Adrienne Rich on Charles Bernstein

“In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery." We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed social relations" (Charles Bernstein).”

“I was also looking for poems that didn't simply reproduce familiar versions of "difference" and "identity." I agree with Charles Bernstein, poet-critic and exponent of L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry, when he remarks in A Poetics that "difference" too often appears in poems simply as "subject matter and ... local color" rather than as "form and content understood as an interlocking figure the one inaudible with-the other." Indeed, there are legions of columnar poems in which the anecdote of an ethnic parent or grandparent is rehearsed in a generic voice and format, whatever the cultural setting. I was glad to find poems by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, Kimiko Hahn, C. S. Giscombe and Wanda Coleman, among others, that embody dialectics of "otherness" in language itself, the strange and familiar interpenetrating.”

“Recently, I read an essay by Charles Bernstein criticizing a facile multiculturalism that can "have the effect of transforming unresolved ideological divisions and antagonisms into packaged tours of... local color of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, region, class. . . . In this context, diversity can be a way of restoring a highly idealized conception of a unified American culture that effectively quiets dissent." Many of us, I think, have had our doubts about such a "multiculturalism" or "diversity," or symbolic "inclusion," when the real question in our radically unequal society is power and privilege...Charles Bernstein, again, has called our public space "befouled" by "spectacularly inequitable distributions of power." In this "befouled" public sphere poetry cannot hope to lend itself to social change through conventional or contaminated methods of communication. Language, the medium, "autonomous and self-sufficient," must do its work by its own methods. I am, of necessity, abbreviating and simplifying here...The public space is indeed befouled. But I also think that Bernstein and others are right when they imply that threadbare language, frozen metaphors, poems in which we "cling to / what we've grasped too well" are part of the problem, and that the power of a poem to subvert, to "intensify / our relationships" depends on its being poetry-taking on the medium of language with all its difficulties. Difficulties of relationship and strangeness, of truth-telling and torsion and how the netted bridge is to be suspended over the gorge.”