not what’s inside

  but what’s

  3.

  Four Foot Six

  Dear Blue,

  Dear Orange,

  knock me for obtuse

  rending (rendering)

  layers of treats,

  rips

  4.

  5.

  Dear/Duel

  Delirium would stand for

  what’s next to

  the girls next door

  the boy who falls

  beside oneself in a sane way

  6.

  There is no level

  In the middle ground

  7.

  Double & Out

  Remove the ground

  triple the crack

  you still won’t get

  the middle back

  the pains are yellow

  & speak like facts

  flush then drained

  absorption’s knack

  8.

  Side by Side

  The shadow falls

  & the object appears in

  the space between

  (don’t ever leave)

  9.

  Blue Blue (Off the Mark)

  I’d like to talk to you about the mistakes

  We just can’t handle

  laminating (lamentation)

  warp us as

  humility changes

  We don’t have to

  10.

  Where the fold should be

  There is no fold

  11.

  No Man’s Land (Call and Response!

  now that I’m

  old as I am

  the more I appreciate

  that moment of

  human life

  I must

  have lived

  through but

  didn’t experience

  at the time

  you can’t paint

  what you can’t feel

  12.

  Broken Token

  Hush

  slips sealed

  13.

  Dear. Here

  if a tree could

  talk you would

  not understand

  its bark only its

  bite

  14.

  Loopy

  a

  pine

  is

  a

  curve

  that

  isn’t

  deterred

  15.

  color is not about the object

  but a part of the human being

  not inside but outside

  not outside but inside

  16.

  Key Lime Hide

  It’s about playing a game

  the way a lamp shines out at

  flight

  but the subject is still

  overlay & under-

  cover, in which

  the line pertains

  to neither

  either, ether

  17.

  White along edge

  Bark of tree

  As if blue becomes a

  lighter color

  Holds

  As you make your bed then

  lie in it

  Ground father to

  Figuration

  18.

  The Knees Have It

  I had a double meter

  I gave my father half

  He put it in his pocket

  Then threw it in the trash

  Now since that time I’ve lost a dime

  I’ve even broke a flute

  But all I want’s that half a rime

  To bleat the denting out

  19.

  Duophone

  East is hung & south

  is its

  torn motion

  belongs to Caesar

  neither, or

  north’s west passagelessness

  20.

  This Side Up

  flues cross

  memory’s encyclopedic

  permutations—

  transparent, succumb

  “the body,

  the

  21.

  Zone

  no circle

  no shape

  coming out of my mouth

  “the sun is but a morning star”

  22.

  Don’t Touch

  Shadow cast on black

  mocks line

  cleave, dart, splinter

  23.

  Can’t hold what resists
r />   enclosure—

  a village of

  malcontents

  Dear or Don’t

  Agents of

  24.

  Against Itself

  like a cut in skin

  or the bleating of edges

  into the frost

  the paintbrush is the forest of society

  25.

  strongest attempt

  the work could make

  to destroy itself

  A Dialogue

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Charles Bernstein

  We became acquainted during many vivid poetry events hosted by Segue Foundation at James Sherry’s loft in the seventies. Over the next twenty-five years, our dialogue evolved into a friendship that included our work, our children, the art of our spouses, Susan Bee and Richard Tuttle. We decided to focus this interview, which took place in July, on the poems published in Conjunctions:35 and on recent work.

  CHARLES BERNSTEIN: In front of me, or perhaps in my mind’s ear, I have two of your books, Four Year Old Girl and Endocrinology, and your new poem, “Hearing.” I have been thinking about the way your work envelops me in its own world of extended sound waves, carrying me along as I read and then lapping back for another line. It’s not mesmerizing exactly but there is a strong tidal pull. You seem to have turned Clark Coolidge’s notion of “sound as thought” into sound as perception and then again thought as perception. Anyway, these are among the themes of the new poem. Hearing not as the physical listening to the words—you write of the “physical latency of hearing” late in the poem—but as a form of response. The difference between hearing and listening that I’m getting at is suggested, for example, when one says—you hear what I say but you don’t listen: listening is, in a word you use in “Hearing,” “reciprocal.” Your work seems to feed that reciprocity back into the loop: “hearing me hearing it” as you write. (I think this is what Charles Altieri is picking up when he writes about your work in terms of “intimacy.”) “Hearing” begins with “A voice with no one speaking likes the sea,” echoing the opening lines of Stevens’s “Ideas of Order at Key West”: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea/ The water never formed to mind or voice.” However, where your voice “merges with my listening,” for Stevens “The song and the water were not medleyed sound/ … it was she and not the sea we heard.” These are not the same “she”s—and that is one thing I wanted to ask you about. Also you seem to show not a medleyed sound but something I would say is merged (or refracted, another of your words) by means of the poem’s extended duration, getting back to your prolonged overlapping sound waves. The “real” of which you speak is transactional and temporal, a flickering pulse that we hear only when we listen. I’m curious about some lines at the end of the third section, where you write “they withdraw from matter to representation which gives more agency.” It seems to me the matter of your poems is very much this “shimmering” “translucence” of listening, where it’s not that “the images have power, because the drama is real” but, rather, where the real is the reel not the image. Who is she?

  MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE: Your question resonates, like hearing. I hesitate to respond, because the question is whole. I think of the physical latency of hearing as a form of response. Hearing is encompassing and receptive, while listening, which I didn’t really address, would be a more focused, directed perception.

  “She” specifically is Kuan Yin as muse. She is “the hearer of all cries” in Chinese. She also represents compassion. I think of the cry as poetry, and also the image, the representation you mention. I’m trying to encompass my conflicting worlds of poet and caregiver. The value of poetry, the value of compassion. Hearing the hearer is intimate. Sound in waves, as plastic, is how I think of time, which is intimate. Whether this compassion is intimate or generic is not resolved, here. There’s a net of emotion, not so specific, compassion for the person and the world. Inspired by a white porcelain Kuan Yin I love and another I grew up with.

  I know your poem Reading Red was written in collaboration with a series of relief sculptures by Richard Tuttle. Richard described them as consisting of two layers of painted particle board in which the shadow of the overlay (“at the exact height of 54 inches, which represents the self”) implies a linguistic element. He told me he hoped you would complete or “give” this linguistic implication. The resulting collaboration takes the form of a gorgeous book published by Walter König. I find these poems full, evocative and mobile in dialogue with the visual. I was in Germany when the poems were presented. Their achievement of making a whole with the sculptures and at the same time remaining so open was thrilling to the audience, even in translation. Would you like to talk about these poems? I see a lyric directness in them. Is that a particular response to Richard’s works? Do you have any thoughts about qualities of abstraction as it crosses and recrosses between the visual and verbal?

  BERNSTEIN: Richard’s series, “New Mexico–New York” was shown at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in 1998. I was immediately attracted to these works and felt they were, in some not completely abstract sense, saying things. But what were they saying? There was the recurring image of an envelope in many of the works, created by the overlay of one piece of wood on another, the superstrate being generally smaller and more tapered than the substrate. So my thought was: if they were envelopes, what text might they contain? Maybe they would tell their own story, one of a gap or bump (indeed, at “four foot six”) where one piece of material is plied onto another, or of the shadow you mention that always falls over that crack, or of the conversation or tension between the two parts that made the whole. Of the painted surfaces that used color and line to articulate a multiplicity of possible relations and evocations of this basic circumstance.

  Richard liked the idea of my writing a set of poems for the paintings, sharing with me a sense that the collaboration needn’t be static. Often poems about paintings have the poet musing on the image before her or his eyes. The channel separation between the verbal and visual is foundational for many poems about pictures (as it is for pictures that illustrate already existing poems). While I remain interested in such separation, the idea here was different—for the poems to enter the reliefs. Richard and I made a time to return to the gallery and we had an extended conversation about each of the paintings, in which I took notes on much of what Richard said and wrote the poems, for the most part, using bits and pieces of the conversation, often taking just a word or phrase from Richard or myself, and scribbling out some ideas, which I then read to Richard as we continued through the series. We both had some sense of the poems as they were unfolding, and our conversation folded into that, as if the poems were a superstrate laid on top of, or framing, the stream of our conversation. In other words, we gave voice to the paintings by a kind of dialogic ventriloquism.

  After the poems were finished, some weeks later, Richard designed the book in a totally inventive manner, extending the phantasmagoric adventure of his many other great book works. The works are displayed, four to a side, on three large fold-out circles and the poems are printed on top of the images, becoming a part of the works rather than a commentary on them. After a time, the publisher wanted us to produce a special edition of the book. To go against the grain of such editions, we decided that we should “deface” forty of the trade copies and at the same time reverse the direction of the collaboration. So we sat down at my dining room table with a stack of books, a scissors and a pencil. I quickly wrote variations on each of the poems in Reading Red (and then around again to forty) and read them to Richard, who responded by cutting and folding the blank endpaper at the beginning of the book, after which I wrote in the new poem, placing it in relation to Richard’s page sculptures.

  One virtue of this second collaboration was that I didn’t get a chance to look back, to edit, to rework. I know much of your own work is based on all three of those processes. Can you talk about your process of finishing a poem? It’s an old-time question, surely. I know you
often hold onto a poem for a while, making slight changes. Now I suspect it’s not some set idea of completion or even closure that you are looking for, or not one that is external to the process of writing, which you could apply to the poem like finish to a cabinet. What are you looking for? What makes the poem the poem you want?

  BERSSENBRUGGE: I know your suspicions about closure inhibiting process. For me, finishing a poem is more a physical struggle for focus. A lot of my method compensates for my natural awkwardness. So, my first draft is a well-researched but very scattered approximation, often using other people’s words, and tends to be written below my understanding. “Finishing” is an arduous process of trying to uncover what I meant and for it to be in poetry. What I meant comes into focus slowly over a long time. Criteria for “finish” are: a feeling of moving along, words smooth in saying, a feeling of something said emotionally, and a physical satisfaction with one word next to the other. The poem tends to be about a quarter as long as the first draft. I publish when the deadline comes, working to the last minute. And then refine the poem at intervals for a long time after.

  A “finished” poem becomes something like an artifact, something independent with its own dynamic. It resists change. I’m trying to discern now if there is any significant difference between being finished and being “good enough,” which is more contemporary. The problem is, so much is unconscious.

  How do you finish a poem? Do my concerns with “saying something,” with balance, interior, contrast with your feelings for instability, openness, etc. You say so beautifully in My Way: “I open the door and its shuts after me … I am moving not toward some uninhabited space but deeper into a maelstrom of criss-crossing inscriptions. The open is a vanishing point …”

  BERNSTEIN: I like the distinction Stein makes between “completed” and “complete” (thinking of “A Completed Portrait of Picasso”). As a practical matter, I agree with your sense that the poem is finished when I don’t need to make any more changes; the poem passes into some other state that in some ways is closed to me. Then it’s time to do something else. Still, figuring out when that time has come—that remains a good part hunch. You’re right to suggest that the contrast between balance and instability, interiority and openness, prosodically motivates many of my poems. Although I would have to say that I am often the last to find out what I am saying and even then I am not certain (just as when you are in the midst of something you may not know where you are even if you know you’re there). Writing is often the most active part of my life. I can do things in writing I can’t do anywhere else, things that won’t work anywhere else (if, indeed, they can be said to work in my writing!). I like to say things like—it seems most right when the writing goes wrong, when there is a breakdown or an infelicitous turning of phrase. I am in fact alarmingly fussy about what infelicity is interesting and few, in the end, are. So it’s a matter of searching and searching—you know how when the hard drive on your computer starts to whirl around as though looking for something and the screen freezes up until the whirring stops. I can relate to that. Often the people who surround me in everyday life (I won’t mention any names) are shouting and gesticulating wildly to get my attention as I seem momentarily unconscious, or maybe just subconscious, which is closer by. Then the next day I read over what I thought was OK and it all looks bad, I shake my head, that awful discouragement that makes this kind of work unfathomable to those on the fabled “outside,” e.g., why put yourself through that? This is what I was getting at: for the most part I have no idea where my writing has come from. In retrospect, the heart of it seems to have produced itself. It was being in the right place and the right time and having a pen handy. Or knowing when to start writing something down, being open to recognize what occurs to me. “Be ready but not prepared” as Dominique Fourcade puts it. And in that sense, when I am reworking something, I am basically just continuing to write, adding layers more than finishing. Keeping myself active. Until it’s not complete but completed.