A Zine Ecology of Charles Bernstein’s Selected Poems

 
All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems offers the prospect of commemoration and erasure. The same is probably true of selected poems in general. The format serves the purpose of introduction and distribution, often for students in classroom settings. The selection is passable if it supplies new readers, through a carefully crafted table of contents, with an abbreviated synopsis of a poet’s career and a balanced overview of writerly achievements and worldly concerns. Some degree of simplification or distortion must result. The best selections are like gateway drugs: the hard stuff can come later.
 
The erasure is especially acute, however, in the case of Charles Bernstein. He has been actively publishing for more than thirty-five years, during which time he has skillfully risen through networked communities and institutions of a fiercely intellectual counterculture and through a series of anti-workshop initiatives for the teaching of poetry and poetics. These relationships, not surprisingly, can be glimpsed as the wheels within wheels of his prior book publications. Of forty-two authored or co-authored books between 1975 and 2010, two come from self-publishing (e.g., Asylums), four come from university presses (e.g., Girly Man and My Way), and all the rest, without exception, come from small and mid-sized independent presses (e.g., Republics of Reality, Dark City, Rough Trades, Islets/Irritations, Resistance, Stigma, and Disfrutes). All the Whiskey in Heaven marks a significant new step because it is his first book released by a large commercial press. A three-decade oeuvre now finds itself represented by a private company that may or may not share the same interests with do-it-yourself and community-based ideas about the avant-garde.
 
While the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition does include endnotes for the prior book and chapbook editions, the information goes only so deep in that it does not list the magazines, journals, and broadsides where Bernstein originally found company with other poets. This point is less a critique of the FSG edition than a basic observation about the historical erasure that accompanies the commercial repackaging of a poet’s work. Without the print record, the poems appear as solitary objects removed from the social and material conditions in which they took shape. My discussion here – moving chronologically through All the Whiskey in Heaven – attempts to forestall this erasure by constructing a bibliographic map, or a zine ecology, of the small-press world in which these individual poems first developed.
 

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The selection opens with the title poem from Bernstein’s Asylums (1975), the self-published chapbook from a press (Asylum’s) that he co-founded with Susan Bee (née Laufer) in their apartment on Amsterdam Avenue between 82^nd and 83^rd. Bernstein absorbed the DIY ethos locally from poets on the Lower East Side. In the early 1970s, he himself enrolled in Bernadette Mayer’s workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Bee designed the cover of this, Bernstein’s first book, establishing a pattern of poet-artist collaboration that they have maintained for many of his forty-plus works. There are a few exceptions: Arakawa designed the cover for the original edition of Islets/Irritations (1983), and the cover of All the Whiskey in Heaven is a photograph by Emma Bee Bernstein (daughter of the poet and artist).
 

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Self-publishing, even when collaborative, is an isolated activity that only indicates so much about the social ecology of a poet’s writing activity. Was that activity part of an emerging conversation about poetics? How did its formal structure resonate with what others were doing? How did it circulate and who cared to read the poem?
 
These questions are partly answered by revisiting the zine debut of “Asylum” in the San Francisco-based Tottel’s (No. 16, 1976), edited by Ron Silliman. Like Bernstein at this early moment, the fellow contributors are almost all outsiders in the poetry world: Jackson Mac Low, Lee De Jasu, Barbara Baracks, Ray DiPalma, Keith Waldrop, Jerome Rothenberg, Karl Young, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Hannah Weiner, and Silliman himself. Still, however much these poets might be excluded from the economy of prizes, commercial publications, and university appointments, one quickly sees the difficulty of restricting an account of Tottel’s – a magazine often heralded as central to Language poetry – to any single coalition or group. Approximately half the poets here are more accurately described as fellow travelers.
 
The cover of Tottel’s 16 is a gas chamber execution record from San Quentin Prison. No information has been completed except “tottel’s 16” for the prisoner’s name. Bernstein’s poem, which is based on cut-ups from Erving Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, thus makes a very nice fit.
 
Poems are like that in magazines: they reverberate with paratextual elements designed by the editor and the printer and with work by other contributors. It’s not that Bernstein’s poem can’t be appreciated when uprooted from the original zine publication. The lines of the poem are fascinating in their own way and raise provocative questions about the relationship between poetry and medicine. The use of quotation marks around words, to take one example, hints at parallels between the technique of poetic citing (which brings to mind Zukofsky) and the clinical skill of listening to patients. Bernstein, who worked for a period as a technical writer for medical publications, clearly zeroes in on the language of persons who stigmatize patients, e.g., the
 

persevering, nagging, delusional group –
 
“worry warts”
 
“nuisances”
 
“bird dogs”
 
in the attendant’s slang
 

(“Asylum” 31-35).

 
Bernstein’s technique, when situated within a rich twentieth-century avant-garde, reaches back to precursors like Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and to recent contemporaries like Ted Berrigan’s “Things to Do On Speed.” Bernstein’s poem, too, conceivably fulfilled an assignment in Mayer’s workshop. His use of Goffman’s text corresponds quite closely to one or two ideas in her widely-circulated “Experiments List”: “Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens.” Even the notion of going to Goffman in the first place has a certain Mayer-like quality, recalling her use of journals from psychoanalysis sessions in Studying Hunger (published in 1975, the same year as Bernstein’s poem).
 
Such interpretive points are vitally important, and nothing about the reframing of “Asylum” in All the Whiskey in Heaven will stop anyone from seeing them (and plenty of others). But let’s look back again at its placement in Tottel’s. While Bernstein’s arrangement of the text is visually complicated, the disjunctive effect of single words and short phrases is fairly light in comparison to other poems in the same issue. Mac Low’s striking poem “LETT” uses all upper-case letters for ten relentless pages: “D U / A S E / N / S F S W T S Q T D” (1-4). Ray DiPalma’s “from The Sargasso Transcries” uses mainly lower-case letters for six straight pages: “khkj khkllkak lskmsmsh hsjsuhjej jekeleheueieo / bchmauh lhakale uahaheuheueieoekemenb” (1-2).
 
The print record reveals that Bernstein was surprisingly straightforward or, some might say, outright conventional in his adherence to complete words and phrases. Bernstein, for all his inventiveness, was going to learn a lot from his peers – or “company,” to use a word that he borrows from Robert Creeley. And as later poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven reveal, Bernstein did not take long to trouble the lexical operations of language (e.g., see the made-up words in “Azoot D’Puund” dating from 1979’s Poetic Justice).
 

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The second set of selections is from Shade (1977), the sixty-five-page booklet that inaugurated the “Contemporary Literature Series” from Douglas Messerli’s nascent Sun and Moon Press. Shade was originally published in five hundred copies, came with a sticker price of three dollars, and had no ISBN in order to facilitate sales and distribution. At this time Sun and Moon was a modest operation based out of Messerli’s apartment in College Park, Maryland. Anyone who wanted a copy could write to his address printed on the back (4330 Hartwick Road #418, College Park, Maryland).
 
“Take then, these…,” one of the poems that finds an afterlife in All the Whiskey in Heaven, had already appeared in Messerli’s magazine La-Bas: A Newsletter of Experimental Poetry & Poetics (No. 7, May 1977). La-Bas was mimeographed on an 8½ by 11, side-staple format. Other poets in that same issue are Michael Davidson, Ray DiPalma, P. Inman, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Again we’re talking outsiders in the poetry world, at least for the particular moment.
 
This early Bernstein likes to combine unlike objects or phrases in order to heighten poetic attention: “Take then these nail & boards / which seams to lay me down / in perfect semblance” (“Take” 1-2). If you’ve followed Language poetry at all, you know the case that’s made against transparent narratives or picaresque representations of experience. Don’t get distracted by the “semblance,” Bernstein says. Don’t overlook the “seams” when something “seems” understood or self-evident. And be sure to catch the violence implied by using nails and boards to put “me” in a box.
 
Bernstein never tires of punning on seams. Further instances crop up late in All the Whiskey in Heaven: “the seam that binds” (“The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” 8, Whiskey 144) and “the brokered / seams of a riven dream” (“The Bricklayer’s Dreams” 29-30, Whiskey 279). Variations appear like “inseams” or “ifsitseamltu” (the latter in “Lift Off” 20, Whiskey 36). In these moments, Bernstein is not the Wallace Stevens of “let be be the finale of seems,” but the wunderkind of anti-essentialism who keeps stressing the ubiquity of artifice. Or keep that in mind for the early poems, because a later Bernstein says just the opposite when he begins “Autonomy Is Jeopardy” with the line “I hate artifice” – thereby reversing Robert Grenier’s “I hate speech.”
 

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Asylums was produced for a gift economy, as to a lesser extent was Shade. Like other side-stapled books from Bernstein’s lo-fi, in-house operation, Asylums did not come with a price sticker or an ISBN. This practice changed in 1979, when his books started to appear with ISBNs – a paratextual lingua franca developed by publishers with the goal of standardizing all books in all languages and maximizing the efficiency of storage and purchase orders for distributors. The adoption of ISBN numbers and barcodes in avant-garde publishing should give us pause, not least because they constitute an eyesore on the back cover of lovingly produced objects. The “standard” of the ISBN and the foregrounding of the book’s commodity status are difficult to reconcile with poetry’s promise of radical social change. How can that promise be packaged using the same marketplace norms for books about improving one’s golf swing or books about planting begonias?
 
Take for example Poetic Justice, a forty-eight-page perfect-bound book published by Pod Books in Baltimore. It appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, listed the ISBN on the copyright page (including a separate one for the signed edition), and acknowledged the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a cost of $3.50, it could be ordered from publishers Kirby Malone and Ro Malone at their home address at 3022 Abell Avenue in Baltimore. Today, copies can still be ordered online (prices range from twenty-eight dollars to eighty-two dollars), because the ISBN gives databases a standard for linking sellers with consumers. The producers, Malone and Malone, are effaced in this exchange.
 
The appeal of the ISBN can certainly be understood, however, for it provided a means to move beyond the limited circulation of a coterie audience. The other book of 1979, Senses of Responsibility, was “Tuumba 20” in the long-running chapbook series designed and published by Lyn Hejinian. Like Asylum’s and the early Sun and Moon, Tuumba was a homebrew operation. Hejinian printed chapbooks on a Chandler-Price Press that she kept in the back room of her home at 2639 Russell Street in Berkeley. Her ambition for the series, she recalls, was to promote poetry, not as a solitary experience, but “in the social worlds of people” (257). The plurality signaled in “social worlds” suggests a pragmatic use of existing market structures to distribute poetry beyond its usual readership. Senses of Responsibility was also subsidized by a grant from the NEA. The book cost two dollars, appeared in an edition of four hundred fifty copies, and listed an ISBN number on the copyright page (though not on the back cover).
 
Most of Bernstein’s subsequent books after 1979 were similarly published with an ISBN. Dark City (1994), published by the greatly expanded West Coast operation of Sun and Moon, was the first to use a barcode for the ISBN.
 

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Senses of Responsibility and Poetic Justice, along with several of Bernstein’s other early small-press books, represent one sector of a micro-economy that was partially sustained by grants from the NEA starting in the late 1960s. Additional funding was available at the local level through the New York State Council on the Arts, and through donations to non-profit institutions that were sometimes founded by the poets themselves (e.g., the Segue Foundation for Roof Books and the Contemporary Arts Educational Project for Sun and Moon). After moving to Los Angeles, for example, Sun and Moon Press drew on lucrative grants from the NEA and from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (Register of the Sun and Moon Press Archive).
 
These economic relationships were deeply entrenched by the time Bernstein won an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in 1980. In 1966, the founding of St. Mark’s Poetry Project was enabled by $200,000 in federal grants from the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development (Kane 129). The nominal goal of this money was to socialize troubled youths by providing them with a structured outlet for creativity. Bernstein and others around the Poetry Project in the early 70s were thus beneficiaries of the fiscal climate – even if they were not exactly the delinquents that the social programs had in mind.
 
The total amount of grant support awarded to literary magazines was really quite small compared to overall funding for the arts. The big-ticket items were opera, theater, and so forth. According to one estimate in 1978, less than two percent of NEA grants were devoted to literature (Anania 18). Still, there were lasting consequences that readers should recognize. As Jerome Rothenberg explains, the reliance on grant support served “to impose both a gloss of professionalism on the alternative publications and to make obsolete the rough and ready book works of the previous two decades” (11).
 

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Critics who charge that Bernstein and other Language poets concocted a poetry movement that was perfectly suited for academic assimilation miss an important point here. The few university presses that took on their work only did so when the Culture Wars of the 1980s led to a massive reduction of federal funding for the arts. The affiliation with university publishers (Southern Illinois, Harvard, New England/Wesleyan, Northwestern, Alabama, and Chicago) was first one of material necessity. Today, the economic circumstances on campuses (especially for state schools) has led to deep cuts and freezes in press budgets – with some being discontinued altogether. The new FSG edition of Bernstein’s selected poems is part of the thirty-year development that arguably represents the full privatization of the avant-garde.
 

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Now a brief story about “Palukaville.” In the fall of 1976, Bernstein embarked on LEGEND, a five-party collaboration with Bruce Andrews, Ray Di Palma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman. In February 1978, Bernstein and Andrews published the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. The period between these dates was one of intense exchange among these five prolific writers.
 
“Palukaville” can be viewed as a kind of spin-off from LEGEND. The poem is comprised of answers to Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris,” which is a poem made up entirely of questions. Other poets have taken up this challenge (see Alan Davies and Michael Lally), but Bernstein was evidently the first out of the gate when he saw a manuscript of Silliman’s poem.
 
Excerpts from LEGEND made up the centerpiece of a forum of new writing – all of it language-centered – that James Sherry featured in his magazine Roof (No. 3, Summer 1977). The individual poets also contributed their own work to the forum. Bernstein contributed “Palukaville,” which he later collected in Poetic Justice and now in All the Whiskey in Heaven.
 

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Roof Books is the long-running, aesthetically diverse operation – i.e., all under one “roof” – directed by James Sherry through the Segue Foundation. Bernstein’s Controlling Interests (1980) was one of the first perfect-bound editions from the press. It came with the title printed on a solid blue cover: nondescript and thus light on the design budget. Roof magazine was already home to several of the poems from Controlling Interests, like “Matters of Policy” in Roof (No. 6, Spring 1978). The poem came sandwiched between poems by Bruce Andrews and William Corbett, and the same issue featured Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Michael Gottlieb, Ted Greenwald, Robert Grenier, P. Inman, Christopher Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Eileen Myles, Nick Piombino, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Michael Scholnick, James Sherry, John Wellman, and John Yau, as well as graphics by Brenda Goodman, Lee Sherry, Louisa Chase, and Ann Christopher.
 
Another poem, “The Italian Border of the Alps,” debuted in Roof (No. 9, Spring 1979) alongside poems by Kit Robinson, Alan Davies, P. Inman, and Lynne Dryer. Sherry tended to place poems and images on adjacent pages in his magazine, thereby providing one glimpse of the productive cross-fertilization that occurred in the arts and poetry scenes of the 1970s. The images in Roof 9 included graphics by Judy Pfaff and Harvey Quaytman, as well as archival images of Stéphane Mallarmé’s writing that hinted at his role in the genealogy of visual poetry.
 
The pages of Roof magazine measure 8½ by 10½, a size that is pragmatically conducive to the reproduction of art images. The size also creates possibilities for the layout of poems. This is not new, of course, not since Mallarmé rolled the dice or Charles Olson sallied forth in Dogtown. But what about a prose poem, like “The Italian Border of the Alps,” where size might seem incidental? It turns out that size does matter when it comes to ingrained habits of reading prose on small, turn-able pages with frequent breaks between paragraphs. The compressed format of All the Whiskey in Heaven is actually a lot easier on the eyes than the voluminous page format of Roof (where it takes up two and a half pages). In the latter case, the poem expands into one unbroken box of text that has no internal paragraphs to organize the flow or create natural breaks in the reading process. It almost seems possible here to argue that the large page of the small press trumps the small page of the large press.
 

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The geographical mixture of East and West Coast poets (plus several from elsewhere) who published in Roof magazine did not represent an isolated case. Bernstein read with Barrett Watten for the Grand Piano reading series in early 1979. Like Robert Creeley a generation before, he was by this time travelling frequently, becoming a familiar face – which was fueled in part by the sensation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine – and establishing contacts among multiple urban scenes of poetic activity.
 
Later that year his poem “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” (which refers to a title by Creeley) was published in the magazine This. Edited by Barrett Watten, this 8½ by 8½ magazine was an organ not only for the close-knit friends and collaborators who became known as the San Francisco contingent of Language Poetry, but also for fellow poets who were drawn into their sometimes vitalizing, sometimes heated and exasperating conversations about the nature of all things poetic. Other poets in the same issue include Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, and Watten himself, who are part of the former group, as well as Diane Ward, Christopher Dewdney, Clark Coolidge, Michael Gottlieb, and Alan Davies, who are part of the latter. It might be alleged, as some have, that publishing friends is nepotism or logrolling. But note the editorial perspicacity at work in this one issue. “For Love has Such a Spirit that If it is Portrayed it Dies” turns out not to be the only poem with an afterlife in an edition of selected poems. Recent Pulitzer-winner Armantrout’s “Postcards,” from the same issue, is reprinted in Veil, her own selected poems (Wesleyan 2001).
 

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Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” (which refers to a title by Robert Duncan) made its book debut in The Sophist (1987), but readers who had an ear to the ground first saw it five years earlier in Gil Ott’s Philadelphia-based magazine Paper Air (Vol. 3.1, 1982).Ott’s editorial philosophy, which openly invited contributions from anyone “engaged in the expansion of revolutionary perception,” courted a range of poets and artists that again defied any single aesthetic category – and thereby guaranteed the reputation of his magazine as an attractive venue for Language poets hoping to place work outside of their own immediate circles. Early issues featured Silliman, Bernstein, and Andrews, but they are far outnumbered by non-Language peers, including by Nathaniel Tarn, Janine Pommy Vega, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Cage, Eleanor Antin, Carole Berge, Larry Eigner, Jerome Rothenberg, George Quasha, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Two special issues were dedicated to John Taggart and Jackson Mac Low.
 
Ott made sure that Paper Air was a welcome venue for essays, reviews, and interviews. Bernstein’s poem “The Years as Swatches” is even situated right next to a review of Controlling Interests by Messerli. Critical prose was simply the norm in Paper Air. The same was true for poems that blurred the line between verse and essay. Later Ott devoted an entire issue of Paper Air to Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” (Vol. 4.1, 1987). Readers who were disconnected from Paper Air would not have the opportunity to see the essay-poem until five years later, when it appeared in the Harvard publication of Bernstein’s A Poetics.
 
Here it must also be stressed that Paper Air was appealing because of it physical format. The pages consistently measured 8½ by 11. The printing evolved from fairly brief issues using side-stapled, photo offset format—a method that superseded mimeograph’s ability to combine art images, poems, and even handwriting—to long issues of more than a hundred pages printed using a perfect-bound format.
 

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A full third of the issue that contains “The Years as Swatches” is devoted to “Contemporary French Poetry in Translation,” in a selection superbly edited by Craig Watson. The presence of poems by Claude Royet-Journoud, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard, and Ann-Marie Albiach is one early and telling indicator of the internationalization of poetics that captures Bernstein’s attention starting in the 1980s.
 
Once again the print history is revealing. Bernstein published his translation of Royet-Journoud’s The Maternal Drape (1984) with Awede Press not one year after its designer, Brita Bergland, published his own book Resistance. Likewise, Bernstein published his translation of Olivier Cadiot’s Red, Green, and Black (1990) with the same press that earlier published his own book Disfrutes (1981). Like the little magazines of modernism, these small presses of contemporary poetry envisioned their practice as taking shape in networks that involved more than a national audience. Moreover, as his own reputation grew, Bernstein can increasingly be seen placing his work with non-U.S. publishers, such as Zasterle Press in the Canary Islands (The Absent Father in Dumbo, 1990) and Aark Arts in New Delhi (Warrant, 2005).
 
One poem from All the Whiskey in Heaven distinctly hints at the national and linguistic boundaries that Bernstein traverses as his career progresses. “A Test of Poetry” takes its title from Louis Zukofsky’s quirky pedagogical book, but the text of the poem, as Bernstein explains, comprises italicized phrases from his Chinese translator Ziquing Zhang. Selected Language Poems came out in China in 1993 and featured seven of Bernstein’s best-known poems. Note that five of these seven (“The Simply,” “The Voyage of Life,” “The Harbor of Illusion,” “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree,” and “Dysraphism”) are included in All the Whiskey in Heaven, so it is even possible to trace many of the lines in “A Test of Poetry” that the translator had questions about.
 

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The poems of the 1990s – especially those featured in Rough Trades and Dark City – reveal a fork in Bernstein’s publishing venues. On the one hand, small magazines with politically oppositional agendas continued to welcome his poems. The most influential of these were Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K,” O.blek, and Big Allis, all of which were edited by poets from an ambitious younger generation. On the other hand, several academic publications, including boundary 2, Rethinking Marxism, and Archive for New Poetry Newsletter (UCSD), began to publish his poems alongside their usual scholarly articles. For example, the editors of Rethinking Marxism situated Bernstein’s poem “The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree” next to an article “On Language Poetry,” thus establishing the idea that a poem might be part and parcel of the social critique performed by the journal’s standard scholarly essays. It may have helped, of course, that the poem combined Bernstein’s usual paratactic zingers with at least one fairly straightforward theoretical assertion: “The first fact is the social body, / one from another, nor needs no other” (“The Kiwi Bird” 13-14).
 
While troubling boundaries between academic insiders and outsiders is nothing new, the 1990s is remarkable in that it witnessed an intensification of exchange that is surely unrivaled since the canonization of the New American Poets. Even the small magazines bore traces of academia. A case in point: Bernstein wrote “A Defence of Poetry” in response to literary scholar Brian McHale, but it first appeared in the magazine Aerial (No. 6/7, 1991), which was edited and self-published by poet Rod Smith. Similarly, Bernstein’s “Gertrude and Ludwig’s Bogus Adventure” was written for literary scholar Marjorie Perloff, whose name was originally “Gabriele Mintz.” The poem, though, made its debut in Ribot (No. 5, 1997), a magazine published by a non-institutional collective that referred to itself as the College of Neglected Science. Lest there be any confusion, this College is self-described as having a “virtual existence,” and even though it once organized an academic-style conference, I don’t think it was ever in the business of granting actual degrees.
 

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Bernstein’s points of interest are increasingly drawn from cultural artifacts of the twentieth century. Early foreshadowing of this interest appears in “Dodgem,” based on the name of a children’s board game, or “Palukaville,” based on a comic strip about a boxer. Allusive lines from Bernstein’s recent poems sound like an encyclopedia of Americana that is packed with old movies, old cars, old song tunes, old catchphrases, and more. This later drift differs from the historical digging of Ezra Pound’s luminous detail or Susan Howe’s dark side of history. Bernstein is rather a collector of rhymes that charm like cheap souvenirs. If he is to be called a historical poet, then his specialty is the low or common.
 
Bernstein does not pretend, however, that these artifacts are without their own perils. He is not, that is to say, one of Walter Benjamin’s heroic collectors who uncovers the “revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.'” The pessimism of Bernstein’s historical vision is quite clear in his poem “Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis,” which derives from the GAP advertising campaign in which figures from the past are repurposed for a commercial clothing line. A broadside edition (produced in Buffalo in the mid-1990s) superimposes the poem on top of the well-known GAP advertisement that shows Jack Kerouac wearing khakis. Here the rebel without a cause is reborn in the service of a socially acceptable cause, namely to make buckets of money in a media-saturated environment: “The Thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end / in the studio backlot.”
 
Bernstein’s bleak historicism is somewhat tempered in later poems. The post-9/11 selections taken from World on Fire are bleak in their own way, but they incorporate a mash-up of vinyl albums that he clearly adores. Horace Heidt’s big band piece “I Don’t Want to Set the World On Fire” (1941) is the source for the title of that book, and the song’s seductive refrain, “I just want to start a flame in your heart,” is the source for the title of one the poems. The poet Marcella Durand notes that another of the book’s poems, “In a Restless World Like This Is,” likewise derives from a hit song of the 1940s, “When I Fall in Love” (famously recorded by Nat King Cole). Finally, the poem “Didn’t We” can be read as a curt rejoinder to Billy Joel’s denial of political complicity in the megahit “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
 

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What I explore above is a zine ecology that stresses the social life of Bernstein’s poems as well as the material conditions that enabled publication in the first place. Like any ecological mapping, no matter how rigorously constructed, the points that I describe are not purely objective but emphatically partial – a lesson that Bernstein’s poems impart regardless of their particular publication venue. What the poems also impart, regardless of venue, is a sense of conversation with fellow poets and readers. That conversation is not one that can be understood without gross distortion when the poems are lined up with other poets in the FSG catalog. It’s doubtful that anything will ever make Bernstein’s poems fit cozily with those of August Kleinzahler, Frank Bidart, or Carol Ann Duffy – to name a few poets under the FSG imprint. (Perhaps Bernstein is best read in light of the handful of modernist poets that FSG publishes, like Mina Loy.)
 
I close this review by noting that the zine ecology above is severely limited by its reliance on the print record. Other kinds of archives exist, other entranceways to the social bearings of poetry, and these are increasingly available to anyone who wants to explore the work beyond the page. The online format here allows for links to PennSound recordings that capture Bernstein performing many poems from All the Whiskey in Heaven. I listened to them while writing the above, and it was startling how often my interest in constructing a bibliographic account was thwarted by an interest in returning to poems themselves – though by “themselves” I mean when they were aired before a live audience and not yet committed to print technology. Rather than an exercise in close reading, it was, as Bernstein himself would say, a matter of close listening. Here, to close, are links to ten of the finest:
 

“Asylums” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977
 
“Azoot D’Puund” – Recorded for Cabinet #1, Winter 2000
 
“Dark City” – Reading for Live at the Ear, 1992.
 
“Palukaville” – Reading for Anthology Film Archives, April 3, 1977
 
“Matters of Policy” – Reading at the West End Bar (NYC), March 12, 1978.
 
“The Italian Border of the Alps” – Reading for Grand Piano (SF), February 20, 1979
 
“The Simply” – Reading in Ithaca (New York), May 8, 1982
 
“Dysraphism” – Reading at Poetry Project, St Mark’s Church (NYC), October 17, 1983 (poem starts at 30’13”)
 
“A Defence of Poetry” – Recorded by Chris Funkhouser and Belle Gironda, July 27, 1994, Monterey, MA (via Kenning CD, 2004)
 
“Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis” – Recording from Postmodern Culture (journal), 1994