Language poetry to me felt more like a post-modern philosophy of language, a constant experiment, rather than poetry as I normally understand it or try to grasp. I feel like this writing really requires time to get used to reading just because it is so different than what people normally read. As soon as one feels they can grasp a line or part of a line it quickly withers away. Everything feels uncertain for readers and not just in the meaning of what is said, but even in the tone of the speaker in some of the poems as well. There is a real unique sense of discovery when this distinction between writer and reader is broken down so much—broken down through this “unfixed subjectivity” (Perill 228) that feels reminiscent of Beckett in many ways.
These writers also feel the most reactive. They are anti-speech, anti-narrative, and anti-capitalism. They want to get rid of the idea of readers consuming what they read—and language no longer as the medium for narrative in order to serve that purpose, but the message itself it seems, which to me illuminates ultimately the instability of language. It’s hard to say whether they are really effective in their political pursuits, but they sure are effective in showing us how inadequate and unstable language is. In the Hejinian prose she highlights that language is inadequate, both with its dealings with the world and the imagination, and that its flaws create other virtues. Its restlessness makes it ” inevitably active.” To me language can of course be active like how she depicts it as holding spatial and temporal properties (but it often feels this way just because of the lack of referent); it is an event in this way—but the actual writing to me feels crippled by what its writing against, and also the theories behind language feel like they are digging a hole for these writers to keep going down. Rather than being an active force, wholly itself, the poetics feels too overwhelming to me, too conscious; there is too much of an argument going on here, which I think is something the best of poets don’t really have time for (being active in their own creation rather than reactive against something outside themselves), but this may be because I hold a more solitary, romantic idea of the poet. These poets seem to hate solitude.
But all this aside, it doesn’t mean you can’t engage with these poems still. I did enjoy reading and thinking about Bernstein’s ” In a Restless World Like This Is.” I found myself wondering what this “Is” was, and thought back on the Hejinian prose on the restlessness of language. The tone feels somewhat exhausted and scatter-brained, but genuine too. We as readers feel that the speaker is searching in the same way that we are searching through the text. The speaker seems to want to be able to gain control of whatever is being talked about and even comes up with plans to seize whatever it is: “if I bend/The turn around the corner, come at it/From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball/Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune/ Tellers,” but all of this seems foolish and pointless to the speaker, whose efforts only seem to confirm that there is no way to gain rest of the object—the speaker has no tricks up his sleeves like the fortune teller might. We are absorbed as Bernstein describes in his essay, up until the “well you can see for yourselves there’s/ Nothing up my sleeves.” The address to the you immediately ends that blurriness between writer and reader established by the first half of the poem. It is interesting that the poem is a sonnet and that the change just mentioned takes place in the middle of the poem, a poem which seems to claim indivisibility. There is a sense of paradox with this idea of restlessness, the travel of the poem, and the indivisibility of it as well.
Indivisible also is a very pregnant word that feels political being a word present in the pledge of allegiance. It is as if it is talking about how lost a nation can become when it only pursues one way of living, and how in that pursuit, humanity could possibly lose the most important parts of itself.
I really appreciate the broader critique here when you write that “it’s hard to say whether they are really effective in their political pursuits, but they sure are effective in showing us how inadequate and unstable language is.” You seem to appreciate the idea of language as even, and the poem as an action, however indirected. But the idea that these poems are also so “reactive,” as you put it, makes thing “too overwhelming, too conscious.” That’s a key recognition here. Perhaps that language poets embrace a certain didacticism, or play with that idea. They are didactic poets supremely uncertain of their primary vehicle (language). Even as I appreciate this critique, I also appreciate your engagement with Bernstein’s poem, and your analysis of how he plays with artifice and absorption in that work.