william watkin's blog (since 2003)

how was your day? now darker I wrote this later [leave space up top for cataphoric reiteration] such is the gamble throw what if the saying of it can’t fill this obscure whiteness? inexhaustible streaming whose source whomsoever stakes a claim mist shrouds the brow call it a hill if you will but brow still stands black birds peck roads this was, at the finish, what we all agreed on having seen if it was made up I didn’t make it up but I made you up one animal’s sharp cry “ ” somehow delimits this shapeless grey occasioning of the passable irrevocable day so they say anyway best thing is to deny having anything to do with it that way your arse is covered either way if anyone asks thrown down the paged reconstruction hollow soled boots on the wooden platform everything is meaningful in that it happened now much lighter I wrote this earlier real writers probably feel the tool-heft asks “do you know the name of these flowers?” furrowed is a word, double letter score the pattern that is mad...

While is is fairly easy to the my students to understand that postmodern poetry is a form of critique of normative poetic strategies of the 20th century, often I find that, in an odd way, they don't necessarily see such strategies as normative. They are not normal for them in that way that for most normal people poetry is totally abnormal. I am them left with the need to teach them what normal is so they can see why Ashbery is not normal. Anyway, here is one way I do it. I usually illustrate first with a poem by Heaney, "Digging" "Death of a Naturalist" something horribly late-Romantic. Then get them to read some O'Hara and Ashbery. It always works. Normative poetry is called variously traditional, realist, late-Romantic, free-verse or voice poetics Elements of The traditional poem: Titular Law: the title announces the meaning Formal regularity and coherence Thematic coherence Significant Lineation (rhyme or strong enjambment) Coherence (narrative, lo...

This crib is based on my lecture and seminar notes for teaching this poen to students who have little or no experience of experimental poetry Like in Koch’s “A Time Zone” poem seems to take place on a bus as poet travels to Boston,probably from New York (3 hour journey) Opening 20 or so lines are a series of statements to do with modes of expression: poetry, parables, deciphering, protest, alibis, telepathy, epistles, phrasemongering, evocation, explanations, glossing Self-referentiality: regularly calls attention to the experience of reading the poem or poetry itself: poetry is like a swoon, his parables, not gymnastic: pyrotechnic, perfume scented, enacting, thoughtlessly, glossings of reality seemed like stretching it to cover ground Techniques: lineation at odds with sentences, gaps between sentences result not in narrative or cohesion but confusion, cohesion instead comes from association, repetition, randomness and self-referentiality; good deal of caesura use or interruptions wi...

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others. Bernstein on absorption: “By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...: belief, conviction, silence. Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom, exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented...: skepticism doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29. Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible Through the...

Have been teaching Bernstein for some years now and last year included him on my MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Brunel University, West London. Thought I would post these notes as a general introduction to Charles' work. This begins in a very rudimentary style desgined for all kinds of students who have not encountered Bernstein of Language poetries before. 1. Context: Introduction to Language poetics So-called Language poetry emerged in 70s West and East Coast USA around journal This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E I was ostensibly reacting to the predominant free verse, confessional mode of English language poetry to be found across the US and UK poetry scenes As a group it looked to build on the formally innovative and socially concerned poetry of American modernism Picking up on the postmodern innovations of New York School poetry, the groups however had a political edge Founder poet Bon Perelman defines the Language programme as the following: “breaking the automatism of th...

Grow grow grow wet toes aligned at the edge of a void as clams like limpets at the rocktide's lapline jump and make something project out into what was not the void until you happened and like a waveretreat cleaved that into empty sfunny the hallway didn't seem so empty until we inherited this hideous armoire an impassable thouroughfare become itself a placeless place my kids are stranded in the lounge we cringe and scrape the stairway's foot stamped once in anger now planted then blooming Legends: MAKING IS NOT ALL IT'S MADE OUT TO BE ANYONE CAN EXPLODE THINGS HAPPEN, TRY STOPPING THEM bravery comes in the lingering copse of the faithful not to break nor fashion but hold on there on that upturned hull skyborne rescue is not for the likes of us rather we stubborn we clutch to a boat's expanding shell while the swell below becomes continuum no, it isn't in the throw nor in the wreck as such but how the swell begins to build to gather rise and fill beneath our ...

fast (food) thoughts burgerking has suffered a complete makeover fu- cking horrible it is but then it must be hard to come second in late monopoly capitalism as they call it now to us lot or sometimes yes I call it globalisation but no do not know what that actually means ends was so simple, supply the demand but in BK at KX what exactly is the demand for fake lichtensteins on the walls? oh where is the new real? to add insult to injury or perhaps spicen [sic.] up this hyper-real salsa, that by the way is when the attractions of reality very real though they are are outstripped by those re-presented by art or the media with chilli added , the latest burger is the Mexican big spicy which not only is- n’t Mexican (burgers aren’t) but you have to specify that you want it regular (a beat) big regular! or big large that is an option too and it is all about that isn’t it options I mean? and outside you can buy crack&sex fairly easily which is also tempting but one must resist because I a...