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    Recalculating
    Recalculating
    Recalculating
    Ebook213 pages3 hours

    Recalculating

    By Charles Bernstein

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years. As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.
     
    The collection’s title, the now–familiar GPS expression, suggests a change in direction due to a mistaken or unexpected turn. For Bernstein, formal invention is a necessary swerve in the midst of difficulty. As in all his work since the 1970s, he makes palpable the idea that radically new structures, appropriated forms, an aversion to received ideas and conventions, political engagement, and syntactic novelty will open the doors of perception to exuberance and resonance, from giddiness to pleasure to grief. But at the same time he cautions, with typical deflationary ardor, “The pen is tinier than the sword.” In these poems, Bernstein makes good on his claim that “the poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.” In doing so, Recalculating incorporates translations and adaptations of Baudelaire, Cole Porter, Mandelstam, and Paul Celan, as well as several tributes to writers crucial to Bernstein’s work and a set of epigrammatic verse essays that combine poetics with wry observation, caustic satire, and aesthetic slapstick.
     
    Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange—and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 13, 2013
    ISBN9780226925301
    Recalculating
    Author

    Charles Bernstein

    CHARLES BERNSTEIN is author of Pitch of Poetry and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. He is the Donald T. Regan professor of english and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

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      Book preview

      Recalculating - Charles Bernstein

      THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637

      THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, LTD., LONDON

      © 2013 BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED 2013.

      PAPERBACK EDITION 2018.

      Printed in the United States of America

      27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18     2 3 4 5 6

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92528-8 (cloth)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56472-2 (paper)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92530-1 (e-book)

      DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226925301.001.0001

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Bernstein, Charles, 1950–

      Recalculating / Charles Bernstein.

      pages. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-226-92528-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

      ISBN 978-0-226-92530-1 (e-book)

      I. Title.

      PS3552.E7327R43 2013

      811'.54—dc23        2012026200

      This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

      RECALCULATING

      CHARLES BERNSTEIN

      THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

      CHICAGO & LONDON

      It is our privilege alone

      to disappear

      to never forget that we do,

      never forget to set down what must be set down

      so that it not be forgotten,

      not be lost in all this time:

      Emma.

      Bob Perelman

      In darkness let me dwell, the ground shall sorrow be,

      The roof despair to bar all cheerful light from me,

      The walls of marble black that moisten’d still shall weep,

      My music hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep.

      Thus wedded to my woes, and bedded to my tomb,

      O, let me, living, living, die, till death do come.

      John Dowland

      See sun, and think shadow.

      Louis Zukofsky

      I navigate now without authority. Turn, great sun,

      your disc upon me

      I set out now

      in a box upon the sea

      Charles Olson

      CONTENTS

      Autopsychographia

      The Truth in Pudding

      Poem Loading

      Talk to Me

      From Stone

      Sane as Tugged Vat, Your Love

      Two Stones with One Bird

      Sad Boy’s Sad Boy

      Design

      Blue Tile

      The Honor of Virtue

      Blown Wind

      The Duck Hunters

      Loneliness in Linden

      Umbra

      Dea%r Fr~ien%d,

      Fold

      Ku(na)hay

      5 for MP

      Brush Up Your Chaucer

      The Importance of Being Bob

      Every True Religion Is Bound to Fail

      The Twelve Tribes of Dr. Lacan

      Do Not Desensitize

      Sea Drift

      On Election Day

      Last Words

      Pompeii

      I will not write imitative poetry

      All Set

      The Sixties, with Apologies

      Prose

      Not on My Watch

      In Res Robin, Nibor Resalb Inscripsit Mentastrum (XXC)

      Stupid Men, Smart Choices

      Lenny Paschen Redux

      Trouble near Me

      Later

      Irreconcilable Disrepair

      sorrow where there is no pain

      A Theory’s Evolution

      Todtnauberg

      How Empty Is My Bread Pudding

      [There once was a Young Woman of Whitechapel]

      Transegmental Drift

      Incantation by Laughter

      Great Moments in Taches Blanches

      You Say Insipid, I Say Inscripsit

      [To empty earth falling unwilled]

      A Long Time ’til Yesterday

      Joint Dark Energy Mission

      To a Begging Redhead

      The Moment Is You

      This Poem Is in Finnish

      Breathtails

      The Jew

      Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links

      And Aenigma Was His Name, O!

      Armed Stasis

      Unready, Unwilling, Unable

      Recipe for Disaster

      After Leminski

      Catullus 85

      Psychology of Composition (VII)

      Venereal Muse

      Poems for Rehab

      Won’t You Give Up This Poem to Someone Who Needs It?

      The Most Frequent Words in Girly Man

      Death on a Pale Horse

      Up High Down Low Too Slow (2)

      Charon’s Boat

      If You Say Something, See Something

      [Tomorrow, dawn . . .]

      Today Is the Last Day of Your Life ’til Now

      Time Served

      Synchronicity All Over Again

      Le pont Mirabeau

      Morality

      The Introvert

      Strike!

      Sapphics

      Recalculating

      Misfortune

      Be Drunken

      Long Before the Rain, I Wept

      Chimera

      Before You Go

      Notes & Acknowledgments

      The road tells you what to do. Throw on some shades,

      pump up the radio, put your hands on the wheel.

      Retrace your route in reflection, but look only as far

      as the blur of passing yellow lines to see the present.

      Race your future to the finish line.

      EMMA BEE BERNSTEIN

      RECALCULATING

      AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHIA

      after Fernando Pessoa

      Poets are fakers

      Whose faking is so real

      They even fake the pain

      They truly feel

      And for those of us so well read

      Those read pains feel O, so swell

      Not the poets’ double header

      But the not of the neither

      And so the wheels go whack

      Ensnaring our logical part

      In the train wreck

      Called the human heart

      1 April 1931

      THE TRUTH IN PUDDING

      Imagine poetry as a series of terraces, some vast, some no bigger than a pinprick, overlooking the city of language. The sound and light show begins in the dark: sentences dart by, one by one, forming wave after wave of the rag and bone shop of the quotidian, events passing before our eyes like the faint glimmer of consciousness in an alcoholic stupor. Facts, facts everywhere but not a drop to drink.

      Now it is dawn, now night, now noon, now morning. It’s as if the day never ends, it just keeps coming back for more.

      Language is an event of the world, just as, for language users, the world is an event of language. Even the world is a word.

      Speak truth to truth.

      In the viscosity of process, the end never arrives.

      Poetry shows the ink the way out of the inkbottle.

      Don’t let the Proper Name horse lead the active thinking cart.

      A thing of beauty is annoyed forever.

      Poetry’s social function is not to express but rather to explore the possibilities for expression.

      Poetry is difficulty that stays difficult.

      [Hank Lazer via Pound / Williams]

      Slivers of reason make amends.

      Connect the knots.

      Blaming others for your own failings is inevitable; getting others to do it for you is unforgivable.

      Fate makes us who we are

      Just as we make it what it is

      But the sadness overwhelms

      I don’t want interdisciplinarity but nondisciplinarity.

      Something there is that doesn’t love a frame

      That wants it laid bare.

      Before I made a frame I’d ask to know

      What I was framing in or framing out.

      Two frames diverged on the common road

      & I, I could not choose the one for the other

      So stood, astounded, in place.

      For frames are what we are inside of.

      Two frames are better than one

      Three’s the thicket.

      Today I am worried about Professor B, who worries about whether his worrying is run-of-the-mill worry or worrisome worry, and this worrying about his worry worries him the most, turning his worrying into the kind of worrisome worry he worries about.

      Is the best you can do really the best you can do?

      Does the work frame the interpretation or the interpretation frame the text? Or is a text a work without a frame?

      Poetry starts in the present but immediately takes you to its many pasts, through its many paths.

      What is missing from bird’s-eye view is plain to see on the ground.

      Not incoherent, coherent by other means. By any means necessary.

      Not the flow of consciousness but the flow of perception.

      It is not a thought, finished and complete, that seeks expression in a beautiful form. It is thought’s struggle, what is in and below the thoughts; it is the things and all things behind them, the life-material, expressed in our perception, that we should render in aesthetic creation.

      [Gunnar Bjorling, tr. Fredrik Hertzberg]

      What’s the difference between narrative and

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