3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

Interview with Alí Calderón

In 2018, Mexican poet Alí Calderón interviewed Charles Bernstein for his influential web magazine Círculo de poesía. The interview is published here in English for the first time. Bernstein addresses the poetics of “hybridity” and the possibilities for poetic disruption. The discussion ends with Bernstein's then new poem, written for John Ashbery on the day he died.

The Epiphany of Language: The Connotation of Zen-Taoism in Charles Bernstein's Echopoetics

As a prominent representative figure of American Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has incorporated many themes concerning “nothingness” into his poetry. Contrary to the traditional Western philosophy that defines the concept of “nothingness” as meaninglessness and agnosticism, “nothingness” in Bernstein's poetics is endowed with profound poetic and aesthetic implications. Bernstein studied the works of Zen-Taoist philosophy in his early years. Understanding the Zen-Taoist connotations of “nothingness” is an important new dimension in interpreting Bernstein's echopoetics. Bernstein integrates the anti-traditional ideas in Zen-Taoist philosophy and aesthetics with the experiment of American avant-garde poetry. “The transformation between Xu (emptiness) and Shi (Being),” the beauty of “speechlessness,” and the expression of “defamiliarization” show the “epiphany” of language and the “nature” of language. The Chinese traditional Zen-Taoist philosophy is an important part of Bernstein's echopoetics.

Editor's Note

Charles Bernstein is a major crossing point for poetry and poetics. His art and discussion of poetry exploit and develop the vernaculars of language as they echo across time and international borders and national languages.

Remarks at the Retirement Celebration for Charles Bernstein

Remarks made at Charles Bernstein's retirement celebration at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, April 4, 2019.

In the Un-American Tree: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein, Translated

Leevi Lehto, in a keynote on American poetry presented in China, outlines the challenges and possibilities of Language poetry outside the American context, with specific relation to the meaning of translation.

Charles Bernstein: Against the Idea of Poetry

This text is Leevi Lehto's introduction to his Finnish translation of Charles Bernstein's work, both poetry and poetics. Lehto argues that Bernstein's poems are interventions into various constellations, or power relations, in the field of poetry, always reacting to something, always against a particular idealization—among them the idea of interventionism as such.

“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks / in the manner of enclosure”: An Afterword to Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte

The following text was published in German as an afterword to the bilingual poetry collection Charles Bernstein: Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte (München: luxbooks, 2014). Originally intended as a critical survey and introduction for German-language readers, it traces Bernstein's work as a radical modernist poet, distinguished scholar, and critical theorist in his own right from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. From his early poetry to L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E magazine, from his major books of poetry and collective avant-garde performances to his essays on poetics, Bernstein, I argue, consistently articulated with wit and precision why and how radical modernism affects what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.”

Introduction to Chinese Anthology of American Poetry (19th–20th c.), ed. Li Zhimin

Li Zhimin, poet and professor at Guangzhou University, asked Charles Bernstein to write the introduction to his anthology of American poetry, which spanned from Dickinson to Stevens, with Bernstein the youngest poet in the collection. Published here in English for the first time.

Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal

The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions, confessionalism, and certain self-centeredness. Poetry is a private matter for both. Both have poetics built on the “oddness that stays odd,” as Bernstein himself put it, paraphrasing Pound's “news that stays news.” Both are aimed at renovating the language, and the verses of both are built on fragmentation, collage, moving from one statement to another without preparation. However, in Ashbery, whose poems are surreal, these transitions are smoother, based on an apparent connection, what Bernstein calls “hypotaxis” or “associative parataxis.” In contrast, Bernstein's poetry is built on parataxis; it is “bumpy,” in the poet's own words.