tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593764226213882767.post7260386512790761302..comments2024-02-22T15:48:50.427-08:00Comments on Poems and Poetics: Charles Bernstein: Our Americas: New Worlds Still in Progress (Part Two)Jerome Rothenberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14166931849293504537noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593764226213882767.post-51681466003442474782011-06-28T20:52:02.478-07:002011-06-28T20:52:02.478-07:00The great American assimilation machine absorbs po...The great American assimilation machine absorbs poetry right along with local cultures, of course, but such homogenization creates in the dispossessed a negation that opens space for an alternative. It poisons the mushrooms so that Maria Sabina can learn to heal them with words. That’s the secret of the great creative outpourings the Americas continue to unleash. But one must be extremely careful with this line of thinking, for the truly inassimilable belongs to a personal space that can’t be contextualized, where the negation is a closing on the door of possibility, not the allowing of something because of its impossibility.<br /><br />“Palimpsestic” is a lovely word, but I’m not sure how parallel the “experiment in exchange” circuits run, with LatAm elites (de Andrade, the Noigandres, XUL, to name a few named in the essay) espousing/subverting Anglo-European modernist causes, Canadians carrying on a one-sided dialogue with U.S. hegemony, and not too many U.S. poets gasping with Celan “O Augen der Stadt, wo ich stürzte und súdwarts geschleift ward!” (O eyes of the city, where I fell and was dragged southward), awestruck at, say, Loxa Jiménes Lopés or the Incan Ikaros singers. The academic hedgehogs can adjust the packaging to canonize/colonize the periphery all they want, but “calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen throw flowers” (Dylan). I put my money on the Hopi to remember the original language better than Sumerian scholars, anyway. (Speaking of scholars, I may be jaded but I would expect someone who wants to be a “New World” scholar (Greene) to at least know that Colon (“Columbus”) was a trick played on the Spanish by the Portuguese.) Yes, “inconsolable coexistances” (Bernstein), 1st-world cocaine vs. 3rd-world coca leaves, with hypertextuality another manifestation of a peculiar destiny to make available at one’s fingertips all the information one needs to keep ones beliefs unchallenged. Yes, it’s a direct engagement with the sum total of all human knowledge but it’s all within the confines of one’s movie (if one is lucky enough to own a studio/videocam).<br /><br />My point, I guess, is that the tyranny of the reader inheres in his ignorance, not his skill. A point often missed when crime-scene detectives wonder how truth escaped again Houdini-like the confines they had laid.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5593764226213882767.post-85097035754306934652011-06-28T15:54:51.006-07:002011-06-28T15:54:51.006-07:00It's overIt's overAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com