For Bernstein, innovation is an “aesthetic necessity”; “the human need to create anew is no less strong than our need for lamentation” (Attack 34–35). In line with the long tradition of innovation going back to at least Poe in American poetry, who in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” demanded that originality “be elab-orately sought,” Bernstein claims that innovation is what constitutes tradition, while
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also the only valid response to it: “Tradition is the record of innovation. Innovation is a response to tradition” (Attack 228).
In his innovative language poetry, Bernstein allows language itself to take con-trol over the creative process and develops radical poetic techniques in order to foreground the materiality of language. Among these techniques, we find the cre-ation of new words, agrammatical structures, ellipses and visible traces of ellipses, the dismemberment of words into sounds and letters, sound mutations, syntactic doubling, and what he calls “imploded sentences.”
He creates new words, but these words are such that could exist in English (see Marjorie Perloff, The Dance 216–17). Bernstein is fascinated by rare words, whose meaning has to be searched for even by the native speaker in a dictionary. And likes to use words in their fifth or sixth meanings.
Bernstein violates the rules of semantics and syntax as well, creating words and syntactic structures that do not exist in “proper” English. In his nonsense poems, he obeys the rules of syntax but not of semantics, putting together words that refuse to follow the combinational rules of semantics. The nonsense structures of “Broken English” are not to be “understood,” if by understanding we mean paraphrasability;
although these lines are written in perfect structures syntactically, they still make no sense semantically. The words insist in their wordness; the sentences must be taken in their factuality and actuality.
Brushing up fate pixel by pixel, burnighing dusk: the sum of entropy and elevation.
(Recalculating 271)
“The Italian Border of the Alps” is another nonsense poem, where not only is the semantics broken but the series follows no logical order; this nonsense semantics, related (or unrelated) in non sequitur structures, account for the unheimlich reading experience of such poems. But whether these are nonsense poems or non sequitur poems or both, meaning is never referential: it does not point outside of the poem. For as he writes in “Palukaville,” “It’s not the supposed referent that has the truth. Words themselves. The particulars of the language […] require the attention of that which is neither incidentally nor accidentally related to the world” (All the Whiskey 31).
Elliptic condensation will often create syntactic doubling, where one syntactic unit can go either way, round off the preceeding structure or begin the subsequent one. Moreover, by typographically marking deletions, as he does in “Standing
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Target,” for example, he makes clear that empty spaces are not really empty but contain traces of words fallen through the tracks of language.
fatigue
of of open for
to , sees doubles
glass must are for
in : they are , her that it
watches, leaves,
days that made
and the
(All the Whiskey 64)
In other cases, ellipsis comes about by the breaking of words into their constituents, suggesting that the smallest semantic unit is not the word but the sound and the letter. This is why he applies line breaks within words; this is why his words break into syllables and letters; this is why he creates new semantic units out of the ran-dom combinations and permutations of letters, as in “Azoot d’Puund,” “List Off,”
and “Dea%r Fr~ie%d,” for example.
He chooses his words as much for their meanings as for their sound or look on the page, violating thereby both the principles of selection and combination of sentence construction. What he does is combine elements inadequately selected from the pool of selectable words. Altering the sound structure of words, he creates new phonetic mutations. For such the various forms of phonetic foregrounding serve euphony; as he puts it in a tongue-in-cheek passage in “The Lives of Toll Takers, these are the “services” poets provide for the reader.
Poets deserve compensation for such services.
[…]
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services as alliteration, internal rhymes, exogamic structure, and unusual vocabulary.
(All the Whiskey 172)
Moreover, all these radical departures from the norms of language contribute to what he calls imploded sentences, sentences that are fragmentary, broken, associ-ative, acrobatic, cumulassoci-ative, incomplete, and without closure, as well as rough, knotty, lumpy, and gnarled. They are very much alive too, the word sentence being a near homonym of the word sentience, he claims. The sentence does not follow the normative—subject + predicate + object (noun phrase + verb phrase + noun phrase)—
structure of English grammar, for the rules of syntax would rather hinder the development of thought.
Deserted all sudden a all Or gloves of notion, seriously Foil sightings, polite society Verge at just about characterized Largely a base, cups and
And gets to business, hands Like “hi”, gnash, aluminum foil Plummeting emphatically near earshot Scopes bleak incontestably at point Of incompetence […]
(All the Whiskey 55)
It is not accidental that these sentences disregard the rules of English syntax, or that their irregularities explode in the middle of the text, drawing the reader’s attention to them—and the non-transparency of this medium. For by placing one’s thinking into a given form, a paradigm pre-existing the sentence just being born, the actuality of the meanings would suffer. Imploded sentences are not character-ized by the “syntactic ideality” of proper sentence grammar but by the “surface disruption of syntactic ideality”:
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In imploded-sentence poetry, meaning flows durationally—horizontally—by means of the linear continuousness of the sweeping, syncopated rhythms.
While in the complete/closed sentence, attention is deflected to an abstracted, or accompanying, “meaning” that is being “conveyed,” in the imploded sen-tence, the reader stays plugged in to the wave-like pulse of the writing. In other words, you keep moving through the writing without having to come up for ideational air: the ideas are all inside the process. (Artifice of Absorption) And as he suggests in “The Klupzy Girl,” sentences written in imploded sentences deprive the readers of the complacent comfort of the familiar and will act as a cold shower in bringing them to their senses.
Poetry is like a swoon, with this difference:
it brings you to your senses.
(All the Whiskey 84)
And as language does not obey preconceived rules, so does the poem not obey preexist-ing form. These pieces are not written in closed form, complete with closure, but in often agrammatical fragments, unfinished sentences, in lines running across the page.
Rhymes are extremely scarce, virtually absent from Bernstein’s poems, as are parallel-isms of sound or thought; even metaphors occur very rarely. Bernstein is quite explicit in refusing poetic devices. In the last lines of “Endless Destination,” for example he revises Gertrude Stein’s famous aphorism into a new tautology, claiming that the two elements of the simile are like one another, while the tenor of the metaphor is its vehicle.
Love is like love, a baby like a baby, meaning like memory, light like light.
A journey’s a detour and a pocket a charm in which deceit are borne.
A cloud is a cloud and a story like a story, song is a song, fury like fury.
(All the Whiskey 210)
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Not following any abstract metrical scheme, the Bernstein poem is not regular metrically either. For free verse, as he puts it in “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,”
“is not a type of poetry but an imperative to liberate verse from constraints no longer applicable for a new time and new circumstance” (Recalculating 82). And to write traditional metrical verse in the 21st century, he goes on, alluding to Robert Frost’s witticism, “is like having sex through a net” (84).