Lazer argues that the unorthodox characteristics of so-called Language Poetry, of which Charles Bernstein is a practitioner, cause mainstream poetry publishers and critics to ignore him and his kind. Helen Vendler, the doyenne of poetry criticism (see THE MUSIC OF WHAT HAPPENS), for example, Lazer accuses of failure to see the memorable and the beautiful in Bernstein and in Language Poetry in general. He quotes Bernstein himself to decry the limitations of "official verse culture":
"What characterizes the officially sanctioned verse of our time, no less than [William Carlos] Williams's, is a restricted vocabulary, neutral and univocal tone in the guise of voice or persona, grammar-book syntax, received conceits, static and unitary form."
Bernstein said that in 1983; Lazer asserts that matters have not improved since. He sees Bernstein represented (or segregated, as he puts it) in Norton's POSTMODERN AMERICAN POETRY anthology of 1994 but omitted from the major anthologies.
Whatever the merits of this poetry polemic, Lazer advances some useful observations on Bernstein and Language Poetry. (We note in passing that the complaint against the mainstream's narrowness of taste, while appealing, is not borne out by our own reading of current poetry. We see a variety that often defies categorization. To be sure, Language Poetry per se may be underrepresented, but we do not see enough of the total production to know.)
Lazer acknowledges that Bernstein resists " mere" self-expression, the impulse to create a stable representation of himself (an undesirable, indeed, impossible thing to do in the view of standard postmodern critique). Yet Lazer finds Bernstein's poetry developing over time "individualistic modes and manners."
" What Bernstein's poetry involves is a resistance to (but not absolute evasion of) self-expression and the poetics of signature, voice, and a homogeneous styl e. Indeed, Bernstein's work does not ignore but is in constant dialogue with su ch forces." (36)
We find Lazer's report on Bernstein's dialogue with the "self" an interesting instance of one of postmodernism's central humanistic issues. Bernstein, we learn from Lazer, is not seeking to create a "personal signature" and yet his writing is "distinctive" and thus, in some way, the product of an identifiable persona. The humorous play of language figures heavily in his distinctiveness. Also, he chooses a collage technique that incorporates the "language of movies, the style of stand-up comedy, and the language of business."
Lazer differentiates Bernstein's work from that of others by demonstrating its resistance to critical strategies designed to decode and thematize it--such as the "New Critical hangover of compulsive (theme)-making." (43)
Lazer makes a useful connection between Bernstein's writing and that of Gertrude Stein. Like Stein's work, he argues, Bernstein's poetry "successfully resists reductive recuperative reading strategies. He writes 'difficulties that stay difficult.' Such a link between a high modern voice and a postmodern voice can advance our understanding of the peculiar flavor of the postmodern, either through comparison--as with Stein--or through contrast. Lazer makes an equally useful reference to the high moderns, Eliot and Pound, to show the difference between their objectives and those of a postmodern Language Poet such as Bernstein:
"The high modern quest for unity--Pound's quest for closure and unification in the *Cantos*, Eliot's attempt in *The Waste Land* to shore fragments against his ruin--gives way to a postmodern understanding more attuned to [John] Cage's relativist assertion: 'that two notations on the same/piece of paper/automatically bring/about relationship' (*Composition in Retrospect,*22). Or, if Bernstein's writing were to be called a new kind of realism, that realism would be premised not upon closure and (thematic) unification but upon resistance to these particular over-used poetic devices." (39)
Lazer gives us a handy tag for the frame of mind of a Language Poet such as Bernstein in the following quote from Bernstein's *Content's Dream*, 62: "When I think in language, there aren't 'meanings' going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." (44)
As a reader of Eliot and a student from the pre-postmodern era (if we may cop a term), we note the unanalytical manner of putting down the goals of the high modern writers, characteristic of much postmodern commentary. The rejection of the architectonic is axiomatic in the critique of the modern. We come back to the homely picture of the people by the fire with the frightening darkness outside. If the story that comforts them does not vary from time to time, it will become routine and uninteresting. The children will not listen to it, and their fears will go unrestrained. The postmodern story, also, in time will become overly familiar. And someone will begin to tell it a different way. In doing so, they will have to say how boring and uninteresting the old story has been. Eliot redux.
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