Jerome McGann reviews The Kinds of Poetry I Want

Charles Bernstein. The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 424 pp.

Review by Jerome McGann

22 November 2024

It was when I started reading Charles Bernstein more than fifty years ago that I began believing in reincarnation. Surely this was Groucho Marx come back with a college degree and bent on making more mischief. Fifty years have made duck soup of that belief—that is to say, have made the impossible come true. Freedonia?! Please! Here he is with his latest, even more perverse take on “I wouldn’t join a club that would have me as a member.” I mean, who in the club of “Official Verse Culture” wants him? Now there’s foresight for you.

Like Charles, Groucho was by his own admission born at an early age, so getting older and becoming a poet was no problem for him. And Groucho wrote a lot of books, so when Charles got going and kept going, I wasn’t surprised. (And if you’ve heard this story before, sorry, but I want to hear it again. That’s called taking reincarnation seriously.)

Reading this latest book, we can see that he doesn’t just think military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. It goes for literary intelligence too, and that‘s what this collection of his will let you know: that the kinds of poetry Freedonia promotes has to exhibit, one way or another, contradiction in terms. That would be “#CageFreePoetry” that has John Cage as a founding member, and “Doubletalking” and “Offbeat” verse of any and every kind (pp. 163, 283, 25). And there’s no nonsense in the way he talks about nonsense. Or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry for that matter: “I thought language poetry was a lot of nonsense packaged to look important” (p. 37). Did he write that, or was it somebody else? Whoever it was, he’s annoying enough to add thirty-nine other thoughts he’s had about that close-to-home subject . . . and none are versions of that thought. Most are aversions, or run at odd or irrelevant angles to it. (Versions of the word averse run through the book nearly as often as versions of the word resist.)

Did I say “annoying enough”? Blake said “Enough! or too much!”[1] (I’ve never understood what he meant by that.) Bernstein has said “A thing of beauty is annoyed for ever.”[2]

This person is all by himself a loose canon.

Remember My Way (1999)? Did you think when you read that book he was saying: “My way or the highway.” If you did, did you forget or did you remember that there’s always a contradiction in terms? Who’s to say whether or there means is or whether it means otherwise? And once a Horton heard a Who thinking one or the other, Who’s to say what is and/or what otherwise mean? If my way is the highway, then Larry Eigner and Robert Lowell are maybe just driving along at different times and going different places. Maybe at different speeds. Maybe Larry’s driving on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and Robert’s driving on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday (or not, or the other way round), and then what about on Sunday? Maybe on Sundays nobody wants to be driving. And isn’t it up to you to decide who you want to be driving with, and when, and why, and where you’re going? In the end (and the beginning too, a poet said), my way has to be your/our/their way anyway.

Besides, who’s to say if “my way or the highway” is a statement or an outcry or a question? (Now there’s a contradiction in terms!) Maybe I was wrong to make that a question. Maybe it’s actually “Who IS the one to decide if ‘my way or the highway’ is a statement or an outcry or a question.”

“The Kinds of Poetry I Want?” What about what I want? I’ve got A-versions too, and sometimes they’re B- or C- or even F-versions. (If you get an F when you turn in your A-version, find out if you can take the test again. If not, that’s life too. “Fail better.”[3])

You just have to make up your mind. Like this: On Lopez Cuenca’s “ordinary” poetry: “I’ve placed one of Lopez Cuenca’s signs in the hallway just outside my classroom. The sign has the exact color scheme and shape of a famous midtown Manhattan traffic sign. At the top, replacing ‘tow-away zone’ is REAL ZONE, & beneath this, in big letters: DON’T EVEN THINK OF POETRY HERE” (p. 187).

Or like this, on Tracie Morris: “Hand-Holding is the first collection of Morris’s work to present a full spectrum of her approaches to poetry. This is not so much a collection of poems, as conventionally understood, as a display of the possibilities for poetry. Each work here is not just in a different style or form but rather explores different aspects of poetry as a medium: re- sounding, re- vising, resonating, re- calling, re- performing, re- imaginings. In Hand-Holding the medium is messaged so that troglodyte binaries like politics and aesthetics, original and translation, and oral and written go the way of Plato’s cave by way of Niagara Falls” (p. 196). Rein in carnations? Let a thousand flowers bloom.

This book is a report about how somebody went about making up his mind over and over again. Did too many cooks spoil his duck soup? Did those many hands he hired to help him make up his mind make light work of it (his mind)? Is that light as in enlighten or light as in Ogden Nash? Who doesn’t like Ogden Nash?

I made up MY mind about that a long time ago. I think as long ago as when I started reading Charles Bernstein and realized he was making up his mind to be Groucho Marx (as in “every poet his own Aristotle,” which means—rhymes with—every Bernstein his own Tracie Morris).[4]

Refrain: “With a poem you start with the flight and fugue of the words, not with what the poem represents” (p. 87).

[1] William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Boston, 1906), p. 20.

[2] Charles Bernstein, “The Truth In Pudding,” Recalculating (Chicago, 2018), p. 4.

[3] Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (New York, 1983), p. 7.

[4] Lord Byron, Don Juan (Mannhein, 1838), p. 79.