The Marginalization of Poetry by Bob Perelman

Author:Bob Perelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Writing and Power

Such disparate anti-orthographies finally may not end up as all that binary. First, I want to cite the last lines of Bernstein’s poem, which, shockingly, are spelled perfectly (with the italics lending an almost Yeatsian sententiousness): “b6y the waylines 9-10 are based on an / aphorism by Karl Kraus: the closer we I look at a word the greater the distance I from which it stares back.” Kraus staring at a word, hypnotized by the auratic strangeness of print, the inexplicable arrangement of lines and curves of the letters, the delicate seraphs, the bizarreness of its silent call to sound—this is a reader for whom the language holds out the promise of endless significance. But such fixation on the letter connotes an empowered native speaker. A nonnative speaker would want to translate, get the message; the strangeness of the word would not be an uncanny revelation, it would be an all-too-familiar experience.

The following stanzas, from the “Dies Irie" of X/Self, display an opposite relation to Kraus’s bemused position vis-à-vis power: they want it.

Day of sulphur dreadful day

when the world shall pass away

so the priests and shamans say

. . . . . . . . . . .

to what judgement meekly led

my lai harlem wounded knee

fedon fatah sun yat sen

. . . . . . . . . . .

day of sulphur guernica

when the world shall pass away

so the priests and pundits che (37)

It would be easy enough simultaneously to award the palm to the revolutionary commitment of X/Self and to dismiss Bernstein’s anarchy. I can imagine that a subtle, self-aware, and humorous Caliban makes a more attractive figure for many than a self-shattering “Hupty Dempty” (to recall the excerpt from “A Defence"), who seems to say little more than “Words can be spelled however I choose to spell them.” Brathwaite’s words exist in history, to the point where a revolutionary life becomes the embodiment of the verb of saying: “so the priests and pundits che.” By extension, the act of writing X/Self can be seen as a parallel revolutionary act. Such a statement, however, requires a major caveat. “By extension” masks a problem: the idea of revolutionary writing is based on a revolutionary reading of it, which in turn is based on the academic security of intellectual flexibility. And Bernstein, despite his many gestures of renunciation, also wants power, at least in a more local academic arena: we should not forget that it is also Humpty/Hupty who says: “The question is—which is to be master, that’s all.” The poetry-as-error aspect of the poem suggests the answer is: no one (but to reiterate: the poetry-as-theory aspect is enmeshed in its own power struggles).

The Brathwaite lines just cited evoke the Last Judgment; as a whole X/Self ends with the return of Xango, who the notes tell us is the “Pan African god of thunder, lightning, electricity and its energy, sound systems, the locomotive engine and its music” (130). But while Brathwaite’s poetry may reach toward the divine realm for its

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